Let’s be honest: Headlines aside, trying to dub one pitch the “best” in baseball is a silly way of thinking about things. There are so many pitches a year that anointing exactly one the best doesn’t make much sense. Emmanuel Clase threw hundreds of unhittable cutters this year. Blake Snell’s curveball, when correctly weighted, might as well be made of smoke. Paul Skenes and Jhoan Duran both throw 100-mph offspeed pitches. How can you separate one of these from the rest?
One easy way? Ask one of our pitch models. PitchingBot gives every single pitch three grades. There’s a pure stuff grade, a pure command grade, and a holistic overall score. Those work basically how you’d expect. Stuff is just the raw characteristics of the pitch, ignoring location and count. Command accounts for count and location. The overall grade isn’t a straight combination of the two; it uses all the same inputs, but instead of separately considering pitch shape and location, it grades the combination.
If, for example, you wanted to see the nastiest pitch of the year, you’d look at each individual pitch’s stuff grade. You’d want something with a ton of movement, good velocity, and probably some kind of funky release point to make the other attributes play up. It almost certainly won’t be a fastball, because there’s no way you can match the pure bat-missing prowess of a breaking pitch that way. You’d be looking for something like this:
That Kevin Gausman splitter is just the ticket. It’s not his most consistent pitch – splitters are tough that way. The movement profile is all over the place depending on his exact grip, which leads to the occasional floating ball that hitters can obliterate. But that variance works in his favor sometimes, too, like on that pitch to Giancarlo Stanton. That splitter fell 37 inches, six more than his average one, because he killed the spin on it absolutely perfectly.
How much of an outlier was this particular splitter? Gausman threw 959 of them this year, and only three had less induced vertical break. Those three resulted in a foul ball, a swinging strike, and a harmless grounder. Batters quite reasonably don’t know where the ball will end up, because most of his splitters don’t end up where this one did. When Gausman is pitching like this, he’s almost unhittable, just like the stuff model says.
Want another flavor of best pitch? Here’s the best located one, as determined by the command score:
Huh, really? I have to admit, the command grade winner doesn’t jump off the page the same way that Gausman splitter did. The location was, no doubt, exquisite. In a three-ball count, I’d prefer a pitch like this one that squarely catches a corner to one that just nips the outside of it. The rulebook strike zone is great and all, but umpires are fallible and the strike zone is probabilistic. A location like this creates a great chance at a called strike.
Likewise, with two strikes, the ideal location is far from the center of the plate. This one splits the difference between the two competing factors perfectly – it’s going to be called a strike almost every time, but it’s in a location that Willi Castro simply couldn’t do anything with. As it turns out, the stuff score on this pitch was excellent as well, and it was one of the best pitches thrown all year. It might not look as obviously impressive, but that’s why command is so hard to appreciate.
One funny thing about this pitch: Elvis Peguero didn’t demonstrate particularly good command this year. He walked 12% of the batters he faced, which clearly isn’t great, and threw too many meatballs to boot. His slider location was all over the place. But the great thing about location is that no one is throwing the ball exactly where they want to every single time. Heck, take a look at where Eric Haase set up – inner half. The best located pitch of the year was a missed target. Baseball’s funny that way.
That just leaves us the best overall pitch of the year. If you’ll recall, the model that assigns overall grades isn’t just a linear combination of the other two grades, though it often produces an answer that looks roughly like that. It takes everything into account – you can imagine combinations of locations and movement that work better in tandem than either would alone. Likewise, a slider with huge break isn’t going to do much if it’s located poorly, but in the zone, it’s the best thing you can be doing.
Combine all of that, and what do you get? You get Logan Webb painting the corner:
That’s right: Per PitchingBot, the best pitch in baseball in 2024 was a 91-mph fastball. But it wasn’t just any 91-mph fastball. It was a sinker, and one thrown to a lefty to boot. Sinkers thrown to opposite-handed hitters have fallen out of fashion thanks to their extreme platoon splits. Don’t tell Webb or Jake Cronenworth that, though.
What made this particular sinker so lethal? First, Webb located it perfectly. I don’t just mean that he hit his target, though that was certainly the case. Like Peguero, he put it far enough into the strike zone that the likelihood of getting a called strike approached 100%. Between the location and the target, no umpire is calling that one a ball.
Second, the shape of the pitch and its location complemented each other. That sinker started off the plate inside, and Cronenworth gave up on it early. Pitches that start out coming from the third-base side of the mound towards a lefty’s ribs don’t often find the plate. Front-door fastballs, and sinkers in particular, are always tough to handle thanks to that deception.
Finally, this sinker was one of Webb’s best from a movement standpoint. It broke four more inches to his gloveside than his average sinker. It fell four inches more than his average sinker (three inches due to imparted movement, one due to its slower than average speed). In other words, he picked off the inside corner with a pitch that, had it been an average Webb sinker, would have missed the zone by a mile.
None of those factors are overwhelming in a vacuum. This wasn’t the nastiest sinker in baseball, or even close to it. At the end of the day, it was a 91-mph pitch without a ton of wiggle to it. The location is nice, but plenty of well-located fastballs don’t turn out well for the pitcher. But that movement, to that spot, in that count? Our model thinks that was the best pitch of the year, and I can kind of see why.
One fun side note is that that pitch was thrown in the first inning on Opening Day. For the entire rest of the year, all the pitchers in the majors combined couldn’t beat out a 91-mph fastball. For goodness’ sake, there were 794 sliders thrown faster than that this year. But the model doesn’t just care about pure stuff, and it doesn’t care only about location; in its inscrutable way, it blends the two to look for the best overall effect, and it’s hard to argue with the overall perfection of that pitch.
Another bonus? The second-best pitch of the year, per PitchingBot, was also an up-and-in sinker thrown by a Giants right-hander to an opposing lefty. Sean Hjelle painted this one to Yordan Alvarez:
And the best breaking ball? This nasty right-left slider from Riley Pint. The camera angle makes the movement look less impressive, but this had huge movement to a great spot:
The reason that all of these pitches come on 3-2 is that that’s where location matters most, so the relative change in pitch value based on location is at its highest. The only exception to that rule here is Gausman’s 3-2 splitter – the stuff model doesn’t care about count, so that would have been the best pitch regardless of count. The overall model wasn’t enamored with that pitch, in fact; it thinks that the chance of a walk was too high. But if you’re looking for the best pitches, of course they’d have to come in high-leverage counts.
What’s the point of this article? Eh, it’s December 4. There isn’t a lot of fresh baseball news. I wanted to look back at PitchingBot to get an idea of what it’s looking for in a pitch. But also, it’s just fun. I know that I get a kick out of a boring sinker being the best pitch in baseball – and out of the fact that Gausman’s very best splitter is nearly unhittable even when he has a down year. Also, if you don’t think Pint, who has thrown all of 3.2 innings in his major league career, throwing the best slider of 2024 is funny, you and I don’t have the same sense of humor.
