Spring is the time of year when we wax poetic about possibility. “Behold,” we say to ourselves as we remember the feeling of the sun’s warmth on our skin, “we have once again foiled the earth’s attempts to murder us with subzero temperatures and an unceasing barrage of unrelentingly cheery and/or horny Christmas songs. The time for survival is past; now is the time to thrive.” Among baseball players, pitchers stand alone in their capacity for reinvention. They have the chance to add a new weapon, and in so doing level up into an entirely new pitcher. After all, what are we if not a collection of our attributes? Maybe you used to be a sinkerballer, but once you added a slider, you evolved into an entirely new species: the sinker-slider guy.
I spent Wednesday afternoon trawling through search results and Jeff Zimmerman’s indispensable Mining the News feature looking for reports of new pitches. The fruits of that labor populate the table below, and they are legion. As it turns out, even MLB: The Show has finally added a sweeper. Beneath the table, I will spend a sentence or three on each of the 21 pitchers who is reportedly working on a new offering. Not all of these pitches will actually make it into a regular season game. Fewer still, possibly even none, will have a discernible impact on a player’s season or career. But that shouldn’t keep us from dreaming on them. There are some really big names here. Maybe Kevin Gausman’s new cutter will run interference for his four-seamer, returning him a while longer to the fraternity of undisputed aces. Who are we to deem any future unreachable before even attempting the journey?
Let’s not bury the lede here: Paul Skenes is adding a cutter. Does Paul Skenes need a new weapon? No, he does not. Will it be fun to watch him wield one? Absolutely. Skenes already threw both a sweeper and a slider in 2024, and the slider’s movement, though inconsistent, already looked fairly similar to what you’d expect from a cutter. However, the pitch averaged 86.5 mph, and we would expect a cutter from Skenes to be much, much faster. Maybe the cutter will take its place; maybe he’ll throw both. “With the cutter in itself, he’s had his slider and he tried to throw it two different ways,” explained pitching coach Oscar Marin, “so he has a sweeper, he has a slider, it was just a pitch to be able to consistently get one shape with and be able to be a strikable pitch to be more efficient.”
Just as confusing, Skenes has also said that he’s adding a sinker. As you surely recall, he threw a “splinker” in 2024, which Statcast classified as a sinker. How different would a sinker be from the existing splinker? Said Marin, “With the sinker, it’s just something that he wanted to play with and kind of see where it goes from that.” Maybe that’s all we need to know. Let Skenes cook.
Skenes isn’t the only frontline starter who’s talking about adding a cutter. Gausman told the “Blair & Barker” podcast, “I’ve never wanted to throw a cutter because I thought it would take away from how good my four-seam fastball is. Well, now I’m at the point now where I think I should probably maybe have a cutter just in my back pocket in case.” He didn’t say for certain that he’d be adding the pitch, but I broke down what that might look like over at Jays Centre. Regardless, Gausman has certainly come into camp with change on his mind. He tried bulking up over the winter in the hopes of maintaining his weight throughout the whole season. “I live in southwest Louisiana, so the food is a lot different than Toronto, or really anywhere,” he told reporters. “It’s a little bit easier to put on weight if you’re eating hush puppies and stuff like that instead of flatbreads.”
On the other end of the stardom spectrum, Giants right-hander Landen Roupp is hoping that a new cutter will help him earn a roster spot out of camp. “There’s still a lot to work on,” he told MLB.com.
Clay Holmes signed a three-year, $38 million contract with the Mets, transitioning across New York City as well as from closing out games to starting them. In order to survive the extra looks batters will get at him, he’s working on adding both a four-seamer and a changeup to his current repertoire of sinker, slider, and sweeper. More specifically, the changeup is of the kick-change variety. Holmes actually started throwing the four-seamer with the Yankees during last year’s playoff run, and Eli Ben-Porat broke it down over at Baseball America back in December. Holmes threw 10 four-seamers, ending up with four balls, one called strike, two whiffs, and three fouls.
Jackson Jobe was the third overall pick in 2021, and he just checked in as baseball’s ninth-ranked prospect on our Top 100 list. But even with all that pedigree, he still has more developing to do. That includes adding both a sinker and a curveball to his current repertoire of four-seamer, cutter, changeup, and sweeper, according to Evan Petzold of the Detroit Free Press. Jobe had previously thrown a curveball, but scrapped it in 2023. He struggled to finish batters with his sweeper, so it made a lot of sense when he told the “Days of Roar” podcast, “I’m working on my two-strike execution.”
Lefty Cristopher Sánchez, the rising star of the Phillies rotation, throws a sinker, changeup, and slider, but back in January, he told reporters that he’d be adding a new pitch. The catch? He wouldn’t say what the new pitch was. “I am working on a few new things,” he said through an interpreter. “I won’t say what those are, but I’m working on a few new things.” With his low arm slot, Sánchez averages nearly 18 inches of arm-side run on his sinker and changeup and just one inch of glove-side break on his slider, so it’s hard to imagine that the mystery pitch could be a sweeper or a four-seamer. Statcast did categorize three of his 2024 pitches as cutters, and that has to be the leading contender. Lance Brozdowski agrees, noting, “Everything Sánchez throws to righties — sinker, changeup, slider — is down in the zone. Thinking from a ‘what quadrants of the zone can you touch’ standpoint, it makes sense to incorporate a cutter up and inside to right-handed hitters.”
On the subject of terminology, Miles Mikolas is working on a new pitch that he calls a “Big Slider” because he has moral objections to calling it a sweeper. “It’s a slider,” he insisted. “I mean, guys have been throwing this sweeper pitch for 20 years, and it’s just, they just called it a slider – or a slurve, even. But someone called it a sweeper, and now everyone calls it that. I’m just calling it a slider.” Mikolas has been throwing his existing slider roughly a quarter of the time for years now, and Statcast already credited him with throwing a sweeper 4% of the time in 2024. Now it’s official.
With that, let’s jump into Sinkerpalooza. Twins prospect Andrew Morris, whom Eric Longenhagen ranked as Minnesota’s 16th-best prospect heading into 2024, is adding a sinker. “I need something to go in on righties, to open up the outer half of the plate,” he told Twins Daily.
Griffin Canning might end up using a sinker regularly after throwing it just 1% of the time in 2024. Will Sammon and Tim Britton of The Athletic reported last week that Canning plans on discussing the possibility with Mets assistant pitching coach Desi Druschel.
Tyler Matzek missed the entire 2023 season due to Tommy John surgery and struggled over 11 appearances with the Braves in 2024. After pitching in a showcase for scouts, he landed with the Yankees. As he told MLB Network Radio shortly before signing, he’s added a new sinker, explaining that the pitch made sense for someone with his natural spin axis. “Everything on the Trackman data is showing it’s going to be a good pitch, it’s a quality pitch,” he said. He added that his velocity is nearly back to where it was in 2021. That would be a big deal, as his fastball averaged 96 mph that season, but was down to 93.9 in 2024.
Right-hander Sean Burke, who will be competing for a rotation spot with the White Sox, is also adding a sinker to his repertoire. “Consistency is the big thing,” he told MLB.com. “It’s a pitch that will open up the arsenal and the zone a little bit more so that guys are not always just diving for sliders a little bit. Makes them respect that up-and-in or down-and-in spot in the zone. They can’t be over the plate the whole time.”
Marlins righty Max Meyer is adding both a sinker and a sweeper. According to Statcast, Meyer threw a handful of sinkers in 2024, but I’m really curious about the sweeper. His current slider averaged just 1.8 inches of horizontal break in 2024, and it was his only pitch that graded out as above average according to Stuff+. His fastball features below-average movement, especially horizontally. If Meyer really can throw a sweeper with significant horizontal break that separates it from his slider, I’m not exactly sure what it would do to his repertoire.
In his attempt to transition to starting for the Marlins last season, A.J. Puk planned on adding a changeup and a cutter. However, he started just four games before ending up back in the bullpen. The cutter never materialized, and he only threw a handful of changeups. This season, he’s planning on making another run at the changeup. “Just talking to [the coaches] this offseason,” he said. “Something that I want to play around with, and just add to that third pitch, just mess with the hitter some more, and that’s just something to flash, so we’ll see.”
In Baltimore, Grayson Rodriguez is working on a sweeper, while Albert Suárez is working on a slurve. As The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka explained, Rodriguez threw a sweeper and a cutter in 2023, then dropped both pitches and went with a firmer, more traditional slider in 2024. It sounds like the plan this season is to keep the slider and add the sweeper, but nothing is certain. “We’re going to mess around with it, for sure,” Rodriguez said. “It’s something we’ve been kind of trying over the last couple weeks. Definitely kind of developing it right now. Obviously, we’ll throw it some this spring and see.” Suárez threw a slider back when he pitched with the Giants in 2016 and 2017, but after returning from the KBO and joining the Orioles in 2024, he threw a four-seamer, cutter, changeup, and curve. The Orioles approached Suárez about adding the pitch during the 2024 season, and although he started working on it then, he waited until the winter to really incorporate it. Terminology aside, it sounds like the pitch will fill the niche of a slider in his repertoire (and The Baltimore Sun is calling it one), adding something with glove-side run to complement a curveball that’s heavy on vertical break.
Last month, Mariners righty Bryce Miller posted a video of himself throwing a cutter with seven inches of horizontal break. Statcast credited Miller with throwing just 63 cutters (a 2.3% rate) in 2024, but those pitches averaged less than two inches of break. Asked about it in camp, Miller chuckled and said, “Yeah, I add a new pitch every offseason. I think I throw about eight different pitches now.” Emerson Hancock also mentioned working on a sweeper and a cutter. Those pitches would be particularly interesting for Hancock, because he’s a low-slot righty whose four-seamer, sinker, and changeup all get tons of arm-side run. That being the case, it makes sense that he mentioned using a spike grip for the sweeper, and I’d be really curious to see what it looks like if he could add a sweeper with real glove-side movement, or just a cutter to bridge the gap between his four-seamer and existing gyro slider.
A lot is happening in Arizona. Left-hander Tommy Henry already throws five pitches, but is planning on adding a cutter to the mix. However, in 2024, there wasn’t a ton of separation between the movement profiles of Henry’s four-seamer and slider. He might need to change that some for a cutter to be effective. Ryan Thompson also told the “Wolf & Luke” show that he was planning on adding to his current repertoire of sinker, four-seamer, slider. Thompson didn’t specify what he might be looking to add, but as an extreme righty side-armer with a 99th-percentile groundball rate, he’s already got plenty to work with.
Atlanta also has change on the horizon. AJ Smith-Shawver is working on a cutter, and considering he already throws a curveball with some pretty extreme break, the cutter might have a chance of bridging the gap between his curve and his four-seamer. “Just trying to mix in another hard pitch,” he told reporters. “We’ll see what the final product looks like. You play with things every day and see what you have.”
Atlanta’s Hurston Waldrep is bringing back the curveball that he threw as a standout at Southern Mississippi and Florida. It’s worth noting that Statcast already credited him with more than a few curveballs last season, but our pitching models hated the pitch, so hopefully it won’t look quite the same. He got rid of the pitch “to work on making the slider the forefront of the arsenal and let it make the splitter better,” he said, according to Justin Toscano of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So adding the curveball back just kind of gives me a little better tool to lefties. It fits my fastball really well out of my arm slot, and it just kind of made sense to bring it back.” He went into a satisfying amount of depth in discussing the process of bringing back the curve: “It was about getting the right shape that we wanted, getting the right velocity, movement profile everything. And then, how are we going to use it? What’s the percentage gonna be? What counts are we going to use it in? It’s not going to be just, ‘Hey, I’m gonna abuse this pitch.’”
