It's Wednesday, which means it's time for us to visit the bump on Hump Day and discuss starting pitcher news. Each week in this article, I'll be taking a deeper look at a few trending/surging starting pitchers to see what, if anything, is changing and whether or not we should be investing in this hot stretch.
The article will be similar to the series I ran for a few years called Mixing It Up (previously Pitchers With New Pitches and Should We Care?), where I broke down new pitches to see if there were truly meaningful additions that changed a pitcher's outlook. Only now, I won't just look at new pitches, I can also cover velocity bumps, new usage patterns, or new roles. However, the premise will remain the same: trying to see if the recent results we're seeing are connected to any meaningful changes that make them worth buying into or if they're just mirages.
Each week, I'll try and cover at least four starters and give my clear take on whether I would add them, trade for them, or invest fully in their success. Hopefully you'll find it useful, so let's get started.
Most of the charts you see below are courtesy of Kyle Bland over at Pitcher List. He created a great spring training app (which he's now carried over into the regular season) that tracks changes in velocity, usage, and pitch movement. It also has a great strike zone plot feature, which allows you to see how the whole arsenal plays together.
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Brandon Pfaadt - Arizona Diamondbacks (Curveball Usage)
Coming into this season, I had Pfaadt ranked lower than many other people because I was concerned about his approach against lefties. In 2024, he allowed a .294/.339/.472 slash line to lefties with just a 19% strikeout rate. Much of that is because he’s essentially just a four-seam/sweeper pitcher with a sinker that he mixes in to righties. He did throw the sinker 14% of the time to lefties last year, but it performed poorly against them, so the only effective pitch he had to lefties is his changeup, which took a step forward in 2024. Pfaadt’s sweeper has a better-than-league-average swinging strike rate to lefties but a gross 50% ICR and 33.3% HR/FB ratio, so it’s not a pitch he should throw to them often.
However, we're starting to see Pfaadt address this issue in multiple ways. In addition to using the changeup more often, one of the biggest changes I've seen from Pfaadt this year is his curveball shape and usage, which you can see from Kyle Bland's chart below.
First, we can see that Pfaadt is throwing his curveball almost three mph harder, with more vertical break and significantly less horizontal break. The more north-south movement on the pitch makes it a better weapon against lefties since he doesn't need to throw it down-and-in, which is typically a hot zone for lefty swings. Pfaadt seems able to command the pitch well, with a 74% strike rate in his last start and five whiffs with a 36.8% CSW. He seems confident in using it to lefties, and the pitch has a 33.3% swinging strike rate (SwStr%) and 33% Ideal Contact Rate (ICR) against lefties so far this season.
Of course, he's also still given up a .281/.303/.688 slash line to lefties this season with four home runs, so there is still work to be done. However, for the first time in a long time, I can see a path forward where Pfaadt can mitigate some of the damage lefties do to him and raise the floor of his fantasy upside.
Hayden Wesneski - Houston Astros (New Curveball, Pitch Mix Change)
Early in spring training, I wrote about Hayden Wesneski as one of my favorite late-round picks because he was getting a chance with a new and better organization for pitching development. However, I didn't like him nearly as much as some of the other late-round starting pitchers, and I wound up with zero shares after my drafts. Following his strong performance on Monday, I'm wondering if I might regret that, but I'm not yet sure how much FOMO I'll have.
In the article linked above, I mentioned that Wesneski had the foundation for success against right-handed hitters but, after two years in the bullpen, needed to show some evolution against left-handed hitters in order to have success as a starter: "In 2022, Wesneski had a cutter that posted a 21.2% SwStr% to lefties when he threw it 22% of the time, and he also used a changeup 19.3% of the time to lefties with an 18.2% SwStr% and 16.7% ICR so he has shown those skills, but we need to get one of them back now."
Well, so far, we're seeing that cutter come into play more with Wesneski throwing it 27% of the time to lefties, and he used it almost 30% of the time to lefties in his start against Seattle.
Last year, Wesneski threw his four-seamer over 40% of the time to lefties, so leaning into the cutter more often allows him to dial that back closer to 30%. But what I also love to see is that Wesneski is now throwing his four-seamer up in the zone 71% of the time to lefties, after doing so just 51% last season. His four-seamer still has bad shape and a poor approach angle, but he has good extension, so I think this newer attack location helps to cover up some of the deficiencies in the pitch. Just know that there remain deficiencies in the pitch; it's not a great four-seamer, so the fact that he's using it 53% of the time to righties after using it 29% against them last year is not ideal for me.
Another change worth discussing, which you can see in the chart above, is that Wesneski added a curveball that he's using primarily to lefties. Now, a 17% usage to lefties is not a significant amount, but this change is more about how Wesneski is now able to use the sweeper 11.5% of the time to lefties in a game after throwing it nearly 30% of the time to them last year. The results on his sweeper to lefties last year were fine, but as a reliever, his sample size against lefties wasn't particularly high, and sweepers to opposite-handed hitters have a long track record of not being strong offerings (see Brandon Pfaadt above). The fact that Wesneski can go four-seam, cutter, curve, change, sweeper to lefties will make it harder for them to sit on any of his offerings, despite none of them being truly a plus pitch.
Important context here is that Wesneski faced a mediocre Seattle lineup in Seattle, which is one of the worst parks for offense in baseball. That's not to diminish what he did for your fantasy team on Monday, but it is to say that we want to be cautious about extrapolating that out over the remainder of the season. Wesneski is improving against lefties, and we love to see that, but he also doesn't truly have an elite offering for them. His sweeper remains his bread-and-butter pitch, and his four-seam remains below average, so even if he has a better approach with it, it still makes me a little nervous in tougher matchups.
Jackson Jobe - Detroit Tigers (Four-seam fastball, Sequencing concerns)
I'm officially concerned about Jackson Jobe in redraft formats. After the talented 22-year-old made his MLB debut as a reliever last year, it seemed likely that he would start this year as a member of the starting rotation and have a chance to blossom into the next young star in the Tigers' rotation. However, his first two starts have illuminated a much larger concern I have in Jobe's ability to miss bats.
As you can see from Kyle Bland's chart below, which showcases Jobe's pitch mix against the White Sox last week, he was able to induce just six whiffs while producing an above-average CSW on just one pitch: his cutter. Jobe has been utilizing a three-fastball approach to righties and then removing the sinker from the equation against left-handed hitters. His four-seam fastball has good velocity at 96 mph in addition to a solid 17.4" of iVB (Induced Vertical Break - or "rise") that helped him create a Height Adjusted Vertical Approach Angle (HAVAA) of 1.2. All of which is to say that Jobe has a flat fastball that seems to rise against gravity and should perform well when thrown upstairs.
However, despite Jobe's fastball being thrown upstairs 57% of the time this season, he has just a 5.2% swinging strike rate (SwStr%), which is substantially below average. Some of that could be because he has really poor extension, or it could be connected to poor location or pitch sequencing, but the larger issue is that Jobe has never really generated swing-and-miss at any level above High-A.
Jobe had just a 9.5% SwStr% in Triple-A last year and has an 8.5% rate in his MLB innings this year. His 12.7% mark in 73 2/3 innings at Double-A last year is fine, but that's not really a mark you tend to see from high upside strikeout prospects. For example, Zebby Matthews had a 14.8% mark in 55 1/3 innings at Double-A, and Jared Jones had a 14% mark in 44 1/3 innings at Double-A.
Jobe seems to have dialed back the usage of his changeup and sweeper, and he has struggled to throw the curveball for strikes, so there isn't really a dynamic pitch in his arsenal other than the cutter. Maybe he can sequence his pitches better to have the cutter thrive as a PutAway pitch, but he'll still likely need more pitches to generate swinging strikes so that he can get into two-strike counts. I'm not saying he won't get there; he remains a high-upside starting pitcher. I'm just coming around to the idea that he's more of a work-in-progress than we anticipated, and he may not reach the heights we were hoping for in 2025. If another manager in your league is bullish on Jobe's upside, it might be time to try and swing a trade.
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Matthew Boyd - Chicago Cubs (New changeup, release point change)
Matthew Boyd has tantalized us in the past with solid fantasy upside in the seasons where he has added some juice to his four-seam fastball; however, injuries have prevented him from throwing over 79 innings in any season since 2019, and the fantasy goodness had seemingly died with it. Until Boyd showed up this season with a new approach to get back to the pitcher he was before.
As he said in this article from The Athletic,“I had a long time to reflect on who I am as a pitcher and who I want to be when I come back. The changeup I throw now is not driving pronation, I stay very flat-wristed on it. I try to use the seam-shifted wake to make it move more. Little stuff like that has led to a better understanding.”
If you look at the chart below from Alex Chamberlain's Pitch Leaderboard, you can see that Boyd's changeup is now two mph slower with a little bit more drop and less horizontal movement while approaching batters from a different angle. In a limited sample size in 2025, the pitch has posted a 22.5% SwStr% to righties, up from 18% in 2024, and has limited hard contact. He's locating it away much better to righties as well, which may just be his feel for the pitch or it may have something to do with his ability to be more precise with location now that he's not pronating his wrist and the pitch lacks some run.
However, the other note we can pick up from Alex's chart above is the change in Boyd's arm angle. This could be a result of him trying to pronate less, as he mentioned above, or could simply be a focus on throwing from an arm slot that feels more natural to him and letting the pitches move how they will naturally. If an arm angle of 0 degrees is sidearm, then we can see from the chart that Boyd has dropped his arm angle three degrees. This has led to different attack angles on all of his pitches while adding more movement overall to his arsenal as well.
While nothing jumps out as being drastically different, slight changes in release point and movement profile can throw off a hitter's timing or contact point just enough for a batted ball to move from the barrel of the bat to the end of the bat. If Boyd can pitch from an arm angle that feels more naturally (and less painful) while creating a movement profile that limits hard contact, then he should be able to continue to do what he did in his first two starts of the season against two good offenses: prevent hard contact, produce solid ratios, and give himself a chance for wins. Considering where you drafted him in your fantasy leagues, that would be a major victory.
Tylor Megill - New York Mets (New Slider, Four-seam fastball usage)
At the end of the season, I was super excited by what Tylor Megill was doing and even wrote him up as one of my favorite late-round draft targets because of the introduction of his cutter. In that article,I mentioned that "Megill has a four-seam fastball with elite extension, but he can’t command it, so he added a sinker last season, which has a 73% strike rate. He uses it primarily as a strike pitch to righties, which is crucial for him. He also added a cutter in 2024, and despite it having above-average swinging strike rate marks to righties and lefties, it’s also a pitch he can command for strikes with league-average zone and strike rates."
I felt like the addition of the sinker and cutter would allow Megill to command the zone better than he had previously, which would enable him to pitch deeper into games and set up his secondary offerings to miss bats. Yet, here I was looking at his pitch mix for his first two starts and seeing not one cutter. So where did the pitch go?
As you can see from Kyle Bland's chart below, Megill has continued to use his sinker primarily to righties, which we like to see, but he has made a big tweak to his slider which perhaps made the cutter no longer relevant.
In that same article from spring training, I mentioned that Megill's slider was great as a two-strike pitch, with him using it 47% of the time in two-strike counts and producing a 70th-percentile chase rate, which made it an above-average putaway pitch. However, the slider struggled when he used it often because it had just a 36% zone rate and it had a lot of horizontal break, which caused it to move low-and-in on lefties, right into their sweet spot. As a result, lefties had a 50% ICR on the slider in 2024 and he rarely ever threw it to them.
In 2025, Megill has dialed back on the velocity of the slider but added tons of depth to the pitch with over six inches more drop so far this season. The slider playing as more of a north-south pitch has given him more confidence to throw it to lefties, and he has used it 35% of the time to lefties so far this season after throwing it just 4% of the time to them last year. He'll now use the pitch early in the count against righties and then also use it as a putaway pitch to hitters of both handedness. Considering he also has the sinker and four-seam fastball to righties, that approach can work for him.
Yet, what has also helped him against lefties this year is a tweak in his four-seam fastball approach. Megill gets elite extension on his fastball at 7.1 feet and has solid vertical movement with a 17.4" iVB (which is up from last year), which, as we discussed with Jobe, gives him a flat fastball that will perform well up in the strike zone. Yet, last year, he threw the four-seam fastball up in the zone just 45% of the time overall and just 47% of the time to lefties. So far in 2025, Megill is using the four-seam upstairs 59% of the time overall and 76% of the time to lefties, which is a huge change. That approach, paired with the increased iVB on the fastball should work for him over the long run. He just needs to keep throwing strikes.
Matthew Pouliot
