It's been a long road for Dustin May from GIF hero to reliable starting pitcher. Videos of his hard-running sinker and sweeping breaking ball dazzled many baseball fans for years, but he had pitched over 50 innings just once in an MLB season heading into last year. Even in a relatively healthy 2025 season, he had his worst year from a results perspective, so what May has done this year in his first season with the Cardinals has caught many by surprise. After seven years, it seems that we may finally be witnessing the Dustin May breakout.
When the right-hander debuted back in 2019, he was coming off a solid but not exceptional minor league career. His ratios had always been good, but the strikeout numbers never seemed to match what people saw with their eyes: a 6'6" mass of lanky limbs and flowing red hair, hurling 98 mph sinkers with 19 inches of run in on right-handed hitters and 87 mph breaking balls with nearly 16 inches of movement in the other direction. It was so easy to imagine May leaving MLB hitters in fits.
Yet, it never seemed to happen. Mostly due to injuries.
After pitching over 140 innings split between the majors and minors in 2019, May was healthy for all of the COVID-shortened 2020 season, throwing 56 innings with a 2.57 ERA, but the strikeouts weren't quite on par with the league average. In 2021, he began the season in the Dodgers' starting rotation before injuring his elbow and having to undergo Tommy John surgery in May of that year. When he returned in 2022, he pitched well in the minors and threw 30 MLB innings before back injuries shut him down for the rest of the season. He was, again, healthy at the start of 2023 and made nine starts before a right forearm and flexor tendon injury ended his season and required surgery and significant rehab.
That's when the injuries got even scarier. While May was completing a rehab program in the Dodgers’ training facility at Camelback Ranch,he suffered a torn esophagus when a piece of salad got stuck in his throat while he was out to dinner. May had to be rushed into surgery and then remained in the hospital for another 11 days before being released. Not only was the incident frightening in its own right, but it further delayed his return from elbow surgery, and he missed the entire 2024 season.
As a result, not much was expected of May when he returned to the mound in 2025. It was just nice to see him healthy and pitching. He went on to make 23 starts for the Dodgers and Red Sox, pitching a career high 132.1 innings before missing the final weeks of the regular season and the Wild Card Series due to elbow inflammation. On one hand, a 4.96 ERA and 1.42 WHIP were disappointing, but on the other hand, May finally cleared an important mental hurdle and threw a full MLB season. Almost.
"I mean, it definitely helped [to throw a full season]. I mean, I still didn't have a full season, which is kind of irritating," May said before the Cardinals' final game against the Mets in New York last week. "I got kind of close and then fell off right at the end, but it was definitely good to go and throw the most that I had thrown in a season."
Yet, there was still more to accomplish heading into 2026, and while May came into the season feeling good, the early results were not kind to him. In his first three starts of the year, May had a 9.45 ERA while posting an underwhelming 17% strikeout rate and 7.4% swinging strike rate (SwStr%). It seemed like the 28-year-old was heading for another disappointing season before he made a small pitch mix change, leaning into his cutter more than he had in years.
Over the first three starts, May threw almost 31% four-seam fastballs and just 11% cutters. Over his next 11 starts, he has reduced his fastball usage to 25% and upped his cutter usage to 24.5%. Since then, May has a 2.63 ERA, 1.01 WHIP, 24.1% strikeout rate, and nearly 11.1% SwStr%.
"It was just kind of something where we liked the shape of [the cutter], and we didn't think we were using it enough," explained May. "Then once I started to use it more, it definitely weakened contact a lot. I feel like it's a very good, 'get me back into count' pitch. I feel like it's a good get-me-out-of-a-jam pitch. It's been big for me so far."
May's belief that his cutter weakened contact is backed up by the data as well. On the season, the pitch has given up far less hard contact than his four-seam fastball. May has a 25% Ideal Contact Rate (ICR) and 3.3% barrel rate allowed on his cutter compared to a 41.3% ICR and 6.8% barrel rate on the four-seamer.
Because of May’s lower arm slot, his four-seamer has below-average vertical movement and a lot more horizontal movement than normal. That's a problem for lefties because the four-seamer will tail out over the plate a bit more, kind of like a sinker. As a result, lefties hit May’s four-seamer harder and swing and miss less often, which is why, over this recent stretch, May has made his cutter his primary fastball to lefties, throwing it nearly 30% of the time, while knocking his four-seam usage down around 26%. Specifically, the cutter has been a pitch that he’s able to use 67% of the time early in counts to lefties and get ahead, which then sets up his sweeper, which has a 32% PutAway Rate to lefties this year (that measures how often a two-strike pitch results in a strikeout).
The cutter has provided May with more value than just weakening contact against lefties. In this 11-start stretch, he’s also throwing the cutter 16% to righties, using it early in the count 71.4% of the time. Despite it being an early-count pitch for righties, it actually has a 23% swinging strike rate over these last 11 starts, likely because May is so sinker and four-seamer focused to righties that when he throws a cutter that’s four mph slower than his other fastballs and with a different movement profile, hitters are lost: "Righties are probably so geared up for the sinker in, so anything that's kind of starting in the same line and then just kind of holds it and kind of darts left at the end instead of barreling it on their hands, they're probably like, "Oh s@#t, like I gotta swing, like that's in the zone, and then it's like already too far."
Not only has the cutter itself gotten additional whiffs for May, but it has also improved his four-seamer performance as well. In this 11-start stretch, May's four-seamer is allowing just a 27% Ideal Contact Rate to righties and has not given up a single barrel. He's also gotten more swing and miss on the four-seamer, with a 14% SwStr% to righties, mostly because he’s locating it up in the zone over 70% of the time during this run.
As May explains, the four-seamer has "a pretty similar spin profile [to the cutter], so coming out of the hand, it looks pretty much the same. Then it holds its line a little bit better, so I feel like throwing it in the relative locations that the cutters are, which is more targeted at the upper zone, I feel like it opens up a lot." In this case, elevating the four-seamer over the top of the cutter has opened up plenty of whiffs for May against right-handed hitters.
That deliberate attention to location has been a focal point for May this season: "I for sure think it's location-based for me at the moment. The heater's been playing very well, and being able to know where I want to throw it, getting it into location, has been good. So, I'm just trying to tack onto that."
In fact, May is getting more strikes on all three of his fastball variations this season. His sinker may have a slightly lower zone rate, but the strike rate has gone from 68% last year to 73% this year. Similarly, since the cutter is inducing more whiffs, its zone rate is down, but its strike rate is up from 66.7% in 2025 to 73.1% this year, and the four-seam fastball has improved in both, with a 3.5% increase in zone rate and a 8.3% increase in strike rate. If you wanted to use Location+, which is a FanGraphs stat that measures a pitcher's relative success in hitting his spots, May's four-seam fastball Location+ has improved from 92 last year to 102 this year (99 is average), and his cutter has gone from a 91 Location+ to a 112, which is a massive shift.
That improvement is not lost on May, who knows that his recent success is because he's "locating [his] heaters pretty well, trying to keep a good mix with those, and just trying to figure out the good spots to throw the breaking balls." It's those breaking balls that have been a larger struggle for May over his career. In part, May's struggle with his breaking balls has been because of just how much they move. It's a bit of a gift and a curse. May gets tremendous movement on his breaking balls, but that means he constantly needs to think about where to target them so that they land close enough to the strike zone to induce a swing.
Last year, May's most-used breaking ball was a sweeper, which had a Stuff+ grade of 108 (99 is also average) but a Location+ of just 96. The pitch had nearly 18 inches of horizontal run at 85 mph and seemed like it should have killed righties, but it had a below average 11.7% SwStr% against them in part because the zone rate was just 1.4% above average, and the strike rate was 2% above league average for a sweeper. He also had a 6.7% mistake rate on the pitch, which was 2.5% above league average and is supported by the fact that May threw far more middle-middle sweepers than average.
He had the same issue in 2023 when his most-used breaking pitch was a curveball that had 15 inches of horizontal movement at 86.2 mph. It was really just an earlier iteration of his current sweeper, but it had a Stuff+ grade of 136 and a Location+ of 85. That season, May had just a 17th percentile strike rate on his curveball, so it posted just an 8% SwStr% despite its elite movement profile.
"The sinker, the heater, the cutter, are all pitches I'm kind of able to kind of throw kind of where I want to," admitted May. "I'm still trying to figure out how to throw the slider like I was last year, because last year was super easy out of hand, but it's been pretty bad so far this year."
Last year was the first year that May threw his new slider. He scrapped his curveball last year and tweaked it into more of a sweeper, taking off over one mph but adding about three inches of horizontal movement and removing about an inch of drop. Last season, that new sweeper became his most-used pitch overall at 39.3% and posted a 44.3% zone rate and 61.5% strike rate, as mentioned above. This season, that zone rate has fallen to 36.8%, but the strike rate is only slightly down to 58.4% in part because he's getting far more swings and misses on it.
This is where a fresh approach can help.
May is now on his third team in the last year after being traded from the Dodgers to the Red Sox in July and then signing with the Cardinals over the winter. With each new organization comes new coaching staffs and new ideas for how to attack hitters or utilize a pitch mix. In May's case, moving to the Cardinals didn't mean a drastic overhaul of his arsenal but simply new discussions about how to optimize it.
"My pitch shapes are kind of what they are; they're good, so there hasn't been any talk for anything shape-wise," he revealed. "It's just more so usage-wise, and trying to figure out the right time to use [a pitch], and the ability to like get back into counts or get ahead in counts, and then finish it off."
The added swing and miss on his sweeper has likely been tied to that shift in usage. Even if May is not happy with the feel and location of his sweeper, seeing a 15.6% swinging strike rate on the pitch after posting an 11.7% mark last year is encouraging. A big part of that is because May has leaned into it as his two-strike pitch, throwing it 49.2% of the time in two-strike counts this year versus 34.3% last year. The biggest jump has come against lefties, where he is using it nearly 55% of the time as a two-strike offering to them, after doing so 33% of the time last year.
May has been able to utilize this approach because his curveball has been a nice surprise for him after bringing it back this season. The pitch is now 83 mph (down three mph from 2023 when he last used it), with 10 inches of horizontal movement and nearly 19 inches of drop, meaning that May has made it more of a vertical breaking pitch to pair with his more horizontal sweeper. It's a pitch May uses only 7% of the time this season, but it's one he believes has been a key to his success.
"I feel like the curveball opens a lot of doors, and I'm very fine with where my arsenal is at right now, and how it's playing," May admitted. "Being able to flip a curveball in for an early strike, and then trying to get a swing and miss with the sliders... That was kind of the whole idea behind it; it was never like 'Let's use this as like a big pitch for this year,' but it's been really good, so it's definitely opened up some eyes for myself. If I can locate this, then I'm definitely gonna get some swing and miss on it, so just being able to kind of feel that out as the year's gone on and kind of find the right situations to throw it and not overexpose it."
That last part is crucial to May's maturity as a pitcher. It would be easy to understand why a pitcher would see a pitch performing well and decide to keep throwing it. Make the hitters show that they can hit your pitch. However, May has come to realize that some pitches are better in complementary roles. The curve is one of those pitches. It has been hit relatively hard this year, with a 50% Ideal Contact Rate allowed and a .400 average and .459 wOBA; however, it also has a 22% called strike rate against lefties, over 4% better than league average. He uses the pitch 75% of the time early in a count to lefties and can steal those key strikes to get him ahead in the count; yet, relying on it too much would leave him open to allowing more hard contact.
"I feel like the, the more that I would expose [the curveball], the more that it would probably show that it's not needed to be thrown that much, and it's more of like, oh, there it is, and then it's more just to keep it in their head."
Right now, May is certainly in hitters' heads. He has always been an imposing figure on the mound, with his lanky frame, wild hair, and elite pure stuff; yet, the results have never matched the image. His strikeout rate during his entire Dodgers career was just over 22%. He had only twice posted a swinging strike rate over 10%, and it was in two seasons where he didn't even pitch more than 30 innings. Yet, here he is with an 11-start stretch where he's missing bats comfortably above the MLB average and pitching like one of the better arms in baseball.
"I'm always an open ear to listen to stuff, but I feel like I've got a pretty good knowledge about myself to figure out what's good and what's bad. When I'm going good, I know I've got good stuff."
At this point, it would be hard for anybody to disagree.
COVERS INTEL: Cease's 13.63 K/9 
Juan Soto
Nick Kurtz
