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 determine if the recent results are connected to any meaningful changes that make them worth investing in or if they're just mirages.
Each week, I'll try to cover change for 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 features a great strike zone plot, which allows you to see how the entire arsenal plays together.I'll also use Alex Chamberlain's awesome work with his Pitch Leaderboard.
Jordan Romano, Hayden Birdsong and Matt Shaw join the Top 300 this week.
Edward Cabrera - Miami Marlins (Arm Angle Change, Sinker Usage, Slider Usage)
I feel like we do this dance every year with Edward Cabrera. We know the raw talent is intriguing, but the lack of refinement on Cabrera's pitches has caused him to constantly walk too many hitters, put himself in bad situations, and torpedo his ratios. Well, perhaps a few mechanical and pitch mix changes have helped to more permanently move the 27-year-old in the right direction.
Over his last four starts, Cabrera has posted a 2.53 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, with 23 strikeouts and five walks. Now, three of those starts were against the Angels, Athletics, and White Sox, but Cabrera's start against the Cubs was solid, and the 23/5 K/BB ratio is really what we care most about, and that's lineup agnostic.
So what might be leading our latest potential breakout for Cabrera?
For starters, if you look at Alex Chamberlain's Pitch Leaderboard below, you can see that Cabrera has dropped his arm angle by six degrees this year. That's a pretty major shift, and has made his arsenal more east-west and less north-south.
One of the pitches it has helped is his sinker, which now has more armside run. That's important because his sinker has now also become his most-used fastball. In 2024, Cabrera used the sinker to righties 12% of the time. That's up to 29.3% in 2025. His zone rate has also jumped from 35.6%, with a 57% strike rate, to a 58% zone rate with a 69% strike rate in 2025. Perhaps the lower arm angle is making him feel more confident in his sinker command, but that improvement in zone rate is much needed for Cabrera, and he now has a league-average true first pitch strike rate on the sinker. While league-average may not seem that special to you, it's very special for Edward Cabrera when it comes to a command stat.
Cabrera has also been using the sinker more against lefties as well. It gets hit harder than against righties, but he commands it well in the zone against lefties, so that's still a net positive for him. He's still using his four-seam fastball nearly 50% of the time early in counts to lefties, and it remains a below-average pitch, so his future performance against lefties is something we're going to need to keep an eye on. However, his changeup remains a strong pitch and one that should help keep the boat afloat against lefties.
The other two major changes are that Cabrera is using his slider more this year, and the lower arm angle has led to far more movement on his curve. The wild part is that, despite its major shift in movement profile, the curve has basically the same zone rate, same strike rate, and same swinging strike rate (SwStr%) as last year. However, it's allowing far less hard contact, and the loopier movement profile has caused a jump in SwStr% to lefties and more success in two-strike counts against opposite handed hitters.
That likely ties into his slider usage changing. With a curve that will get swinging strikes to lefties, Cabrera can now focus his slider to get swinging strikes to righties. The pitch has always been solid for Cabrera, but this year he seems less focused on burying it low-and-away from righties and more focused on keeping it in the lower half of the strike zone but not caring if it's on the outside corner or not. The SwStr% against righties has jumped from 14% to 22%, and it's been far more successful in two-strike counts. It may just be a small sample size, but it's worth noting.
So this version of Edward Cabrera can get ahead in the zone more often, is limiting hard contact by reducing his four-seam usage, and has a good two-strike pitch for both righties and lefties. That's a version we can work with. The volatility remains, and we know this strong stretch is only four starts against (mostly) mediocre competition, but we have to like what Cabrera is doing under the hood, and that makes him worth a stash in deeper formats.
Will Warren - New York Yankees (Hot Stretch, New Curve and Sweeper Usage)
Will Warren has been on quite a run in May, posting a 2.70 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, and 36% strikeout rate over five starts, so I wanted to dig in to see if anything had meaningfully changed that might have led to this success. Obviously, some of it is facing the Rays, Rockies, Athletics, and Mariners in Seattle, which is one of the most pitcher-friendly ballparks in baseball, but there might be something else going on as well. I used the Pitcher List game log to see if Warren's pitch mix had changed, and we can see that he started to shift his curve and sweeper usage to lefties in May.
In May, he has used his curveball 14% of the time to lefties, as opposed to 7% in six starts in April, and his sweeper usage has dropped to 15% against lefties from 24% in April. We've also seen his four-seam usage tick up from 39% in April to 49% in May. Those all seem to be meaningful changes, and his curveball on the season has posted a 23% SwStr% to lefties, so using it more often makes sense. Now, it has just a 7% zone rate. Yes, you read that right, so it's not a pitch he's commanding well in the zone, but he does a nice job of burying it under the zone, so if he can get ahead, it's been a great strikeout pitch with a 23% PutAway Rate, which measures how often a two-strike pitch ends in a strikeout. In May, Warren is throwing his curve to lefties 76% of the time in two-strike counts, so it's clear he notices this too.
On the other hand, the sweeper has not been a good pitch to lefties, which makes sense because sweepers tend to struggle against opposite-handed hitters. On the season, Warren's sweeper has a 5% SwStr% and 47% Ideal Contact Rate (ICR) to lefties, so dialing back the usage of it makes sense. He has also changed WHEN he uses it, throwing it 70% of the time early in the count in May, which is a big bump from the 42% mark in April. He has a 42% early called strike rate on the sweeper in May, so limiting it as a surprise called strike pitch, which also allows him to throw some backdoor sweepers on the outside corner, makes some sense.
The increased four-seam usage is a bit less logical to me since the pitch has been fairly average against lefties this season, but I did notice that he has kept it lower in the zone in May. On the season, Warren has thrown his four-seamer up in the zone 45% of the time to lefties, but that has been lowered to 34% over his last five starts. That could be matchup dependent, or he could be trying to limit hard contact allowed by keeping the pitch low in the zone, which has worked since he's allowed a .192 average and .267 wOBA on the four-seamer to lefites over his last five starts.
Since Warren's sweeper eats up righties and his four-seamer does a good job of limiting hard contact against them, this jump in performance against lefties has made the 25-year-old a bit more stable. There will be ups and downs because he's a rookie pitcher, and it's hard to have sustained success in the big leagues, but this version of Will Warren should pitch deeper into games and be good for an ERA between 3.60 and 4.00 with a solid strikeout rate. That works in pretty much all formats.
60 undervalued players to help you win your fantasy league.
Gavin Williams - Cleveland Guardians (Re-introduced Cutter, New Sinker)
Listen, I was banging the drum for Gavin Williams incessantly this spring, so I understand that I might be a bit "in the bag" for the 6'6" right-hander and might not have the most unbiased view. However, Williams put together a really strong three-game stretch before his start on Monday against the Dodgers (more on that later), and I think he is a very different pitcher than he was to start the season. Primarily for one reason: the cutter is back!
We waited a few weeks longer than we wanted to, but Gavin Williams finally brought his cutter back into the fold and started to go to it far more often in his recent starts.
In the spring, Williams told me that the cutter he was throwing last year was a mistake pitch that came from struggling to find the shape on his slider. However, the cutter is such an important pitch for his arsenal because of how it masks some of Williams' command issues. Williams has tons of juice on his four-seam fastball with a 97 mph average and 12.4% SwStr%, but it's just an average zone rate pitch, and he struggles to get ahead with it. His secondaries are also primarily for swings and missed, so utilizing the cutter allows Williams to get ahead in the count more consistently. In his last two starts, he has pounded the zone early with the cutter, which sets up the sweeper or curve as his swing-and-miss pitches. Or even his four-seam fastball.
The Dodgers' start was a struggle for him because the command of his sweeper and curveball was off. He consistently got into two-strike counts, which is great, but he didn't have his breaking balls to finish off hitters, so he got into plenty of long at-bats, and the Dodgers fouled off tons of cutters and four-seamers. While it wasn't a great outing, it was great to see Williams get ahead so consistently, and he racked up 15 whiffs in 4.2 innings, which was also a positive. The version of Williams we saw in April wouldn't have lasted two innings in that start. If he has command or just one of those breaking balls on Monday, it's likely a solid outing overall.
The other interesting wrinkle for Williams has been the introduction of a sinker. He threw four on May 21st and seven against the Dodgers, so this isn't a major addition for him; however, it's another fastball variation that he hopes to throw for strikes to keep right-handed hitters off of his four-seam fastball. So far, the pitch averages 95.6 mph with nine inches of vertical break and 16 inches of arm-side run. Of his 11 thrown this season, six have been for strikes, and he has allowed one single off of it. It won't be a swinging strike pitch, but it should give righties yet another fastball variation to think about, which will allow the four-seam fastball to play up and allow him to get ahead in the count more.
All in all, these changes raise Williams' floor and bring him closer to the pitcher we hoped he'd be this spring.
Trevor Rogers - Baltimore Orioles (Fastball Velocity, New Sweeper)
Trevor Rogers has, sadly, become more remembered for being a part of Baltimore's botched trade deadline and off-season moves this year than for his solid MLB debut with the Marlins back in 2021. However, the left-hander returned to an MLB mound this past weekend after battling an off-season knee injury and looked, well, kind of interesting.
For starters, he sat 93.3 mph with his four-seam fastball, which was up from 92.1 mph last year. It's not quite the near-95 mph version of him we saw in 2021, but it's moving in the right direction. As you can see from Kyle Bland's awesome chart below, the pitch registered a 70% zone rate and 28% CSW, with slightly more vertical movement and less arm-side run than before. It has the makings of a pretty solid foundational offering.
Rogers also heavily dialed back on the use of his sinker, which he threw 24% of the time last year and 23% of the time to right-handed hitters. In his first start, he threw only eight of them total and two to righties. That's good because the sinker last year had a 3.7% SwStr% to righties with a nearly 50% ICR. It was the worst pitch in his arsenal, and so getting rid of it to right-handed hitters is something we like to see.
Another change Rogers seemed to make was to add a new sweeper. Granted, he threw it just three times over the weekend, but two of them were to righties, which is a bit confusing. The sweeper was 77.7 mph with 15 inches of horizontal break and little vertical drop. It got one called strike and was thrown out of the zone twice, but a sweeper like that usually would not be a good idea to opposite-handed hitters, so I have to think he's trying to use it to set up his harder, tighter slider for swings and misses.
The added velocity on the four-seamer is nice, and dialing back the usage on the sinker is also good. We also have to think the Orioles will give him another chance soon, given how bad their rotation has been. Still, even if he does get another look, I'm not seeing enough here that makes me think 2021 Trevor Rogers is around the corner. Or even in the same neighborhood.
Kevin Gausman - Toronto Blue Jays (New Splitter Grip)
Oh, Kevin Gausman, how you drive me mad. I was a little down on Gausman last year because of the hard contact he has always allowed, but not nearly down on him as much as it turned out that I needed to be. I then spent the early part of spring training buying into a resurgence for Gausman because there were rumors he was adding a sinker or cutter to help protect his four-seam fastball. I took some late shares in early drafts, but then neither of those pitches showed up, and he had a 4.59 ERA and pedestrian 23% strikeout rate in his first nine games.
I figured this was going to be 2024 all over again, and I cut Gausman in a shallow league. Then, lo and behold, Gausman happened to "find" his old splitter after his poor start against the Rays and has now allowed one run on eight hits in his last 15 innings while striking out 15 and walking nobody. Cool.
As you can see from the chart above, Gausman's splitter in his start on Monday against the Rangers had 4.5 inches more vertical drop than before with less arm-side break. In essence, it moved more straight down, which is exactly how he had it moving in years past. "For whatever reason, my fingers want to have a mind of their own,” Gausman told The Athletic. “Kind of do whatever they want. So, you know, it’s just kind of reminding them to stay put.”
I certainly wish he had told them that a few weeks ago, but this version of Kevin Gausman with his long-lost splitter grip feels like it can be close to the 2023 version that posted a 3.16 ERA and 31% strikeout rate. Now, that version still had a 1.18 WHIP and gave up a lot of hard contact, so it's not a perfect pitcher, but it's an infinitely better version than we saw last year. Just keep in mind that splitter movement and location can come and go on a whim, and we've seen over the last year and a half that Gausman simply doesn't have enough to be fantasy relevant if the splitter leaves him. Just cross your fingers for a happy reunion, but don't be afraid to cut bait if the grip wanders away again.
Matthew Pouliot
