Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- MLB's ABS challenge system has not hurt strikeout-heavy pitchers as many expected.
- Pitchers who generate whiffs while limiting walks have continued to dominate, while pitchers with poor command have struggled.
- Jacob Misiorowski and Dylan Cease illustrate why walks, not strikeouts, have become the defining factor in the ABS era.
When MLB rolled out the ABS challenge system this spring, the obituaries wrote themselves. The zone shrank by roughly 11 percent. Walks spiked to levels the sport hadn't seen since 1950. Every analyst with a spreadsheet declared open season on pitchers who live on the edges, and the profile everyone circled first was the max-effort strikeout arm, the guy who racks up whiffs and walks in bulk and rarely lets a fielder touch the ball.
Three months in, that prediction has aged badly. The pitchers it targeted are having the best season of any group in baseball, and the pitchers it ignored are the ones getting wrecked.
Cease and Misiorowski are proving the critics wrong
First up is Dylan Cease. He has faced 349 batters for Toronto this season, and 173 of those plate appearances (49.6 percent) ended in a strikeout, walk or a home run. Nobody in a fielding position moved. That is the highest three-true outcomes rate of any starter in baseball, in the exact season the rules supposedly turned against the style. Cease owns a 3.02 ERA and a 2.37 FIP.
He has company at the top. Most of the pitchers with the highest three true outcomes (TTO) rates — Dylan Cease, Jacob Misiorowski, Chase Burns — have excellent ERAs. One name on the list below has no business being there though. That outlier explains who the ABS challenge system is actually punishing.
Pitcher | TTO% | K% | ERA | FIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Cease (TOR) | 49.6% | 36.7% | 3.02 | 2.37 |
Misiorowski (MIL) | 47.3% | 38.8% | 1.45 | 1.85 |
Imai (HOU) | 45.6% | 27.9% | 6.14 | 4.89 |
Perez (MIA) | 41.7% | 26.8% | 4.21 | 4.77 |
Burns (CIN) | 41.4% | 30.5% | 2.36 | 3.17 |
**2026 TTO% leaders, starting pitchers (min. 10 GS)
The strikeout pitchers are winning the ABS era
Zoom out from the leaderboard and the pattern gets stronger. Baseball's most TTO-heavy starters are outpitching the most contact-reliant ones by nearly three-quarters of a run of ERA this season, 3.74 to 4.48. FIP agrees. Game Score agrees. WAR agrees. Whatever the true outcomes were supposed to cost a pitcher in 2026, the guys leaning hardest into them are collecting instead.
Jacob Misiorowski sits at 47.3 percent for Milwaukee with a 1.45 ERA and a 290 ERA+.Shohei Ohtani runs above 36 percent with a 1.58. Zack Wheeler, Chris Sale and Cam Schlittler are all comfortably above the league starter average of 33.7 percent, all among the best pitchers alive right now. Even Jacob deGrom, at 38 years old, is posting a 39.7 percent TTO rate in Texas. The style was supposed to be a young man's tax bracket, and he's still filing.
Which brings us back to the table, and the 6.14 ERA sitting third from the top.
Walks, not strikeouts, are the real problem
Tatsuya Imai runs nearly the same TTO rate as Misiorowski. One of them has the best ERA among qualified starters. The other has one of the worst and has Houston quietly sweating a big offseason investment. Nearly five runs of ERA separate two pitchers with almost identical true outcome rates, and the difference comes down to a single column.
Misiorowski pairs his 38.8 percent strikeout rate with a 7.2 percent walk rate. Imai walks 14 percent of the batters he faces, the highest rate among qualified starters. Strikeout-driven TTO built the best pitching season in baseball. Walk-driven TTO built a 6.14 ERA. Same house, different foundation.
And a swinging strike, it turns out, was the one thing ABS could never take away. A whiff needs no umpire, human or robotic. The smaller zone stripped out the borrowed strikes, the framing runs, the borderline calls, everything a pitcher used to lean on when the stuff wasn't quite enough. Whiffs survived untouched.
So who actually got buried this spring? Look past the leaderboard entirely, down at the bottom of the TTO rankings, where a former Cy Young candidate is having the worst season of any starter in baseball.
Zac Gallen's strikeout rate has collapsed to 13.5 percent. Without the whiffs, his 24.4 percent TTO rate isn't efficiency, and his 6.36 ERA and league-worst WAR are the receipt. The pitchers ABS punished were never the ones throwing strikeouts, walks, and homers in bulk. They were the ones who quietly stopped missing bats and hoped nobody would check.
The second half will tell us whether Imai can find the strike zone and whether Cease's walk rate eventually sends him a bill. Until then, the scoreboard reads one way. The system came for the strikeout pitchers, and the strikeout pitchers won.
Data via Baseball Savant and Sports Reference, through July 3
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