MLB's newest stat will change the way we measure pitches

It’s not quite a federal holiday, but it’s always a good day when Baseball Savant drops a new leaderboard of electric, scintillating data for sickos like us to enjoy. We now have average swing miss distance (ooooh), and average swing timing differences (aaaah). And we have them for every pitch and pitcher since 2023 (the crowd goes wild).

The talented folks at MLB.com has already put together a number of breakdowns of why this all matters and ranking which pitches miss bats by the most comical distances, which you should totally check out! The gist of the new data, though, is that we can now see by how much each pitcher and pitch misses bats, average everything out and determine what the swing-and-miss-iest pitch we have is. Short answer: 2026 Mason Miller’s slider, missing bats by an average of over 10 inches! 

If you just want the most important takeaway from that new information, here you go: pitches that induce silly swing-and-miss distances tend to do better in all other categories too, like strikeout rate, whiff rate and many others, adding new and valuable things to consider when parsing through pitch-level data. I know, riveting stuff.

But there’s plenty more intrigue to be had, so I put together a list of three interesting factoids or tidbits from my first run through the data. There is much more to see, and I’d encourage checking out the data for yourself too, if for no other reason than to puzzle at what on earth is so nasty about AJ Blubaugh’s sweeper.

1. A Tale of Two Four Seamers

One of the best things about watching a batter whiff on a four seam fastball is to say to your TV “he’s so late,” but now we can actually chart how late and see who makes the most hitters so late. Sorting by four seamers that had the highest rate of late swings, we find two shining through: Jhoan Duran and Michael King. 

Both these four seamers induce similar rates of late swings, and also have essentially identical whiff rates around 38 percent. That is notably high; other four seamers or sinkers with similar rates of late swings did not miss nearly as many bats. In fact, King and Duran’s four seamers look like the same pitch from this table alone. But they have one huge, colossal titanic difference: velocity.

King does not throw hard: his four seamer sits at an average of 93.7 mph, or 27th percentile. Duran, meanwhile, throws the hardest: an average of 100.2 mph, the fastest in the Majors. But hitters are the just as late on King’s four seamer as they are on Duran’s even though it’s almost seven miles per hour slower. What on earth is going on there?

I’m not entirely sure! Duran is throwing stupid hard, so it’s not really a mystery why hitters are late and are missing the ball. King, though, probably demands a type of hitting approach that isn’t ready for four seamers. He nibbles the edges of the zone with changeups, sweepers and sinkers, and keeps his four seamer much higher in the zone than that sinker. It’s possible that hitters are looking for a changeup or sweeper inadviseably left over the plate and just arent ready for heat. Late swings are an emergency.

Duran is inducing late whiffs for a different reason: spin direction. His splitter and four seamer look dastardly similar to hitters since they spin the exact same direction. You effectively have to guess between the two, both of which come at you over 97 mph. But if you think splitter on a four seamer? You may as well just head to third period with how late you were to class.

2. Playing limbo with sinkers

Since the 2023 All-Star Game (the starting point for all this data), of the Top 100 pitches that caused the most swings under the ball rather than over it, 95 of them are four seem fastballs. This is to be expected, given that four seamers have the speed+rise that hitters miss underneath. The other five, though, are what is interesting to me.

Three of these five are Josh Hader’s “sinker,” which is kind of just a four seamer that he grips like a sinker. It is a fascinating and brutally effective pitch given its spin profile and arm angle, but not necessarily a shock to see on this list. Bautista, like Hader, doesn’t even throw a four seamer and keeps his sinker way up in the zone. Compared to, say, our guy Michael King from earlier, these guys are throwing sinkers as substitutes for the approach of a four seamer. But Chapman? Chapman is a different story. A horror story. For hitters. 

Chapman throws a four seam fastball, and forces hitters to guess between it and a sinker with positively sinister deception. They spin the same, they have roughly the same velocity, and even have identical vertical movement. The only difference is that the sinker bites 10 inches to the left while the fastball stays vertical. And in recent years, Chapman has jacked up his sinker usage to the point where, in 2026, it’s actually his most used pitch. Combined with his splitter, Chapman grips the baseball one way and forces his opponent into the world’s worst game of rock-paper-scissors. Good luck to everyone involved.

3. Hope for the Screwball's legacy

When I was a kid, I loved the screwball for no other reason than it was the funniest-named pitch. So I was immediately excited to see if this new whiff-tracking data had any hope for the screwball — it did not. But it did still lead to some interesting facts about the pitch and its pitcher. Yes, singular pitcher: Brent Honeywell.

Statcast tracked 62 total swings on screwballs since 2023, 61 of them were thrown by Honeywell, who last pitched for the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the 2024 World Series against the New York Yankees. In the postseason, he induced 11 swings with his screwball. One of those swings caught my eye:

Look: Honeywell rather infamously came in and gave up five earned on 50 pitches in a single inning of the World Series. But IN THAT INNING he absolutely cooked Juan Soto with one single screwball, which is perhaps the last screwball ever thrown in Major League Baseball. Does this stat mean anything? No. But will I remember for the rest of my life that perhaps the last screwball ever induced a fairly bad whiff from Juan Soto in the World Series? You’re damn right I will.

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