I’m still on a weekly posting cadence here for the next ~4 weeks until we hit Opening Day. Two pieces of content that I’m looking forward to…

Pitching Development/Acquisition Ranks and Survey Results – I sent a survey to 60+ pitching folks in MLB and will be using their responses to heavily influence a 1-30 rank of the best pitching organizations. Projected publish Date: ~March 11th

Top 40 Pitching Prospects Refresh – not a full rewrite, but I’ll be re-ranking and adding in new graphics. Projected publish date: ~March 19th

You may have seen this tweet of mine on new pitches being added this spring. Here’s a document with (most) of those adjustments linked to sources. Let’s discuss some of the adjustments I didn’t touch on in last week’s post.

I have a half-baked idea that more left-handed pitchers who can control their changeup should also be throwing splitters. The root of the idea comes from the concept of pitch decay. In theory, your changeup loses effectiveness the more a hitter sees it. If you can control your changeup, throw it early count, and reserve the splitter for deep-count situations. Pitching prospect Luis De Leon throws both a changeup and a splitter.

Liberatore implies in the interview above that the splitter would be a “seventh pitch,” which means my half-baked idea may not be so half-baked in this particular case. One of the larger corrections he made between 2024 and 2025 was more than doubling the early count usage of his changeup (10%→22%) and curveball (5%→15%) to right-handed hitters. He didn’t have an amazing strike feel on either pitch in those spots (and they kind of got crushed…), but conceptually, I think the Cardinals were moving in the correct direction by slashing 10 percentage points of fastball usage.

Liberatore’s performance against righties in two-strike counts was good (1.45 SIERA, 32% K-BB), but he struggled to miss bats. His 19% whiff rate worse than 75% of lefties who threw 300+ two-strike pitches to righties. A splitter makes a lot of sense. Hopefully, I get my dream of early count changeups with deep-count splits.

2026 ATC Projection: 147 IP, 4.37 ERA, 19% K, 7% BB, 1.6 fWAR, 98th ranked SP

Matthew Liberatore’s changeup grip (2025)