{"id":498809,"date":"2026-02-25T15:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T15:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/498809\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T15:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T15:31:08","slug":"more-new-pitches-that-will-impact-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/498809\/","title":{"rendered":"MORE New Pitches That Will Impact 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m still on a weekly posting cadence here for the next ~4 weeks until we hit Opening Day. Two pieces of content that I\u2019m looking forward to\u2026<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Top 40 Pitching Prospects Refresh – not a full rewrite, but I\u2019ll be re-ranking and adding in new graphics. Projected publish date: ~March 19th<\/p>\n

You may have seen this tweet<\/a> of mine on new pitches being added this spring. Here\u2019s a document<\/a> with (most) of those adjustments linked to sources. Let\u2019s discuss some of the adjustments I didn\u2019t touch on in last week\u2019s post<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Liberatore implies in the interview above that the splitter would be a \u201cseventh pitch,\u201d 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%\u219222%) and curveball (5%\u219215%) to right-handed hitters. He didn\u2019t have an amazing strike feel on either pitch in those spots (and they kind of got crushed\u2026), but conceptually, I think the Cardinals were moving in the correct direction by slashing 10 percentage points of fastball usage.<\/p>\n

Liberatore\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

2026 ATC Projection: 147 IP, 4.37 ERA, 19% K, 7% BB, 1.6 fWAR, 98th ranked SP<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Matthew Liberatore\u2019s changeup grip (2025)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019m still on a weekly posting cadence here for the next ~4 weeks until we hit Opening Day.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-498809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}