Five Pitchers with Splits-Related Upside
I look into five young righties who could break out in 2025 by improving against left handed hitters
There are a lot of obstacles to overcome to become a successful Major League pitcher. One of those obstacles for a right-handed pitcher is figuring out how to get lefties out.
The majority of the world is right-handed. It’s less severe in professional baseball, but we still see the majority of the plate appearances being taken by right-handed bats. The split is closer than you might think for a right-handed pitcher. Last year, right-handed pitchers faced a left-handed hitter 47.6% of the time. That’s higher than I would have expected, and it shows you how seriously teams take the platoon advantage. They are pinch-hitting a left-handed hitter for a right-handed hitter a lot.
Still, you will have many cases of pitchers climbing their way up through the minor league levels because of their ability to dominate right-handed hitters.
We find plenty of young righties who are good against righties but haven’t quite figured out how to get lefties out. The main point I want to make is that this is a fixable thing. And teams are aware of it.
I’m looking for pitchers who could significantly improve their overall performance by making a simple adjustment that improves their numbers against left-handed hitters. I’ve found a handful of them; let’s review the list.
Brandon Pfaadt, Arizona Diamondbacks
Pfaadt has given up homers to both sides of the plate in his young career (1.4 HR/9 vs. righties, 1.6 to lefties), but overall, he’s been very good at preventing runs when a righty is in the box (3.47 xFIP vs. RHP, 4.33 vs. LHP).
What we see is that pitch types matter a lot in the splits department. I took all of the main pitch types thrown by right-handed pitchers last year and looked at how they performed in xwOBA against left-handed hitting:
What we see is that sinkers don’t work too well, and the pitches you want to possess to get those lefties out are the ones that tend to move downward vertically. The changeup, curveball, and splitter would seem to be keys to succeeding here.
Taking a look at how Pfaadt attacked lefties last year, we see that he was using that four-seamer 39% of the time, and it did not work well (.394 xwOBA, .798 OPS allowed).
His second most-thrown pitch was the changeup at 21% (he used it just 2% of the time against righties). And the changeup worked well (.250 xwOBA, .599 OPS allowed).
Coming in third was the sweeper at 17%, and it was fine in xwOBA (.303) but gave up a very high OPS. I’d imagine there’s a lot more randomness in that OPS as compared to the xwOBA, so we can consider that a decent weapon for him.
The fastball is the most important thing. He cannot simply go out there and throw the changeup and sweeper 90% of the time to lefties and have that work. That’s not how this works. The four-seamer has to improve against lefties for him to take another step forward.
Can he do that? Sure. Maybe he can not throw as many pitches in the zone with it (a 30.7% Ball% is extremely low; there’s wiggle room there). He could also afford to drop it to 33% usage instead of 39% and incorporate a few more changeups in there.
It’s also interesting that he experimented with a splitter. He threw just 16 of them last year (all to lefties, by the way), but that could very well be something we see him ramp up this year. Maybe he’s been working on it this offseason. We will get some clues on that in the coming weeks as spring games begin.
The point is that Pfaadt has options here. He has great command and a lot of arrows in the quiver. I think there’s a very good chance he will improve in this regard in 2025, and that could facilitate a very nice result for him this season.