This piece is excerpted from Eno Sarris' "10 bold predictions for the 2025 MLB season."
In the marketplace of pitches, stock in sinkers was performing awfully in the pitch-tracking era. Between 2008 and 2021, the use of sinkers was down over 40 percent as teams focused on high-spin riding fastballs and pitching for whiffs at the top of the zone. Sliders picked up the slack at first, and are still up at peak usage. But advances in seam-shifted wake and recent research showing the importance of having a wide arsenal combined to set the scene for a resurgence in sinkers in particular. But cutters and splitters also benefited from this study -- pitches that have been considered a little finicky in the past were now more trainable given high-speed cameras and pitch-tracking equipment.
If you look at the use of different pitches, you can see that uptick in sinkers, cutters and splitters in the past couple of years.
Last year, only 27 percent of the league's pitches were sinkers, cutters or splitters. But teams like the Mets, Phillies, Mariners and Giants are emphasizing multiple fastballs -- pitchers throwing new sinkers this spring include Kodai Senga, Griffin Canning, Jackson Jobe, Jared Jones, David Festa and Jack Leiter. Perhaps they saw the success Hunter Brown had last year when he added his sinker, or maybe they just want more wrinkles on the fastball. You could say the same about teams like the Dodgers, Cubs and Blue Jays leaning into the split-finger -- it could be because of some high-profile splitters like the ones thrown by Yoshinobo Yamamoto and Kevin Gausman, or it could be that they've found better ways to teach that pitch.
In any case, a little lurch forward in each type of pitch and we could see these old-school pitches taking over a third of the modern pitching environment.