The hot new pitch that's sweeping across the Majors

[Auggie]

mlb.com / April 19, 2023

What’s a “sweeper,” as you’ve certainly seen all over your television broadcasts this year? It’s a slider that’s specifically intended to get a great deal of horizontal movement, and it looks a whole lot like this beauty (video at link) from Shohei Ohtani, who is – to the greatest of all our surprises – absolutely fantastic at this, too.

It’s not that this is a pitch that just got invented in the last few years; certainly you can name pitchers from decades ago who threw a pitch like this, and maybe they even called it a sweeping slider, too. But it’s definitely a new trend, one that really came to the forefront in late 2021, when MLB.com’s Tom Tango and Driveline Baseball’s Dan Aucoin (now with the Phillies) started using the term. That same month, the Athletic’s Eno Sarris started writing about the “Dodgers Slider,” and later on, Lindsey Adler wrote about the Yankees using the “whirly,” pitches which are now considered to just be: sweepers.

So now it's a thing, and it’s got a lot to do with seam-shifted wake, if you want to get really deep about it – the science of how to use the orientation of the seams themselves to gain extra or unexpected movement. In large part, that’s why the trend has accelerated so quickly recently, because the shift of Statcast technology to Hawk-Eye in 2020 has really helped supercharge the ability to identify and teach this kind of movement.

So which teams do this the most? If we stick to “most sliders of all types with at least a foot of break,” then it’s the Rays (53%), followed by the Cubs, Padres, Mariners and Brewers. At the other end? The Rangers, Tigers and Guardians (5%). It's not the only thing the Rays stand out in -- their four-seamers have the most rise whether you include gravity or not, for example -- but it does tell you a lot about what they're up to.

Full, unedited article at the link, with video: https://www.mlb.com/news/sweeper-slider-latest-pitching-trend-explained

Bottom line IMO (from the article): It’s not as much about swing-and-miss rate as you might think. It's a whole lot more about getting a lot more weak contact.