One of baseball’s most exciting things about a new season is how players can reinvent themselves. When Opening Day arrives, everyone starts fresh, and anything seems possible over the next six months. This is especially true for pitchers, who often take reinvention literally by adding new pitches to their arsenal.
Here are five notable pitchers working on new offerings as the season approaches.
Paul Skenes, the Pirates’ phenom, is developing both a cutter and a two-seamer.
What makes Skenes special isn’t just his imposing size and strength—it’s his curiosity about pitching. This guy clearly loves experimenting with the baseball, constantly looking for new weapons.
Last year, as the sport’s top draft pick and pitching prospect, he created a sinker (sometimes called a splitter or “splinker”) before his incredible rookie season. That pitch became one of his best, holding batters to a .184 average with a 29.3% whiff rate.
Now he’s crafting two more pitches: a gyro-movement cutter and a running two-seamer.
We’ll see how much he actually uses either once games count—remember, he already throws four different pitches at least 10% of the time. But Skenes seems confident: “You’ve just got to mix it in,” he said early in spring training. “I learned some stuff about it. It’s going to be good, I think.”
Robbie Ray of the Giants is finally adding a changeup after 12 years in the majors.
Despite being a former All-Star and Cy Young winner with a career 108 ERA+ and nearly $150 million in career earnings, Ray has barely thrown changeups—just 21 total since the start of 2022! He’s always relied on his excellent fastball-slider combo instead.
That’s why it’s significant that Ray is now working on a changeup this spring, using a grip he borrowed from AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal.
“It’s just another look and something that has some arm-side movement, something I don’t normally do,” Ray told NBC Sports Bay Area. “Everything I threw before is kind of hard-in to righties. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a swing-and-miss pitch, it’s just something that gets them off of my swing-and-miss pitches.”
Jackson Jobe, the Tigers’ top pitching prospect, is overhauling his arsenal with a curveball and sinker.
During his big-league stint last season, Jobe threw four pitches: four-seamer, cutter, changeup, and sweeper. Now he’s adding a sinker and replacing his sweeper with a curveball that has more depth.
It’s a smart move. By his own admission, his previous arsenal lacked verticality and relied too much on east-west movement.
“The idea behind the curveball is just to have a bit more of a north-south approach and work off the four-seam fastball that I’m throwing 40-plus percent of the time,” Jobe explained. “It just gives me a better option.”
His new curve has averaged over 2,900 rpm this spring. That would’ve ranked in the top 10 in the majors last season. For comparison, his sweeper allowed a .286 average between MLB and Triple-A.
Jack Leiter, the Rangers’ former No. 2 overall pick, is trying to get his career back on track with a changeup and two-seamer.
Leiter’s pro career hasn’t gone as planned since being drafted in 2021, but he’s working hard to add weapons. His new changeup is particularly interesting—it’s a “kick change” that’s becoming trendy around baseball. He first learned about it from journeyman reliever Matt Festa.
“It’s kind of like all the craze in pitching,” Leiter explained. “I think the guys at Vanderbilt are throwing it. Clay Holmes did an interview talking about how he’s throwing it. It’s literally just however you normally throw your changeup, but you kind of just spike this middle finger a little bit to make these even lengths. It kind of just sets the ball on a better axis.”
The results are promising—his new changeup is generating more swings and misses than his old one, with a few more mph and five more inches of drop.
Jesús Luzardo is bringing a sweeper to Philadelphia after joining the Phillies.
Luzardo is on a new team for the first time since 2021, and he’s using the opportunity to potentially add a new pitch. He already threw one type of slider—a “bullet slider” with almost no horizontal or vertical break.
His new sweeper has more lateral movement, making it the only pitch in his arsenal likely to break toward his glove side. The rest of his pitches feature pronation, meaning they move toward his arm side.
Though he’s only thrown a few sweepers so far, his catcher J.T. Realmuto is already excited about the possibilities: “It’s something he can mix in to righties, maybe for a backdoor strike. I think it can be a real weapon against lefties because it’s a little bigger, maybe a little more swing-and-miss to those guys with two strikes. It’s a really solid pitch.”
