Blue Jays’ Kevin Gausman Throws Baseball’s Best Splitter

The Super Bowl is behind us and spring training is set to begin, so it’s time to take a final look back at last season with my annual “Best Pitches” series.

Let’s continue to go pitch by pitch through the arsenals of all starting pitchers who threw 135 or more innings last season and determine the game’s best – and worst – offerings. The main inputs are pitchers’ bat-missing and contact management results. Each pitch is compared to league average swing-and-miss rates and pitch-specific Adjusted Contact Scores.

Adjusted Contact Score is, on a scale where 100 equals MLB average and the lower the number the better, the relative production a pitcher “should have” allowed based on the exit speed/launch angle mix of every batted ball yielded. An average pitch gets a “B’”, and a sliding scale is applied to each pitcher’s results to approximate a bell curve.

We began last week with changeups, curves and cutters. Today, it’s splitters. For the first time, I separated cutters from splitters, as there are finally enough of the latter to form their own category. Splitters have consistently been the single most effective pitch in the game for a while now, and there are finally enough qualifying pitchers to let them stand alone. The average splitter swing-and-miss rate of 18.8% and pitch-specific Adjusted Contact Score of 82.9 both stand at the very top of the pitch leaderboard. 7 pitchers met the total pitch and batted ball requirements (which I relaxed a tad for both cutters and splitters) to get a grade, with a single hurler receiving either an “A” grade, and another a “B+”.

RHP Kevin Gausman (Blue Jays) – A – (76 Adj. Contact Score, 26.5% Whiff Rate) – Putting splitters into their own category made it much more difficult to obtain a top grade. Nothing can stop Gausman’s splitter, however. This isn’t its first rodeo – the pitch previously received “A’s” in 2017 and 2018 and “A+’s” in 2020 and 2021, while he didn’t pitch enough innings to qualify in 2019. His 2022 pitch-specific swing-and-miss rate reached an all-time high, while his contact management performance was its second-worst since 2017, just ahead of 2021’s 78 mark. In my first year of assigning pitch grades in 2016, Gausman’s splitter received a “B+”.

Gausman gets outs at both the top and bottom of the zone with the pitch – his 5.9% pop up rate was well above the league average of 3.6% last season. He muffled both fly ball (61 Adjusted Fly Ball Contact Score) and ground ball (67 Adjusted Ground Ball Contact Score) authority with the pitch – both marks were 2nd among qualifiers. Gausman’s splitter velocity of 85.2 mph was in the average range, but its spin rate (1571 mph) and horizontal movement (8.5 in.) were well above average – the latter figure was highest among qualifiers by far. Its 1.6 in. average vertical movement was well below average. Gausman threw his splitter 34.8% of the time, second behind only the Giants’ Alex Cobb, who received the only “B+” grade.

Just Missed: 1 pitcher received a “B+” grades for his splitter in 2022, the aforementioned Cobb.

Cobb’s pitch-specific 67 Adjusted Contact Score was best among qualifiers, but his 16.1% whiff rate was actually a bit below average. He threw his splitter very hard (89.4 mph, 1st among qualifiers), with an almost identical spin rate (1578 rpm) to Gausman’s. Also like the Toronto righty, Cobb’s splitter had plenty of horizontal (7.3 in.) but little vertical (0.4 in.) movement.

Have to give a shout-out to “B” grade recipient Shohei Ohtani. His 24.4% whiff rate was 2nd only to Gausman, though his pitch-specific contact management performance (91 Adjusted Contact Score) was a bit below average.

The Worst Splitters: The only pitcher to receive a splitter grade below “C”was Marcus Stroman, who got a “D+” in 2022 after receiving an “A” in 2021. Both his bat-missing (from 15.8% to 10.4%) and contact management (from 76 to 104) performance dropped off precipitously from 2021 to 2022.

2021 “A” Grade Recipients: We’ve already discussed Gausman and Stroman. The Yankees’ Frankie Montas (78 Adjusted Contact Score, 25.8% Whiff Rate) also received an “A” in 2021. He got a “B” this time around, with his performance dropping off a bit on both fronts (80, 18.5%). The last 2021 “A”-grade recipient, the Twins’ Tyler Mahle (64, 16.4%), didn’t pitch enough innings to qualify this time around.

2022’s best cutters featured almost identical, above average spin rates and lots of horizontal but very little vertical movement. Here is a table with all 2022 qualifiers’ splitter grades.