The 2026 Pitching Superlatives, Part 1: Velocity

David Frerker and Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images Awhile back I was staring at the pitch movement chart of one player or another, and I got to thinking about cutters and gyro sliders. Often, cutters and gyro sliders end up right in the middle of the those charts. The cutter is designed to split the difference between a breaking ball and a four-seam fastball, and as its name indicates, the gyro slider leaves the hand with gyroscopic spin, which stabilizes the flight of the ball. I started wondering who throws the truest pitch in baseball, the pitch that moves the absolute least. I’m going to write about that later this week. It’s not today’s topic, though, because once I started down that path, I found that it kept branching. I started wondering about who throws the sweepiest sweepers and the fastest fastballs and the sinkiest sinkers. Which pitch hits the edges of the zone most often? Which pitch fools hitters into chasing and which pitch fools them into taking called strikes? Which pitch tricks batters into challenging those called strikes? Which pitches miss bats the most and by the furthest? Which pitches get pulled, or skied, or beaten into the ground the most? We’re looking for the most extreme pitches in baseball, so now that the 2026 season is over, we’re not leaving any of the path with leaves no step had trodden black. We’re going to spend the week handing out some superlatives. This is part one, and it’s going to be focused mainly on velocity. The rules of the exercise are simple. Any pitch can qualify as long as it was thrown at least 152 times during the regular season of 2026. If that number sounds surprisingly un-round to you, it’s for a reason. A’s outfielder Carlos Cortes ended up pitching in a whopping nine different games in 2026, and he was credited with throwing 151 eephuses. This is an unofficial superlative, but that makes Cortes the sloppiest of 2026. You know what? I take it back, let’s make it official. Now it’s in bold: Carlos Cortes’ eephus was the Sloppiest Pitch of 2026. To celebrate, here’s the sloppiest pitch he threw all season. Fittingly, it came in a sloppy 23-2 game against the Nationals. That wasn’t the slowest pitch Cortes threw all season, but it was definitely the biggest miss. I’d like to draw your attention to two particularly funny things about this pitch. First, keep an eye on where this ball ended up. Very fittingly for a pitch that bypassed the general area of home plate, it crashed into a Circa Sports sign. It took three hops to get there, and that wasn’t the end of its journey. It took a crazy carom back toward the center of the field, as if Cortes was going for home plate all along, but he first needed this pitch to take a gigantic detour. Amazingly, none of the protagonists in frame, the pitcher, catcher, batter, or umpire, noticed the bizarre journey the ball took. Second, keep your eye on the middle of the screen, between the mound and home plate and a bit to the right. After Cortes’ pitch bounced behind Jacob Young, you’ll see a white dot pop up to indicate where Statcast thought the pitch was when it – for lack of a better term – crossed the plate. If such a thing were possible, I’d say that the robots were engaging in sarcasm. While we’re on the subject of eephuses, we should probably hand out the Slowest Individual Pitch superlative to James McCann, whose achievement came in a Diamondbacks-Brewers game on April 28. It was a 30.3-mph rainbow on the first pitch of the bottom of the eighth, and he released it while the Brewers broadcast was still showing a promo for group sales tickets. When they finally cut back to the game, the ball was so high that it was out of frame entirely. You Aren't a FanGraphs MemberIt looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. 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Membership includes:✓Ad-free browsing✓Unlimited FanGraphs & RotoGraphs articles✓Historical & platoon projections✓Leaderboard & player-page stat heatmaps✓One-click data exports✓Customizable player-page dashboards✓Dark & Classic site modes✓Weekly Members-only mailbag✓FanGraphs Walk-Off, your year in review✓Optional homepage photo removal✓Gift articles to non-Members✓Full postseason coverage For a second, everybody who was still watching this 13-2 laugher at home had to be wondering whether the game had gotten so out of hand that the teams got together between innings and decided that pantomime was the most humane way to finish things out. Alright, let’s get into the real stuff. We have to start with Jacob Misiorowski’s fastball. Misiorowski didn’t win the award for Fastest Fastball, although at 100.6 mph, he deserves credit for throwing the fastest fastball for a starter, not just this season, but in the history of the world. He does win Fastest Individual Pitch for this 105.5-mph heater to Pete Crow-Armstrong on June 26. Let’s make sure to give PCA plenty of credit for making contact with the third-fastest pitch of the Statcast era. Misiorowski’s four-seamer also wins the superlative for Heaviest Usage. He threw it 1,677 times. No pitch in baseball was thrown more, though second place went to Misiorowski’s former teammate and World Series opponent, Freddy Peralta, who threw 1,568 four-seamers. Unfortunately, by law that means we may no longer refer to Peralta as Fastball Freddy. Henceforth, only Misiorowski may bear that moniker. These are the rules and they are ironclad. Just so we’re clear: The superlative for Frequentest Fastball goes to Phillies left-hander José Alvarado, who threw either a four-seamer, a sinker, or a cutter 97.4% of the time. What did Alvarado throw the other 2.6% of the time? That would be his curveball, and when he did throw it, batters weren’t the only ones who got thrown off-balance. I clicked on a random curveball dot from Alvarado’s Baseball Savant page, and here he is earning a called strikeout on a pitch that didn’t come all that close to touching the top of the zone. The really fun thing is that Stuff+ thinks Alvardo’s curveball is his best pitch, awarding it a wild 152 grade. Because Baseball Savant’s run values didn’t love Alvardo’s cutter in 2026, and because the percentile sliders at the top of each pitcher’s page combine all fastballs into one bar, it looks like Statcast also prefers the pitch he almost never throws. I think that’s enough preamble for the big superlative. Congratulations to our Fastest Fastball winner Mason Miller. Miller’s four-seamer averaged 101.4 mph, up from 2025, when he won the same superlative at 101.2 mph. We should also hand out honorable mention to 2024 winner Ben Joyce at 101, and we definitely need to mention Edgardo Henriquez, who finished in both third and fourth place with a 100.9-mph sinker and a 100.7-mph sinker. Here’s Miller’s fastest pitch of the year, a 104-mph ball to Hunter Goodman. Somehow, Goodman was able to lay off this tempting offering. I’m not sure if you’ll be surprised to learn this, but the Slowest Pitch of the season wasn’t a changeup. Chris Bassitt’s curveball earned that superlative with an average velocity of just 71.3 mph. In fact, Bassitt’s curveball has been either the slowest or second-slowest pitch in baseball in each of the past four years, and he finished in the top 10 in 2022 and 2021. Truly, his curveball cannot be stopped (from moving so slowly that even a light breeze would stop it instantly). Here’s his slowest curveball of the season, which was notable in absolutely zero other ways: We’re going to close out the velocity portion of our superlatives with the Changiest Changeup. Changeups may not be the slowest pitches in baseball, but their relative speed is still a big part of the story, so we’re looking for the biggest gap between a pitcher’s fastest fastball and their changeup. By rights, this one should be a tie. Both Dylan Cease and Hunter Gaddis had a 15.4-mph gap between their changeups and four-seamers, but the tie goes to the slower changeup. Gaddis bested Cease on that front, 79.7 to 81.4. so he’s our winner. (Just in case you’re curious, at 76.6 mph, the slowest changeup this year belonged to Brent Suter, but he wins nothing. You hear me? He wins nothing!) Sorry, let’s get back on track. Gaddis’ slowest changeup of the season was eventful: In a game against the Twins on July 23, Gaddis floated this pitch (which is a traditional changeup despite being classified on the broadcast as a splitter) way too far inside, but luckily for him, Luke Keaschall took the pitch directly off the knob of his bat for a foul ball. In case you’re curious, the ball came off the knob at an exit velocity of 50.3 mph. Amazingly, that wasn’t the slowest foul ball Keaschall hit off a Gaddis changeup in 2026. That’s because on May 9, Gaddis threw a different changeup to Keaschall that also bounced off the knob of his bat! Gaddis’ changeup wasn’t just the changiest, it may have also been the freakiest. Tune in for more pitching weirdness later this week in pitching superlatives part two.