The 2026 Pitching Superlatives, Part 2: Movement

Brad Penner and Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images Welcome to part two of our pitching superlatives series. I’ll be here all week covering the pitches that stick out the most. Yesterday, I discussed the pitches that stood out the most due to their velocity. Today, we’re talking about movement, but before we get into it, I need to issue a correction. Yesterday, I credited James McCann with throwing the slowest individual pitch of 2026, but it has been pointed out to me that McCann only threw the slowest tracked pitch of 2026. Twenty-one times, a position player threw a pitch so funky that Statcast threw up its electronic shoulders and assigned it a velocity of “–”. Often, it did so because the pitch was so slow that the cameras didn’t know what to make of it, or perhaps (just a theory) because the slowness of the pitch forced the pitcher to throw such a high-arcing rainbow that it was out of the path where Statcast expects to find pitches. I mean, what are you supposed to do with this pitch? Either way, it’s possible that McCann’s pitch was, at worst, the 22nd-slowest pitch of the season. However, McCann still threw a plurality of those 21 untracked position player pitches, which means that he’s still most likely the person who threw the slowest pitch of the entire season. It just might not be the one we highlighted yesterday. Could it be this preposterous offering? We’ll never know. And with that, we’re moving on to movement. Well, we’re almost moving on to movement, because we first have to talk about the difference between total downward movement and induced vertical break. As you might have heard, gravity pulls things downward. Every pitch thrown this year, even the ones with the most induced vertical break, ended up deviating downward from its initial trajectory by at least two inches. Here’s the pitch with the most downward movement: 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. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member. 1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other. 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off. 3. Dark mode and Classic mode! 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them. 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects. 6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.) 7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only. 8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO. 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. In case you didn't read all that, here's the short version. 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 No. What’s going on? How are we still talking about this one pitch from James McCann? As it turns out, when you include gravity in the equation, eephuses have the biggest vertical drop from their initial trajectory, because they start out going straight up and rely on gravity to pull them down. That pitch from McCann had 330 inches of drop. If gravity had suddenly turned off the moment it left McCann’s hand and it had just kept going straight on that trajectory, it would have crossed the plate at a height of 31 feet and four inches. Damn you, James McCann. Halloween is over; stop haunting us. Alright, so we’re eliminating eephuses from our search. We’re only looking at real pitchers. And apparently, I also need to specify that we’re only looking at real pitches, so that we don’t include accidental eephuses like this one. Now that we’re looking at the right thing, the real Droppiest Pitch superlative goes to Max Fried’s curveball, which averaged a whopping 68.1 inches of downward movement. That’s five feet and eight inches of drop from its release angle. Let’s make sure that matches up to the eye test. Yeah, I’d say that checks out. Now let’s get to the pitch that fell the least, even when including gravity. As you’d expect, the top of the list features some pitchers who can really get the rpm going on their four-seam fastballs. Trevor Megill, Chase Burns, and Mason Miller are all in the top five, but the Unfallingest Pitch superlative belongs to Miami’s Michael Petersen. His four-seamer averaged just 9.2 inches of drop, and it’s not hard to see why. Like those other pitchers at the top of the list, Petersen throws really hard and can really spin his four-seamer. He’s also got a steep arm angle of 54.5 degrees, which allows him to get plenty of backspin on the ball. He makes the most of that spin, as well. Statcast says that his four-seamer has 99.5% active spin, the 10th-highest mark in baseball, which means that nearly all of that spin affects the movement of the ball. However, we’re now switching over to induced vertical break, and with 19.4 inches of IVB, Petersen’s four-seamer placed just outside the top 10. Induced vertical break is just what it sounds like. We’re ignoring the effect of gravity and looking just at the actual vertical movement induced by the spin the pitcher imparts upon it. The Risiest Pitch belongs to Alex Vesia of the Dodgers, whose four-seamer had a whopping 21.2 inches of induced vertical break. This pitch rose the most of any he threw all season, and it just explodes out of his hand. Vesia only averages 92.1 mph on his four-seamer, which is the reason he can’t compete with Petersen in terms of total movement. The extra time it takes for his ball to reach the plate is extra time for gravity to exert its effect on the trajectory of the ball. But that extra time also gives Vesia’s higher spin rate more time to push back against gravity, so although it makes the ball drop more overall, it also helps his IVB. And while Petersen has a high arm angle, Vesia has the highest in baseball. He averaged 69 degrees on his four-seamer, and, somehow, 73.8 on his slider. I mean, look at this. Vesia isn’t credited with the highest IVB of the pitch tracking era, or even the Statcast era. However, if we limit our search to 2021 onward, when Statcast switched over to the more accurate Hawk-Eye tracking system, he ends up in second place. First belongs to Demarcus Evans, who in 2021 averaged 22.3 inches of IVB on his four-seamer. All of this is to say that Vesia’s fastball rise really is something wild. If there’s one thing I hope you’ve taken away from the comparison of total drop to induced vertical break, it’s that pitch movement is complicated. Now that we’re back to talking about induced vertical break, let’s return to pitches that drop. Since we started with curveballs, let’s look at the Droppiest Curveball by IVB. It belongs to Matthew Liberatore, whose curveball averaged -17.2 inches of IVB, the biggest induced drop of any pitch in baseball. Fried’s curveball was ranked sixth by IVB, and other notable names are all over the top of the list. Aaron Ashby finished second, Hunter Brown finished eighth, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto finished 10th. But watch this ball leave Liberatore’s hand, and you can understand why he earned the top spot. I honestly don’t know how Liberatore can locate that pitch when it leaves his hand with such intense spin. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone rip a curveball so hard. Watch the way his arm wraps around his body as he follows through. It’s doing that because he’s pulling down so hard in order to impart all that spin on the ball. Curveballs aren’t the only pitches that drop. We’re going to have co-champions for the superlative of Sinkiest Sinker. Tyler Rogers is technically the winner at -12.5 inches of induced vertical break, but he’s borderline cheating because he throws like this. That pitch had -13.1 inches of IVB, making it Rogers’ sinkiest sinker of the entire season, but because he’s a submariner, it still looked from home like it was rising the whole time. Rogers deserves his flowers, but we’re going to force him to share the award with a representative from the group of pitchers who throw sinkers from something resembling a normal human release point. For that, we need to skip down to the 10th name on the list (sorry to notable sidearmers like Tim Hill, Kevin Kelly, and Yennier Cano), where we find Logan Webb and his 23-degree arm angle. Here’s the depressing thing: Webb’s sinker averaged 0.1 inches of IVB. That is, it averaged a tenth of an inch of rise. That made it the sinkiest sinker among non-sidearmers. What that means is that even if you throw the sinkest sinker possible, unless you’re a sidearmer, it’s still going to rise rather than sink. This pitch to Caleb Durbin had -6.6 inches of IVB, making it Webb’s sinkiest sinker of the entire year. Can you even tell? The changeup situation is only slightly less depressing. The Droppiest Changeup belongs to Kevin Kelly, but it averaged just -7.5 inches of IVB out of 44.9 inches of total drop. In other words, 83% of the drop on the Droppiest Changeup was just about gravity doing its thing. That’s why we’re not excluding sidearmers, as we did for the Sinkiest Sinker. Although they benefit from the fact that they’re not generating as much backspin, they’re still just trying to kill spin and let gravity do its thing, just like everybody else. Luckily, the break is still pleasing to watch. The good news is that we’re done with vertical break. It is dead to us. Let’s get horizontal. We don’t have to worry about gravity bringing horizontal break down. That was a very confusing sentence. We’re going to start with arm-side run, and the winner of the Tailiest Pitch superlative won’t surprise you at all. Devin Williams’ changeup, the Airbender, averaged 20.7 inches of arm-side run, well over an inch more than Logan Henderson’s second-place changeup. That’s Williams’ biggest breaker of the year. It had a whopping 33 inches of arm-side run. Also, it wasn’t a competitive pitch, but look at that break. Lots of fun. Now let’s get into the breakiest pitches of them all. We’re talking about the Sweepiest Sweeper. By rights, this should be the most fun superlative of the entire article. Horizontal break is extremely satisfying. It’s easy to see because of the way a big, juicy sweeper cruises from right-to-left across your television screen. Unless of course the pitcher is left-handed, because television cameras tend to set up to the right of the pitcher, which tends to emphasize right-to-left movement and deemphasize left-to-right-movement, but that only matters if the owner of the Sweepiest Sweeper is a lefty, and what are the odds of that? Yeah, of course. That’s Cade Gibson’s sweepiest sweeper of the year. He led baseball with an average of 21.5 inches of glove-side break, and at 27.4, that pitch was his absolute sweepiest. It’s still satisfying enough to watch, but it’d be even more fun if the camera were over his left shoulder. So we’ve done the pitches that rise the most, drop the most, and break the most either to the glove or the arm side. The last thing we’ve got to establish is the pitch that features the most overall break. For that, we need to break out the Pythagorean theorem, because we’re looking for the hypotenuse of the vertical and horizontal break. The Breakiest Breaking Ball superlative goes to Nolan McLean, whose curveball averaged 17.5 inches of horizontal break and -13 inches of IVB for a total of 21.8 inches of total break. That means the Breakiest Braking Ball was also the Curviest Curveball. However, you may be surprised to learn that the Most Movement superlative, for the pitch that featured the most total break, didn’t go to a breaking ball at all. Cole Ragans’ four-seamer, which averaged 12.8 inches of horizontal break and 17.8 inches of IVB, just barely edged McLean’s curve at 21.9 inches. Once again, because Ragans is a lefty and the camera is over his right shoulder, it looks like this pitch just sort of sails on him, but it actually featured 26.2 inches of total break, his most movement of the entire season. This was a really weird entry in the series. Sitting at home and judging pitches based on the way they break across your television screen is one of the most fun things about baseball. Especially these days, when pitch design is such a huge part of the game and everybody seems to have a pitch or two that breaks physics, you’d think that a breakdown of the pitches that move the most in any direction would feature a series of jaw-dropping Wiffle balls. But so much of movement is dependent on the context. Something as simple as the angle you’re watching from can have a huge effect on your experience of the pitch, and interplay with the expected movement is extremely important in determining its success. That’s the reason that pitching analysis is so dependent on the context. Maybe your four-seamer features plenty of rise, but it won’t be flat enough to miss bats if you throw it from a high release point, and it might be too predictable to miss bats if its shape matches up too well with your arm angle. That’s why we talk about the dead zone and approach angles. Maybe your sweeper gets plenty of horizontal break because you’re trading too much velocity for movement, and you’d be better served with more of a bullet slider. Marveling at the pitches that break the most is a simple pleasure, but pitching is complicated. Join us tomorrow when we get into the superlative for pitch location.