The 2026 Pitching Superlatives, Part 5: The Straightest Pitch in Baseball

David Frerker-Imagn Images Hello and welcome to the final installment of the 2026 pitching superlatives. I’ve been spending the entire week tracking down all the pitches at the first and 100th percentiles. The fastest pitches, the ones that move the most, earn the most whiffs, hit the middle of the zone or the corners the most often, or end up getting pounded into the dirt most often. I’d love it if you read the four previous entires, but today we’re going back to where all this started. As I mentioned on Monday, the idea for this series came about because I had been wondering for long time who throws the pitch that moves the least. Here’s Baseball Savant’s movement chart for Jacob Misiorowski. I picked him simply because I decided I needed an example, and as the best pitcher in the game this year, his was the first name to come to mind. Misiorowski’s slider averages just 1.8 inches of rise and 3.4 inches of glove-side break. That’s in part because he throws it so damn hard that it doesn’t have much time to move, but it’s also simply the nature of the pitch. The average Misiorowski slider features a total of just 3.8 inches of induced movement. If you glance at just about any pitcher’s movement chart these days, you’re more likely to see a pitch right near the center. Since Candy Cummings popularized the curveball in 1867 — a recent book by Thomas Gilbert makes the case that James Creighton beat Cummings to the discovery by several years — pitch movement has been an integral part of the game. Watching a pitch take a crazy hairpin turn on its way to the plate is one of the game’s great joys, and if you like to get nerdy with your joy, you can go on any number of websites and find out exactly how much horizontal break and vertical break (induced or otherwise) every pitcher put on every pitch. We normally tend to assume that more movement is better, but as is always the case, all sorts of factors can complicate matters. For example, movement can sometimes come at the expense of velocity, so after the initial sweeper craze finished sweeping the nation, we saw many pitchers decide to revert to a tighter bullet slider. We’ve also seen cutters and gyro sliders proliferate over the past several years. Cutters only slightly resist the standard arm-side run that most pitchers naturally impart. They’re often meant to sit somewhere between a pitcher’s fastball and slider, giving batters a third pitch to worry about and making the job of pitch recognition more challenging. Gyro sliders intentionally load up on gyroscopic spin, which stabilizes ball flight in the same way a spiral improves a quarterback’s accuracy. As with some kinds of offspeed pitches (most notably the splitter) the gyro slider looks like it’s falling off the table, but all it’s really doing is finding a way to counteract the backspin that the pitcher naturally imparts, allowing gravity to do its thing. In other words, both pitches are to some degree designed to minimize induced movement. So although revolutions in pitch design have popularized sweepers with huge glove-side break, unlocked the secrets to getting huge rise on four-seam fastballs, and allowed even the biggest supinators to find a way to throw an offspeed pitch with some depth, the rate of pitches that barely move at all has ticked steadily upward. In 2008, the first year of the pitch tracking era, 1.4% of all pitches broke less than the width of a baseball both horizontally and vertically. In 2026, that percentage had doubled.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 After all these preposterous breakthroughs in pitch design – Edgertronic cameras, biomechanical advancements, seam-shifted wake, the kick change, the return of the splitter – pitchers are throwing twice as many pitches that barely break at all. They just kind of go straight. When every pitch is zigging, the way to keep hitters off balance isn’t to zag. It’s to do nothing at all. When I was 14, my friend Matt and I played on the same baseball team. All our games were at Marshall High School, which you might remember as the team that loses the football state championship in Remember the Titans. Once, I was on second base and Matt was at the plate, and he took a pitch right in the face. It was scary, but he was fine other than a bloody nose. The weird thing was it wasn’t all that wild a pitch. Obviously, it was off target, but that’s not particularly unusual for a 14-year-old pitcher, and it wasn’t thrown all that hard. As I could see all too clearly from second base, Matt had plenty of time to get out of the way. Instead, he just stood there and let it drill him. In the face. At some point after all the hullaballoo had died down, I asked Matt why he hadn’t gotten out of the way. He told me that he was sure it was a curveball. He didn’t want to duck out of the way of a pitch that might end up in the strike zone. He was so determined not to get fooled by the break that he got fooled by no break at all. As I mentioned earlier, Misiorowski was just the first person I thought of. If the first name that popped into my head was a pitcher with a slider that moved a total of just 3.8 inches, then no doubt other pitchers out there feature even less movement. Surely somebody throws a slider or a cutter that has no induced break whatsoever. It just leaves the pitcher’s hand and travels toward home plate, dropping some because of gravity, but otherwise remaining true to its initial course. The math here is easy. We’re just using the Pythagorean theorem. The induced vertical break is the height, and the horizontal break is the base. Total movement is the hypotenuse. It turns out that 74 pitches this season featured even less induced break than Misiorowski’s slider. Gordon Graceffo threw two of them, a slider with 2.9 inches of movement and a cutter with 3.0 inches. But only two pitches averaged less than one inch of total movement. Both Jason Adam’s slider and Foster Griffin’s splitter averaged 0.9 inches of total movement. It’s very fun that one of these offerings is a splitter. As I said before, the goal when you throw a splitter is to kill spin. Letting the ball, to some degree, slip right between your fingers when you throw it allows you to impart less velocity despite having the same arm speed, and to put less backspin on the ball, which means less rise. Year in and year out, the pitches at the bottom of the spin rate leaderboards are splitters and knuckleballs. Adam’s slider has a much higher spin rate than Foster’s splitter, but just 12.4% of its spin was active spin, the ninth lowest of any pitch. The rest was gyro spin. Griffin’s splitter had just 13.5% active spin, the lowest of any offspeed pitch. For a couple reasons, I’m going to name Adam’s slider the Straightest Pitch in baseball. First, it’s his primary pitch and his best pitch by a mile, while Griffin throws his splitter just 6% of the time. Next, once you include the drop caused by gravity, it really does move significantly less. Foster’s splitter drops 41.2 inches, compared to the 37.3 inches of drop on Adam’s slider. That’s largely because Griffin’s splitter is significantly slower, which gives gravity more time to bend the ball to its will. I have one other reason that I’ll save for later, but speaking of gravity, there is, of course, another way to measure all this. If we look not at induced vertical break, but rather at total vertical movement, including the drop due to gravity, these pitches are no longer the straightest. This season, just under 80% of pitches featured at least some induced rise due to the backspin the pitcher imparted on the ball. That includes nearly 95% of sinkers. Unless you throw sidearm or from an even lower angle, you’re going to put backspin on the ball, and that’s going to cause it to rise at least a little. If we decide that resisting gravity doesn’t count as movement, then the straight pitch in baseball was Brandan Bidois’ four-seamer, which featured 3.5 inches of arm-side run and dropped a total of 9.8 inches despite an induced vertical break of 19.3 inches. In total, it moved 10.4 inches. Basically, Bidois threw the straightest pitch in baseball partly because he threw his four-seamer really hard, but mostly because he got so much rise on it. In order to throw the straightest pitch in baseball by this way of looking at things, you need to actually throw a pitch with a ton of induced movement. Here’s the straightest pitch Bidois threw all season. Sure looks like it rose, doesn’t it? In part, that’s because of the high location and the camera angle, but it’s also because the pitch had 21.5 inches of IVB. That cut into the gravity-induced drop enough to leave it with just seven inches of total movement, but that’s a ton of rise. Bidois’ four-seamer threatens to jump right off the pitch movement chart. Here’s the pitch that moved the least all season long by this way of measuring. It’s a Dylan Cease four-seamer at exactly 100 mph. It had just 0.8 inches of cut and, thanks to 21.8 inches of rise, it fell just six inches. In total, it moved 6.05 inches. That one is pleasingly straight because the ball traveled almost exactly down the camera’s line of sight. If you’re been wondering why I’m showing you all this, it’s because I want to prepare your for what an actually straight pitch, without any IVB, looks like. Earlier this year, Bradley Woodrum did some great writing about the WPBL at Baseball Prospectus. During an article about pitcher Jaida Lee, he spent some time explaining that the low angle of the center field camera during the WPBL games was making the pitches look like they dropped more than we’re used to. It kind of made every pitch look like a curveball, and here I’ll steal a GIF from that article. The WPBL camera angle, while not ideal, wasn’t deceptive. Although it made it harder to enjoy the game because you couldn’t recognize the pitches as well, I think you could argue that it was a more accurate picture of pitch movement than usual. It’s the high camera angle we’re used to seeing in MLB games that’s deceptive, and I can show you proof. The high camera angle effectively hides gravity’s pull on the ball, because the fall it causes makes the overall vertical angle of pitches more or less match the high-to-low angle of the camera. Essentially, the angle makes pitches look like they’re moving perfectly straight, even though they’re falling. As a result, we can see the induced movement much better. But what happens when a pitch has no induced vertical break? It looks like one of those sinking WPBL pitches. According to Statcast, just four pitches all season long had exactly zero horizontal break and zero induced vertical break. Only four times all season did a pitch leave the pitcher’s hand and go exactly where the batter would have expected it to go. Three of them were sliders and one, believe it or not, was a knuckleball. All four of these pitches looked like the pitches we’re used to seeing from the low angle in the WPBL. Without any induced rise, the way gravity pulled them down became very evident. Here’s a Matt Waldron knuckleball that didn’t knuckle at all. Or, more likely, it knuckled just a little bit, causing it to drop and cut just a bit, counteracting whatever rise and arm-side run Waldron put on it at release. That may be the straightest pitch in baseball, but it drops so much! If you were just watching from your couch, you would probably say that Waldron got tons of late break on the pitch and that’s why Brandon Marsh fouled it off. But the truth is the opposite. Waldron threw Marsh a 77-mph lollipop, and Marsh probably couldn’t square it up because he was waiting for movement that never came. I mentioned Gordon Graceffo earlier, as the only player in baseball who threw two pitches with less movement than Misiorowski’s slider. (I didn’t mention that Gordon Graceffo is probably the fake name the Geico Gecko uses when he checks into a hotel, but I think it’s probably true too.) Perhaps that should make it unsurprising that Graceffo threw another of the zero-movement pitches. What is surprising is that it also came against the Phillies, and just five days after Waldron’s straight pitch to Marsh. Unfortunately, this pitch isn’t all that visually pleasing. It was a big miss that bounced in the dirt in the eighth inning of a blowout. I suspect that until this moment, no one on Earth found this pitch the slightest bit interesting. Rhett Lowder threw the third perfectly straight pitch. It was a slider against Freddie Freeman, and because he threw it in Cincinnati, where the camera angle is located high and almost in perfect straightaway center field, it actually looks like it had quite a bit of arm-side break and drop. That brings us to the fourth and last totally straight pitch thrown in 2026, and pleasingly, it was thrown by Jason Adam, purveyor of the Straightest Pitch in baseball. Adam actually thew this slider in the Game 4 of the NLDS. This time, the camera in San Diego is quite off-center, which makes the pitch look like it had a bunch of arm-side run. I told you earlier that I had one last reason for giving Adam’s slider the Straightest Pitch in baseball superlative rather than Griffin’s splitter. It’s because it fits with something that I noticed all the way back in April, when I was on paternity leave and catching snippets of baseball whenever I could. Adam, I notice, barely has a pitching motion at all. He starts out like any other pitcher, holding his glove low against his belt like a respectable right-hander and following it with a traditional leg kick. His delivery even features a couple of old-school flourishes. He starts with his shoulders pointed toward home plate but his feet closed off, and he pats the ball against the palm of his glove before breaking his hands for good. After that, though, he’s got a hitch. There’s a weird pause in the delivery, and from there, all pretense is dropped. Following that normal leg kick, he just kind of puts his front foot straight back down. He barely bends his back leg. He doesn’t take much of a stride. His arm swing is nonexistent. He just stands up straight, rears back and raises the ball to his ear, and hucks it in there. He’s a nine-year veteran with a career ERA of 3.25, but he looks for all the world like he was converted from catcher some time this morning, like he’ll do his best to look how a pitcher is supposed to look at the beginning, but at a certain point, he’s got to throw the ball home and only knows one way to do that. I can’t tell you how much I love it that the guy who looks like he’s barely trying to pitch at all, like he’s just doing his best to get the ball from point A to point B without any superfluities, actually turns out to throw the Straightest Pitch. If there’s one player who looks like he could throw a perfectly straight pitch, it’s Adam, and here he is doing it in the biggest moment. That marks the end of the 2026 Pitch Superlatives. Thanks so much for reading along.