You probably tuned in to last Wednesday’s Atlanta Braves vs. Toronto Blue Jays game to see the long-awaited return of Spencer Strider. If you didn’t tune in and heard that a starting pitcher went five innings with 10 strikeouts in that game, you’d probably assume that Strider has returned to his ace form.
It was Chris Bassitt who stole the show in the weekday afternoon game, confounding Braves hitters left and right en route to his second win of the year and fourth straight strong start.
While that game was his best start of the year, it was hardly an outlier. Bassitt’s 0.77 ERA and 1.2 fWAR lead baseball through April 20th, a dominant showing for the thirty-six-year-old pitcher.
Bassitt’s 10 strikeouts last week were the first time since 2023 that he’s reached double-digits, a sign that he’s trying to stave off the natural decline as he ages. His 33.3% strikeout rate and 5.4% walk rate are both career bests by a significant margin. While those likely won’t remain as incredible as they are now, it exemplifies how everything is in sync for Bassitt.
Is there something worthwhile here? Or is this just a flash in the pan we’ll all forget about as Strider and Bassitt swap places for the rest of the season?
Father Time is Undefeated, But That Isn’t Everything
Even with a strong start, Bassitt has seen his biggest year-over-year decrease in fastball velocity: his 1.5 mph decline now has his fastball sitting at 91.1 mph, a career low. The only other time he lost a tick of velocity between seasons was when he missed all of 2017 with Tommy John surgery. Bassitt isn’t a slow starter historically either, as he has consistently maintained velocity throughout his first two seasons with the Blue Jays.
As a multiple fastball pitcher, he can’t exactly move away from throwing the hard stuff, but instead has to adjust within his arsenal. Since leaving Oakland after the 2021 season, his use of his sinker, cutter, and four-seam has stagnated between his lone year with the Mets and current stint with the Blue Jays.
Within the fastball pitch group, Bassitt’s four-seamer usage had decreased significantly since 2021 but has rebounded this season. His 19.3% usage dropped down to 4.4% last year, though the early usage in 2025 sits around 7.5%.
For the rest of his arsenal, Bassitt cut the changeup out of his pitch mix, paving the way for the increased four-seam fastball and splitter usage.
While the usage changes are the biggest we’ve seen so far from Bassitt in Toronto, he has made a more considerable change to his arsenal that’s helping him this season. Bassitt has dropped his arm angle two degrees this year, following the overall trend of pitchers lowering their arm slot this year.
Among pitchers who threw 500 pitches last year and at least 200 this year, the average pitcher has dropped their arm angle by 0.7 degrees. This has come from all different types of pitchers, with studs like Paul Skenes and Cole Ragans among the biggest decrasers in arm angle. Bassitt has dropped his arm angle by 2.1 degrees, going from 35.3 to 33.2.
This change is slight in appearance, but considerable in pitch movement.
The horizontal movement is all compared as absolute values (i.e., adding armside movement to a pitch already moving armside is a plus, and vice versa for gloveside). Lowering his arm angle has added a significant amount of east-west movement to all of his pitches, while also contributing some drop (can also be attributed to increased velocity).
Impeccable Execution Solves All
With the pitches moving a little bit at a lower velocity, the name of the game becomes execution. For Bassitt, he’s showing that he can be absolutely on fire when executing correctly this year.
Starting with the fastballs, Bassitt is effectively getting the sinker inside to right-handed hitters. His armside location is up nine percent, and zone percentage is down nine percent compared to 2024. These are not exclusively off of one another, but there is a noticeable focus on the inside sinker.
Half of Bassitt’s 14 sinker whiffs have come on this pitch, fueling a 22% whiff rate on the pitch (up 11% from last year). That’s also driving the absurd 45.5% chase rate on the sinker.
He’s induced a handful of these “sword”-like swings, where it’s clear that the hitter saw the release of the pitch and expected sharp gloveside movement. As for the sinkers that are in the zone, he’s earned a strong 62.5% Str-ICR and 31.8% CSW%. The pitch has also (unsurprisingly) gotten very lucky: it has -3 hit luck already, and an 11% mistake rate means that the damage will come. But if Bassitt can keep executing on the inner-half, the regression shouldn’t harm him as badly as years past.
Against lefties, Bassitt deploys the cutter as a first or last pitch in an at-bat. He knows that the sinker is not the best pitch to throw to opposite-handed hitters and deploys them accordingly. In 0-0 counts, Bassitt goes away, either on the black or out of the zone, attempting to earn a first-pitch strike. He then goes away from the pitch in the middle of at-bats, before turning to them to try and nab the front-door strike to put the hitter away. He throws 40.4% of his sinkers in 2-strike counts, 20% more than the league average.
Similar to RHB, the sinker is still greatly overperforming. It’s getting hit hard with few results, and while it’s going to regress, so is the 0.77 ERA. However, this represents a tangible change in usage: he threw only 28.5% of sinkers in two-strike counts last year.
Bassitt’s other primary fastball, the cutter, has excelled in limiting hard contact and getting whiffs by staying out of the middle of the zone. Especially against lefties, Bassitt can keep the cutter above the zone to set up low pitches.
The movement profile up in the zone lights up the eyes of a hitter, even if they can’t do much with it. Looking at this sequence against Brett Baty, his sightline is so ready for a high pitch that he’s just clueless on a low pitch, especially a fastball.
Bassitt is in the 96th percentile for the number of high cutters, which confuses hitters more than most outlier pitch/location combinations. Since hitting vertical fastballs is a game of reading the expected vertical movement on the pitch (i.e., why ride is important up in the zone), the cutter can confuse hitters.
Finally, Bassitt’s command of his breaking and secondary pitches is currently as good as it gets.
Bassitt knows the splitter gets hit hard, but his locations have vastly improved to help prevent mistakes. There’s not a single pitch in the four up-and-gloveside sections of the zone. Bassitt deploys the splitter early in the count, looking to throw off hitters who might be sitting fastball and steal a called strike. The splitter has a 17.6% called strike rate, which is 91st percentile for splitters.
Meanwhile, the curveball is just filling up the bottom of the zone so far, but not hanging up so that hitters can do damage. The 47.3% zone rate is the highest so far in his career. While it may appear scary to dump in a 70 mph pitch to a major league hitter, they can’t do anything.
58.3% of the curveballs in play have been flyballs, with a large percentage being popups. Nine of the 12 batted balls against Bassitt’s curveball have been in two-strike counts, which indicates that he’s using the pitch to get out of at-bats, strikeout or not.
Bassitt has increased his share of two-strike curveballs by 13%, vaulting him from below league-average to above. The curveball has always been solid at getting whiffs, too, but the increased zone rate while maintaining elite location helps that, too.
Bassitt’s kitchen sink approach works even better when everything is moving further away from e.ach other. Despite lower velocity, the extra movement still shrinks the leeway for a hitter to adjust based on pitch recognition. Bassitt is executing better than anyone else in baseball right now, which is both good and bad.
On the one hand, seeing success early in the year might be huge for him: he’s posted 5.00+ ERAs in back-to-back Aprils as a Blue Jay. The pitch mix changes also appear to be meaningful, both in stuff and usage. On the other hand, the regression can hit Bassitt hard. He has yet to give up a home run, and the sinker is due to get damaged. He’s also still giving up decent amounts of hard contact across his arsenal, none of which has really hurt yet.
All things considered, if Bassitt can largely continue to execute the way he has and maintain the usage changes, especially in two strikes, this year is shaping up to be a throwback to classic Bassitt. Projections all peg him for around a 4.00 ERA with a 22% strikeout rate and 8% walk rate rest of the way, but I think Bassitt has the tools to post a 3.50 ERA with a 25% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate. Bank in the four starts he’s already made, and Bassitt’s end-of-season stats could surprise a lot of people.
