When I wrote about Logan Gilbert early last season, I lamented his approach. His relentless aggression in the zone was leading to too many bad strikes that hitters could pounce on. His excellent stuff was helping him get away with it, but I was convinced he could do better if he changed his plan of attack. As it often goes with pitchers, he didn’t develop exactly along the lines I expected. He made further modifications to his arsenal, and his usage of it shifted as well. Let’s go over what he offers now and how he offers it.
A Quick Rundown
Gilbert isn’t throwing quite as hard this season as he did in 2024, but despite that, his fastball might be better.
He dropped his arm slot and release, while increasing his spin rate and movement. This, combined with his throwing it higher, creates a flatter angle for the fastball, helping it to miss more bats. Its whiff rate has jumped from 19.2% to 26.2%. For additional context, that’s the difference between the 44th and 84th percentiles among starters.
His slider remains mostly unchanged. The mechanical change and velocity drop we saw with his fastball carried over to all of his pitches. So while the slider is a tick slower and has a slightly flatter angle, it’s not a super meaningful difference to me. An 87 mph pure bullet slider is still an extremely tough pitch to get the bat to. It’s one of the league’s best.
The splitter dropped 2 mph and also added depth, putting it into near-outlier territory. It’s incredibly low spin rate and spin activity make it almost akin to a fast knuckleball. It’s not quite as unpredictable in its movement, but it’s about as difficult to track for hitters.
The curveball is about the same as it was in 2024, which was different from the one he had in 2023. He started throwing it harder, with less depth and more sweep. It’s kind of in slurve/sweeper territory now. His ability to get more than a foot of horizontal movement at 83 mph as a low-spin pronator is pretty impressive, and it gives him another solid weapon to throw to righties.
He’s thrown a scant few sinkers this year, but he doesn’t seem to have a real plan for it yet. He’s using it against both righties and lefties, and it doesn’t have a great shape. It’s got enough horizontal movement to be useful running in on right-handed hitters, but he’s only done that twice so far. This is worth keeping an eye on, but it’s just a developmental piece right now. Lastly, he scrapped the cutter he debuted in 2024 this year. He hasn’t thrown it a single time. This is fine by me; it was an acceptable pitch, but it wasn’t worth using over his other offerings. What it did to set them up wasn’t worth the tradeoff on batted ball results and balls being put in play before the opportunity for a strikeout.
Pitching for the Punchout
As you might have guessed, the changes to his arsenal aren’t the entire reason behind Gilbert’s incredible strikeout rate this season. It has a lot to do with his strategy as well. He approaches individual matchups like a fighter would. He wants to set up the finishing blow any way that he can. This comes mostly in the form of 4-seamers and sliders in the zone. He is still aggressive with these pitches, zoning them at rates good for the 85th and 78th percentiles, respectively. In early counts (0-0, 0-1, 1-0, 1-1), there is a 74.9% chance he’ll throw one of these, and he zones those 56.2% of the time combined. He is looking to get ahead in the count early. This gives him leverage to use his best pitch and send the hitter back to the dugout. With two strikes, the secret weapon comes out, and he reaches for what might be the best splitter in MLB.
It’s a bold claim, I’m aware. I would hear arguments for a few other splitters; there are a lot of good ones in the majors these days. None of them are used quite the way Gilbert uses his, though. He’s thrown 143 splitters in total this season. 100 of them, a whopping 69.9%, have come in 0-2, 1-2, or 2-2 counts. Of any pitcher who has thrown as many splitters as Gilbert has, the next highest rate of pitches like this is 55.6% from Mark Leiter Jr. Adding changeups to this group to compare it to all offspeed pitches, Paul Skenes’ changeup misses the pitch cutoff by just five, but puts up the next highest percentage at 63.0%.
When Gilbert is throwing his splitter, far more often than not, he intends to end the at-bat right there. One could argue this makes him a bit too predictable, and there’s some traction to that theory; his splitter whiff rate in these situations is lower than it is when pulling from all of his splitters. That could also be explained by hitters getting defensive and swinging to stay alive. For what it’s worth, while splitters are his most-used pitch in these counts, they’ve only made up 45.9% of what he throws there. It’s a substantial amount, and much more than it used to be, but it’s not the only thing he does. He’s more than happy to try to set a hitter down with any of his pitches, excluding the sinker for obvious reasons. And he can do that often as he likes; they all have above-average putaway rates.
A lot of his increased strikeout rate can probably be chalked up to the aggression to get ahead in the count, and the increased usage of his best whiff pitch when he gets the opportunity to get the K. It doesn’t hurt that he’s locating the splitter better this year as well. It’s been over the plate horizontally more often (30.7% vs 42.7%), and he’s doing a better job of burying it low, too. This, in tandem with the 2-strike usage, has helped to spike its O-Sw% from 35.6% to an absurd 51.9% this season.
Just a note on the splitter I thought I would include because it’s funny: Due to how he’s using it this season, in swing-heavy counts and usually out of the zone, he has landed a total of one (1) of his splitters for a called strike this season. Ironically, it was in a 2-strike count. (Video) Poor Alan Roden, he never stood a chance. Probably saw it come out of the hand and thought he should lay off a high fastball.
What Else is Left to Do?
While I don’t think hitters will ever get good at hitting his incredible splitter or slider, they will eventually adjust to Gilbert’s approach at least somewhat. The one thing you can’t be as a pitcher is predictable. It doesn’t seem particularly likely that Gilbert is a 33.6 K-BB% arm forever now, though he wouldn’t be the first former Stetson Hatter to achieve that mark. I think it’s inevitable that the rates will regress at least a little bit, though his bad batted ball luck and one outing ruined by the winds of Wrigley have inflated his ERA. That might actually drop from the already excellent 3.12 it stands at.
I think if there’s any room left to improve, it lies mostly in further sharpening command. There might be some hope that that could still come. He’s on the first season of a mechanical change, as he spends more time with his new arm slot, we might see his pitch plots tighten up. They aren’t bad by any means, and you can still see a clear plan of attack in them. Scattershot would be exaggerating; he just misses his spots by a little more than you’d like sometimes. That’s largely the only thing that gets him into trouble now. You need him to mess up if you’re going to get a hit off of him. If he’s locating his stuff, you’re out before you even step up to the plate.
He’s now armed with four excellent whiff pitches. He isn’t just missing bats, he’s forcing hitters to swing and still missing them at high rates. That’s the real trick. Whiff rates alone are good to have, but Gilbert has above-average SwStr% on all four pitches as well. None of them fall below the 85th percentile among starters in that statistic. Unsurprisingly, they’re all well above average in zone whiff rate, too. Having one of those is a good start; you have a pitch to get hitters out with a lower threat of a ball in play. Having two of them gives you additional versatility and can allow them to play off of each other. Three gives you an arsenal most pitchers would give up their other arm for and likely makes you one of the league’s most feared aces. Having four of them makes you Logan Gilbert.
