The Miami Marlins have hung around long enough to play meaningful games in September. For a fanbase destined to Sisyphean rebuilds, 2026 is reason enough to believe in the future Peter Bendix has promised.
The Marlins Way, of course, is to maximize their controllable young talent before shipping them off to the greener pastures of competitive baseball. But this core—tied to the promise of Eury Pérez’s right arm and the emergence of Otto Lopez—might have some staying power.
Part of that equation is quality starting pitching. By fWAR, FIP, and innings pitched, Miami has hovered around league average, sporting victories from Tyler Phillips’s and Janson Junk’s development. Max Meyer also popped this spring. Finally living up to his third-overall draft capital, Meyer posted career-best marks in innings (111), ERA (2.68), and fWAR (2.3) before a neck injury all but ended his season.
Having resumed a throwing program early in September, it isn’t immediately clear if Meyer will pitch again for the fighting fish of 2026. Even so, the Marlins can bank on Meyer’s optimized arsenal making him a key piece of their long-term plans.
Meyer Has a Fastball Problem
Meyer was drafted incredibly early in the 2020 MLB Draft because of his high-IVB, high-velo four-seamer and the nutty spin rates that came with it. What once surpassed nearly all of his peers hasn’t aged as well as Miami may have hoped.
It’s a big-league fastball, for sure. But injuries have dampened its development, sitting at 95 mph as the league doubles down on triple digits. Meyer’s 6-foot frame doesn’t help him here, either; 6.1 feet of extension is a ninth-percentile mark, forcing his fastball to play down.
Across 64.2 innings of 4.73-ERA ball last year, his fastball was a primary culprit. Hitters slugged .630 against it, whiffing just 14% of the time and producing -6 run value. Not much has changed year-over-year with his primary heater, as two points of Stuff+ (95 to 97) and identical PLVs (4.86) continue to limit optimism surrounding the pitch. It is getting barrelled and missing bats at eighth-percentile rates, and its Location+ has dropped five points.
Yet, hitters have struggled to punish the four-seamer as they had in years past, especially on the majority of batted-ball events that haven’t been barrelled.
While it remains a weakness, Meyer has successfully mitigated his fastball’s vulnerability without sacrificing the place it has in his arsenal. Without a strong sinker (or any cutter), dropping the four-seamer entirely would limit his ability to find strikes in the zone and inhibit his attempts to use the upper half of the strike zone. He needed to insulate the rest of his arsenal to properly hide the four-seamer, and he’s found his solution with his new-look sweeper.
Turbo… Sweepers?
If two skills define Meyer’s game, they are his raw spin capacity and the ability to throw his secondaries harder than almost anyone in the sport. It shouldn’t be surprising that the solutions he found revolve around those traits.
The sweeper is a relatively new addition to the arsenal, having been added in 2025 and thrown just 12.3% of the time as a change-of-pace offering from his slider. This year, though, the pitch’s 2-mph increase has fundamentally changed his approach.
Meyer is throwing the sweeper 30% of the time in 2026, and he’s turned a traditionally platoon-based pitch into an equal-opportunity offender. Both lefties and righties are seeing it at a 30% clip (compared to 6.6% against left-handed hitters last year), and the platoon splits have flipped, giving credence to the idea that velocity is a driving force in missing barrels to opposite-handed hitters. Loopy breaking balls are easy to recognize, but the math changes when it’s approaching 90 mph.
We expect to see opposite-handed hitters feast on sweepers, but Meyer is exceeding every expectation against lefties. After hitting .500 against it last year, left-handed hitters are currently under the Mendoza Line in plate appearances that end with the sweeper, generating a .166 xAVG, .224 xwOBA, and .324 xwoBACON to boot.
Part of the sweeper’s success can be attributed to the bread-and-butter slider that Meyer has always relied on. He came into the league throwing it north of 40% of the time, and even a 25.8% usage rate is more frequent than three-quarters of the league.
Taking a look at Meyer’s arsenal can help illustrate how these pitches work together. To the arm side, we can see the good (but not great) separation his four-seamer gets from his 43° arm angle, along with a sinker and changeup that don’t jump off the page. There’s not a ton of seam-shifted wake in this profile, but Meyer doesn’t need it. Both breaking ball shapes make sense with his arm angle, and they toe the line of being continuous while remaining distinct.
Hitters know that Meyer is happy to lean on the slider as his favorite secondary pitch. But there’s only a 45-minute deviation in spin-based movement between the slider and sweeper; they are coming out of the same spot, and Meyer’s sweeper is adding an extra eight inches of glove-side movement (and five inches of drop). He doesn’t need to chase crazy glove-side run to miss bats when the rest of his arsenal is doing that work for him.
Likewise, even Meyer’s changeup benefits from the influx of sweepers. Almost six hours of spin-based movement away from the fastball and changeup, hitters picking up the spin axis can still struggle to see the spin direction until it’s too late, further exaggerating an otherwise pedestrian horizontal movement profile.
Meyer is using his sweeper more than ever, and its results are matched with improvements from his slider and four-seamer. He’s got guys off-balance, resulting in the best BABIP and HR/FB rate of his career, and the damage suppression he’s been missing has finally shown up in the box score. Even as he outperformed his ERA estimators by about a run, those peripherals were almost unanimously better than his last two seasons.
Reaping benefits with both batted balls and plate discipline bodes well for Meyer, who struck out 26.2% of batters in 2026 while dealing with an uptick in walks (a likely consequence given the increase in breakers and decreased zone rate). For the first time in his big-league career, Meyer’s BABIP falls below its expected counterpart (.263 to .268), but such a discrepancy shouldn’t sign him up for worse luck going forward. Rather, his arsenal supports weaker contact and lessens his reliance on batted-ball luck to push his WHIP in the right direction.
Moving Forward
Meyer’s next start might come in the final days of the season. A more conservative outlook will wait for a potentially delayed spring training. Whenever he dons the Marlins jersey next, I’m confident he’ll do so with the stuff that made him look like a playoff starter early in the season.
Hitters will naturally adjust to the increased sweeper usage, although that should only help his slider continue to play up. From a pitch-selection perspective, he’s the same guy against righties and lefties, save for flipped usage of sinkers and changeups, which also optimizes for platoon splits. Given his feel for spin, a sweeper always made sense, and after 2025’s trial run, Meyer’s increased velo made the pitch’s characteristics better while also making it a more deceptive threat off the slider.
Subsequently, Meyer’s assortment of secondaries feels complete. He can get strikes in and out of the zone with the slider while generating whiffs and weak contact with his sweeper. The changeup keeps lefties honest and supports his sinker. The last hurdle left, then, is clawing back some of the gains that injuries have taken off his fastball. I’m not sure how possible that is, but getting back to the 6.4 feet of extension he had in 2025 is probably a good start. If a healthy offseason helps him find that velocity and shave off arm-side run, we can start having even more optimistic discussions about Meyer’s future.
Injuries will likely always have a dampening effect on Meyer’s projection, but this profile has the goods, and the Miami faithful got a glimpse of those results this season. Expect Meyer to continue navigating his fastball issues well as he pitches through his physical prime.
Photos by Icon Sports Wire, Adobe Stock and MLB.com | Graphic by Carlos Leano
