After a year of hiatus, our Nastiest Pitches series is back for the 2024 season and we are ready to bring you the best pitches of the day all season long. We start with the two opening games out of Seoul, South Korea, where offense truly shined and pitching took a bit of a back seat.
Yuki Matsui’s Splitter
Welcome to The Show, Yuki! The rookie from Yokohama, Japan comes to the States with a career strikeouts-per-nine of 12, spending all but his first season as a reliever. He’s penciled in as the setup man for Robert Suarez to start the season, but if he keeps dealing this filth he’ll take over the closer role in no time.
Yu Darvish’s Sinker
Wanna feel old? Yu Darvish is 37 years old. Yeah, he’s now on the back end of his career but he’s still throwing something like 15 different pitches in a given game. Despite spiking about half of his pitches into the ground on Wednesday, this front door sinker was a true thing of beauty.
Evan Phillips‘ Sweeper
As the closer for the best team in baseball, Evan Phillips should rack up plenty of saves. He’ll also rack up plenty of strikeouts thanks to his nasty sweeper, which earned a PLV of 5.54 in 2023 which was well above average.
Tyler Glasnow’s Slider
Tyler Glasnow has returned and he absolutely dealt with the slider, earning a 44% CSW with the pitch en route to five solid innings on Wednesday. It wasn’t enough to earn a win (or a quality start for those of us counting), but the positives outweigh the negatives and he showed he’s back to being healthy on a major league mound. Honestly, asking for much more is just getting greedy.
Alex Vesia’s Slider
Alex Vesia enters his fourth full season in the majors in a middle relief role for the Dodgers, and the lefty sports a pretty nasty slider that he loves to spot down and in to right-handed batters. Jurickson Profar is just his latest victim.
Kyle Hurt’s Changeup
Who is Kyle Hurt? Great question. If you’re a bit out of the loop like I am, this guy may have snuck up on you during these two games in Korea. The former 5th-round draft pick by the Marlins sports an 80-grade changeup per Fangraphs, and that is apparent here in this nasty pitch that gets a ton of movement. He’ll start the season in the bullpen for the
Michael King’s Changeup
King was the focal point of the Juan Soto trade with the Yankees, and his changeup is one of my favorite pitches in baseball. This camera angle does not do justice to just how much horizontal movement the pitch gets. I’ll miss being able to watch him regularly on the East Coast, but San Diego sure is happy to have him.
Photo by Leslie Plaza Johnson/Icon Sportswire | Adapted by Justin Paradis (@justparadesigns on X/Twitter)