Trying to hit fastballs in today’s baseball is harder than ever. The average four-seam velocity by right-handed starting pitchers has eclipsed 95 mph for the first time ever, and the average has jumped one mile-an-hour since just 2022. While velocity can be considered the main focal point of this pitch design era, movement is just as important. Hitters are still capable of hitting upper-end velocity, and it takes unique movement on fastballs to consistently miss bats.
The initial focus on fastball movement was vertical. Induced vertical break (iVB) is a measure of how much a fastball is moving vertically, excluding gravity’s effect on the ball. Pitches with high iVB can appear to “rise” and earn whiffs at the top of the strike zone. When a pitch moves well vertically, it’s a lot easier for it to miss bats compared to something horizontal, especially when it has to be around the strike zone. When the dominant movement of the pitch is vertical and not horizontal, it’s easier to miss the 2.61-inch barrel of the bat rather than the much longer barrel.
As more and more pitchers started emphasizing vertical movement, hitters got used to it — whiff rates on fastballs with 18 inches of iVB or more have decreased 2.5% since 2019. Vertical movement is still important, but the horizontal is getting more focus so far in 2026.
Since hitters are adjusting to vertical movement, pitchers are adjusting right back: they are changing the movement of their fastballs and emphasizing a multi-fastball approach to maintain the effectiveness of their arsenal. The cat-and-mouse relationship of hitters and pitchers has emerged with its early trend of 2026: the cut fastball is back in style.
What Does Cutting a Fastball Look Like?
Cut fastballs aren’t necessarily cutters: there are two versions of cut fastballs that we’ll talk about today. First is the four-seam fastball with cut movement, often a primary offering by a pitcher. Second is a harder, vertical cutter that plays off a four-seam fastball.
Most fastballs have armside movement, with around 8 inches being league average for four-seam fastballs. Some of the most extreme armside movement you’ll see from a starter is around 13 inches, with anything larger than that likely shifting into sinker territory. Cut fastballs, however, start around 4 inches and lower. Even though that movement is still armside, it appears to cut relative to the average fastball. Like a variety of aspects to fastball traits, it’s the appearance to the hitter that matters most, rather than just the raw numbers.
The cut fastball is generated through a pitcher not getting their hand fully behind the ball on release. When a pitcher is able to get their hand fully behind the ball, it generates more backspin that contributes to (vertical) break. This is called active spin. For example, Trey Yesavage’s 2025 fastball had 99.5% active spin on it, meaning that almost all of the spin on the ball is contributing to the movement. This pitch averaged 19 inches of iVB from an extremely high arm slot.
For cut fastballs, spin efficiency is lower as there’s more side spin that doesn’t generate additional movement, and that results in “cutting” rather than “rising” in its movement.
Now, why would cutting a fastball be a worthwhile endeavor for a pitcher? Often, the answer is that the fastball isn’t particularly effective otherwise. Especially when a fastball has average horizontal movement relative to the arm angle it’s coming from, a fastball can appear to be “deadzone,” meaning that it has exactly the movement that a hitter is expecting. Cutting a fastball isn’t necessarily about making the pitch better on its own, but unlocking everything else in an arsenal or creating soft contact.
It also helps mitigate opposite-handed hitters, where the movement can thrive on the inner-third of the plate. Especially if an arsenal struggles against opposite-handed hitters, a cut fastball (or true cutter) is a strong platoon neutral offering.
Over the last few years, pitchers have started to move away from throwing their bad fastballs or try to mask them by adding true cutters or sinkers. The thinking is simple, even if a fastball doesn’t grade out well: throw your hardest pitch with different types of movement and give the hitter less time to react to which way the ball is moving, even if it isn’t moving much. It’s not exactly going to create more whiffs, since that’s based on vertical movement, but it might miss just enough barrels to make it more useful.
Some big names with big stuff are making this change early in the year: Logan Gilbert and Bubba Chandler lead the league in cut added to their fastball. Both went from around 9 inches of arm-side break to 4.5 inches. Overall, more players have added at least two inches of cut to their fastball this year compared to adding at least two inches more run.
While the samples aren’t big enough yet, four of these five pitchers have seen a decrease in the Ideal Contact Rate against their fastball (the exception is Kikuchi, but he also is the only one here getting more spin efficiency). The changes in Stuff+ are a mixed bag, but that’s also due to other factors in the pitch characteristics. Regardless, the fastball was a problem for this group in previous years, and they’re trying to get the movement to mitigate the damage.
Using a Cut Fastball as Its Own Pitch
The other cut fastball is meant to be a separate pitch, making a good fastball that much better. When a pitcher is primarily fastball-focused, having a different pitch with slightly different movement can be a game-changer. While not a new concept, a bridge pitch is one that has a similar break in the middle of a fastball and a slider. But that has often become a cutter that’s more truly in the middle of the two, where it can act more like a breaking pitch in the mid-to-upper 80s than a fastball.
This is a key aspect of the new triforce of fastballs pitchers have: a four-seam fastball in the middle, a hard cutter breaking gloveside, and a sinker breaking armside. Three pitches close to peak velocity, moving in subtle ways to prevent a hitter from making hard contact.
Logan Gilbert, mentioned above, is throwing a cutter for the first time in two seasons. With 11.5 inches of iVB, it’s in the 94th percentile of cutter vertical movement and not far from the fastball. However, it has almost five inches of gloveside break, making it distinctly different from the fastball while maintaining fastball-type velocity at 90.9 mph.
When a hitter sees something with velocity out of the hand and some sort of cutting action, they are thinking that it might be the four-seam. Instead, they get sawed off with the cutter.
On the other side, if they see more spin and think it’s a slider, they’re getting overpowered by the velocity.
Gilbert is a great example of how it can work in both ways. Cam Schlittler shows how the cut fastball can make a promising young pitcher an ace.
Schlittler saw a significant increase in velocity throughout his meteoric rise last year, and saw most of his success in throwing his variety of fastballs (83% usage across fastball, cutter, and sinker). For hitters facing him, they’re getting ready for quick reaction times off those pitches consistently. His transformation from last year to this year resulted in a 3 mph bump in cutter velocity, bringing it to 94 mph behind his 97 mph four-seam and maintaining exceptional gloveside break on the pitch.
The result is a cutter that has a ridiculous level of two-plane movement, keeping decent vertical movement while cutting enough that it doesn’t look anything like the fastball.
A cut fastball was once a classic pitch, but now pitch design has led to pitchers finding it’s purpose again with new fastball philosophies. It can mask a bad fastball to help limit contact or add to an already overpowering arsenal. Pitchers have the ability to tweak much quicker than hitters, so we’ll have to monitor in the first few weeks how this trend plays out.
