If you’re a pitcher, what’s the most difficult scenario in baseball from a handedness perspective? In 2024, the answer was right-handed pitcher against left-handed hitter – the batsmen registered a 106 wRC+ in such situations. This narrowly beat out LHP vs RHB (104 wRC+), while same-handed matchups were more of a mismatch for the offense (94 wRC+ for RHB vs RHP; 89 wRC+ for LHB vs LHP). To put that into an unintentionally-Royals-centric form of a multi-year context, lefty hitters were Vinnie Pasquantino against righty pitchers last season. Against southpaws, they were MJ Melendez. This is a key difference that, depending on a team’s aptitude to handle it, can be season-defining. The list of teams in baseball history whose right-handed pitchers perform better against righty batters than lefty batters is a long one, but let’s take last year’s New York Mets as one example.
Their surprising playoff run was cut short by the Dodgers in a 6-game NLCS. L.A.’s two best hitters by wRC+ that series, Max Muncy (266) and Shohei Ohtani (230), are both lefties. New York’s pitching staff was above average if not unspectacular over the course of the whole season, and greater than the sum of their parts in the playoffs, but their difficulties in containing their opponent’s most dangerous left-handed bats contributed to their demise. The Dodgers might be an extreme example as a rare force of both star power and depth, but you get the point: A hot pitching staff that runs into a good lineup that skews left-handed is at its most vulnerable. It was, after all, what held the Mets’ righty arms back the most last season; they had a bottom-10 ERA (4.58) and bottom-5 BB/9 (4.35) in the league against lefty hitters. An intuitive way to mask this deficiency would have been to acquire more left-handed pitchers, except they didn’t exactly need more, having gotten the 2nd-most innings out of any MLB team from lefty arms a season ago. They deemed most of those in that demographic of free agents (Max Fried, Blake Snell, Yusei Kikuchi, Matthew Boyd, Tanner Scott, Aroldis Chapman) not worth the price of admission, opting to simply re-sign Sean Manaea and bring in A.J. Minter. Only, Manaea got hurt in spring training and has since been transferred to the 60-day IL, without a timetable for return. Questions about how they would get by as a staff in general, let alone address their biggest weakness from 2024, were mounting coming into this season.
Just over a month in, and the Mets are off to a roaring start at 25-15. Their group of pitchers has ascended to one of the best in the game, as they sit at 3.3 runs against/game so far, behind only the Padres and Royals. Everyone in the starting rotation has an ERA of 3.10 or under, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, given the offseason they had, the righties are now among the elites in terms of their ability to neutralize lefty hitting. Their RHP vs LHB ERA is down to 3.14 (4th in MLB) with a FIP of 4.04, thanks to an improvement in controlling damage (HR/9 is down to 0.82 from 1.28). As it stands, the league-average wOBA in this matchup is .325, and New York has 4 RHPs that fall on the pitcher’s side of that line in terms of performance vs LHBs. They are: Tylor Megill, Max Kranick, Clay Holmes, and Griffin Canning. Would you have expected to see any of those names on such a leaderboard coming into the season? The Mets’ fanbase has certainly undergone long stretches of “going through it” in recent memory, so this may not be a high bar to reach, but I doubt even the most optimistic, rose-colored-glasses-wearing Metropolitans faithful saw this coming.
This is a big-market team that has already spent a ton of money on their payroll of late, but they chose to try to fix their staff’s most prominent issue by innovating and developing like a smaller-budget operation would, and diverting to shorter-term bargains with respect to baseball’s current pitching market. What’s more is that each of those 4 aforementioned pitchers was previously either below standard against lefty batters or, in the case of Kranick, not in the big leagues since 2022. New York’s legion of pitching coaches, researchers, and analysts had a unique, tailored approach to help them reverse platoon disadvantages, highlighting multiple areas in which they are on the cutting edge of modern pitching development in the process. I’ll break this revelation down case-by-case to illustrate how.
Why he used to struggle against LHBs: Megill wasn’t a total deer in the headlights against opposite-handed hitters before – he’s improved his LHB wOBA every year since he broke into the big leagues, and last year’s was a pedestrian .302 – but he has taken things to another level in 2025. Left-handers’ average against him has dropped from .230 to .155, and their slug from .358 to .211. His strikeout rate is actually down from ~29% to ~25%, but the damage limitation has been palpable. Megill had always been a 4-5 pitch guy before, and he introduced a cutter to his arsenal to use as his secondary weapon of choice against lefties. He still leaned heavily on his fastball so that this cutter usage in this matchup was only 16%, but it was his worst pitch by run value, wOBA, and Fangraphs Stuff+. It sat at 90 MPH with elite extension, but exhibited a fairly run-of-the-mill movement profile.
Why he’s gotten better: He simply dropped the cutter entirely in 2025, and slider usage against lefties has increased from 4% to 20%. Megill’s slider is a much more lethal option in this scenario because it has a ton of vertical drop relative to other sliders around the league (more on that specific part later). He’s continuing to use his fastball half the time against lefties, and it has become one of the very best fastball shapes in the game thanks to a combination of 95-96 MPH velocity, over 7 feet of extension, and ~18 inches of rise, the latter of which is up an inch and a half from last year. That was never the issue in this matchup; he just needed to fill in the cracks to avoid over-reliance on it. These changes have helped Megill along on a pace for the best season of his career, with a 3.10 ERA in 8 starts.
Why he has flipped the script on LHBs: It wouldn’t seem right to do a before-and-after comparison for Kranick, because this season has been his first taste of major league action since 2022. His .318 LHB wOBA makes him a decent bet to weather the storm of tough opposing lefties out of the bullpen. This is because when they face him, he pairs his fastball (43%) almost evenly with a peculiar-looking slider (36%) that averages 89 MPH with around 6 fewer inches of drop than average, so hitters are often fooled and swing over top of it. His tertiary pitch in this matchup (20%) is a curveball that has even better results in a smaller sample (1 for 8, 2 strikeouts). Fangraphs has it as his best pitch via Stuff+, thanks to its alarming 12.5 inches of glove-side cut – a number usually attributed to sweepers. As good as he is against lefties, though, he has been even better against righties (.198 wOBA) with a more strict fastball-slider approach. The shape of the slider has played slightly better against same-handed batters, but neither orientation has had an easy time against it, or Kranick in general, so far.
Why he used to struggle against LHBs: Holmes’ LHB wOBA in 2024 was .294, which isn’t below-average, but it’s not great for a closer. By the end of the season, he was too predictable for them, relying on his sinker 63% of the time and not throwing a different pitch more than 20% of the time. They hit .350 against that sinker, which had good physical characteristics, but that doesn’t mean as much when opponents can bank on it. He also wasn’t terribly sharp locating it against them either, with the highest concentration of sinkers thrown against lefties in 2024 sitting middle-away in the strike zone, a spot competitive enough for astute left-handers to take it the other way. His sweeper and slider both performed well in this scenario in a much smaller sample, with 0 extra base hits surrendered in 42 at-bats, but he needed to diversify his arsenal, especially given the fact that the Mets viewed him as a starter.
Why he’s gotten better: If you follow the Mets, Holmes, or baseball research in general, you know this story by now. Holmes has become one of the faces associated with the kick changeup, a new member of the off-speed family that features a modified, spiked changeup grip to generate more vertical drop on the pitch. Much was made about the introduction of this pitch to his arsenal over the offseason as a weapon to neutralize opposite-handed hitters, and it has gone quite well so far (.179 average, 39% K rate, +1 run value over 98 pitches). It sits at 88 MPH with 14.8 inches of horizontal movement, and tunnels well with the sinker, which has a similar movement profile but more velocity.
That isn’t even the only new pitch he has developed this year: He’s tinkering with a cutter, his tertiary weapon of choice against lefties, and while Fangraphs isn’t a fan of its shape (85 Stuff+; 100 is average), it’s working well so far as another pitch that lefties have to anticipate when facing him. These wholesale changes have come together such that his sinker usage vs left-handers has been cut by more than half (28%), and is now flanked by the kick change (25%), the cutter (17%), the sweeper (12%), and on occasion, the fastball and the slider (10% and 8% respectively). All told, his LHB wOBA has decreased to .277 as a starter, which says something given that he’s facing opposing lineups’ best lefties more than once per game. The Make-Clay-Holmes-A-Starter experiment was an ambitious one for the Mets to undertake, but they had a clear plan here, and it’s paying dividends early.
Why he used to struggle against LHBs: Canning successfully neutralized lefty hitters in 2023 to the tune of a .279 wOBA, but that figure ballooned to .357 last year. He was a fastball-changeup guy (37% and 32%) with a slider (19%) and knuckle curve (11%) as his tertiary and quaternary weapons, respectively. The fastball got crushed (.550 SLG), and they hit .284 against the slider. The changeup results were okay, but lefties went 8 for 18 against the curve with 3 extra base hits. Of those, his best pitch according to Fangraphs Stuff+ was the slider…at 101. Overall, at -19, he had one of the worst run values of any starter in the big leagues. There are ways to work around suboptimal pitch shapes, but good location isn’t as predictive. Canning is a former second-round pick who has always thrown 4 pitches in his big-league career, but tinkering was needed.
Why he’s gotten better: In terms of sheer season-to-season improvement, this is one of the bigger success stories in baseball right now. Canning didn’t make many changes to his pitch selection against lefties – fastball, changeup, and curve are slightly down while the slider is up by 8% – but he did take some steps to adjust the physical characteristics of a couple of his offerings. The changeup has 3 more inches of vertical drop than it did last year, despite maintaining an ~89-MPH velocity and 16 inches of arm-side run, which has raised its Stuff+ grade from below to above-average (91 to 102). He also added 3 inches of vertical drop to his slider, reminiscent of the Tylor Megill slider that stands out in that category.
This is part of a wider innovative trend that the Mets appear to be on the cutting edge of: A new slider variant, colloquially called the “Death Ball”, that features more downward vertical movement than a gyro slider but less horizontal movement than a sweeper. Lance Brozdowski, an analyst for Chicago’s Marquee Sports Network, made an informative YouTube video on this development a few weeks ago. The improvements to the change and the slider, as well as the slight tweaks to his arsenal, have taken Canning from extremely vulnerable to passable against lefties (.306 LHB wOBA so far in 2025) – not to mention, one of the better buy-low moves from this past winter across the whole sport.
Conclusion
Pitching strategy is an inherently continuous, never-ending game. Teams innovate, opposing hitters catch up, and the arms race for the next trend or source of competitive advantage rolls on. As far as platoon splits and handedness-based matchups go, the New York Mets are among the leaders of the pack right now. The righty-pitcher-lefty-batter standoff is unavoidable, and the Mets, already relying more on left-handed pitchers than most, needed a way to get ahead of them. However, their solution was not one-size-fits-all in nature – instead, during a time where elite pitching costs more than it ever has, they invested in undervalued arms that they knew their coaching staff could work with. Pitch design and research are now advanced enough for us to know that certain pitch types, movement patterns, and usage patterns can cut through handedness disadvantages in any given matchup, which is something that this team emphasized and exploited coming into 2025. The hypothetical discussion can be had about anyone, and they need to get healthier, but let’s say the Mets meet the Dodgers and their lefty mashers again for a rematch this postseason. Are they better equipped to handle them? Based on the meaningful changes we’ve seen so far, there’s no question about it.
All stats entering Sunday, May 11, 2025.
