They don’t make pitchers like they used to. We knew that, but the typical thoughts about the modern pitcher revolve around using pitch design and velocity to rack up strikeouts recklessly. The proliferation of pitching knowledge reaches all sorts of pitchers, but we see new-age command pitchers appearing in ways we can’t comprehend. That starts with George Kirby, who has historically low walk rates and is capable of hitting 99 mph, which breaks just about every logical understanding of pitchers.
Twins rookie Zebby Matthews is enticing in his own way. The 24-year-old struggled in his taste of the big leagues last year but brings an exciting combination of strikeouts and elite command.
Before posting a 6.2% walk rate in his 37 MLB innings at the end of 2024, Matthews’ highest walk rate at any level was just 3.6%. By a decent margin, his 1.9% walk rate in the minors last year was the lowest of any pitcher (min. 70 innings). His minuscule walk rate was paired with a 30% strikeout rate, giving Matthews a gaudy 28.6% strikeout-minus-walk rate across three levels. While 2024’s minor league stats were worthy of hype when he got the call in August, the results looked like a completely overmatched pitcher.
Matthews had an uncharacteristic 6.69 ERA and 1.65 WHIP in the majors last year, which almost certainly bumped him out of the opening day rotation for this year. However, he’s teased exciting improvements in the spring so far, and having major league experience under his belt might be beneficial in the long run.
The Arsenal
Matthews has five pitches: a fastball, cutter, slider, curveball, and changeup. He deploys all five to left-handed batters and just three to right-handed batters. The use of all five pitches to left-handed batters
His fastball sits in the mid-90s with a slightly above-average ride and run for his arm angle, and he locates it armside to all hitters. The pitch got hit pretty hard last year, but it had a 70% fly-ball rate and a 25.0% home-run-to-fly-ball ratio, which will regress to typical rates. On the discipline side, his fastball yielded a 26.1% CSW, an underwhelming figure that shows that hitters were on top of it.
His next most used pitch, the slider, is Matthews’ bread and butter. It is a gyro slider at 87.2 mph, which he primarily utilizes in two-strike counts and is his whiff pitch. Its 23.5% putaway rate is the best in his arsenal and in the 80th percentile among sliders.
With its verticality, Matthews can throw the slider to all hitters and get whiffs. It has an absurd 25.0% swinging-strike against righties and a solid 16.0% against lefties. Matthews throws the slider in the zone only 29.3% to right-handed hitters, while it’s nearly 50% against left-handed hitters.
Hitters are not fooled when they get the slider in the zone. It has a horrendous Ideal Contact Rate, but it’s a promising pitch nonetheless.
Matthews throws a bridge cutter between the fastball and slider, which effectively limits righties but hasn’t neutralized lefties yet. The cutter has a 56.5% Str-ICR, which is precisely what to look for in a pitch that suppresses contact. Though it hasn’t performed well against lefties overall, it has worked when located up-and-in; this tunnels well with his fastball away.
As for his two other offerings to lefties, the changeup is clearly a work in progress. The pitch has a 20.0% zone rate and a 29.1% hiLoc%, proving that the command of the pitch was not there. It was so far out of the zone that hitters never swung at the pitch as they didn’t see it as competitive. The curveball had a similar problem but graded out more favorably in stuff models. Matthews kept the curveball in the zone too frequently and saw similar high-and-away misses rather than burying the curveball in the dirt. This resulted in significant hard contact and massively underwhelmed in whiffs.
What Went Wrong
Matthews was one of the quickest risers in baseball last year, ascending from High-A to the bigs. This is a steep adjustment in the quality of opposing hitters, and Matthews faced more and more hitters that he couldn’t simply overpower.
One of the few publicly available advanced stats across all minor leagues is strike percentage, which is very useful in analyzing a command-focused pitcher.
The 70% threshold is the upper limit for MLB arms, with only one starter eclipsing a 70% strike rate last year (Bryan Woo). Matthews could throw his pitches in the zone more frequently in the minors, and it was MLB-caliber stuff that the minor league opposition wasn’t touching. His ability to dominate in the zone inflated his strikeout totals and likely deflated his walk rate too.
By the time he got to the majors, Matthews had to nitpick more in location and pitch selection. Matthews wasn’t ready to maintain his command while the stuff lagged what he wanted to do. There were some blowup games (9 earned runs vs. TOR, 6 earned runs vs. BAL) when Matthews located his fastball poorly, and he didn’t have confidence in his secondaries to get whiffs or suppress contact like he had throughout the minors.
The surface-level stats look horrid, but that’s also what happens when there’s a nine earned run game in a 37-inning sample. He can probably ask teammate Bailey Ober how having a similar one-game stain on his ERA felt.
What’s Exciting About 2025
Matthews comes into 2025 with the bad major league experience already encountered, giving him an offseason to formulate new plans on attacking hitters since he’s already seen the worst of the worst.
He got trounced by homers last year: Matthews ended the season with a 2.63 HR/9 (1st percentile). That likely will not stick, as he didn’t have a home run problem in the minors. Despite the struggles, Matthews also exhibited a handful of good starts, proving he can succeed. He gave up two earned runs or less in six of his nine starts, though he failed to get through the fifth inning in three of them.
His start against the Cardinals exhibited what we want to see: 5 innings, 4 hits, 1 run, 0 walks, and 7 strikeouts.
He executed on fastballs up-and-armside, cutters up-and-gloveside, and sliders down-and-gloveside. He didn’t turn to the curveball and changeup enough, but this was arguably his best start of the year.
Despite the poor run prevention, Matthews posted a 24.3% strikeout rate and 6.2% walk rate, both better than league average. If Matthews can avoid the true heart of the zone, I believe he can suppress hard contact and emerge as an exciting young pitcher. Even most projection systems believe in his walk rate regressing to a 5% range, but he can go even further.
Matthews has dazzled in his spring starts this year. His velocity is up, and his pitch shapes have changed slightly, so we’re potentially getting an early glimpse of a version of Matthews that is adjusting to big league hitters.
While we must take velocity gains with a grain of salt (though exciting), the shape changes can be significant. His entire arsenal has shifted more towards his armside, with his main three pitches (FB, FC, and SL) all seeing 3.6+” of armside movement gains. His fastball now has significantly more run than average for his arm slot, coming in with much better HAVAA (it was 0.9° in 2024). The cutter now has less horizontal depth, while the slider becomes a true gyro slider, which can help deal with lefties. The changeup is also closer to the fastball in horizontal movement, which can help deception between the two pitches.
He won’t immediately have a starting gig: Chris Paddack and Simeon Woods-Richardson are ahead of him at the back of the Twins rotation. He does provide more upside than either of those arms, and all it takes is one injury or a poor April for Matthews to be back on the proving ground for a team fighting in the AL Central. If Matthews starts to show his true self at the big league level, a classic command pitcher is ready to take the league by storm.