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          Passan identifies the best new pitches of 2024 MLB season

          Logan Gilbert's cutter has helped take his game to another level. Which other pitchers have added to their arsenals this season? Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports

          Baseball in 2024 belongs to pitchers. It's not just the .699 leaguewide OPS or the average fastball velocity approaching 95 mph. It's the widespread desire for starters and relievers to stroll into a pitching lab and leverage modern technology to learn new pitches in a fraction of the time it used to take. A practice long reserved for only the nerdiest pitchers is now seen as a necessity.

          Quite often it's little more than a refresh or retooling of a past offering. Clarke Schmidt has a 2.59 ERA for the New York Yankees thanks to an improved cutter. Trevor Williams pulled away from his traditional slider, embraced his sweeper and has allowed one home run in 46 innings after yielding a major-league-high 34 in 144⅓ innings last year. There are countless more tweaks and tinkering that only serve to reinforce this pitching era.

          The apex of this pursuit comes when a pitcher adds a brand-new pitch. Perhaps it tunnels well with something he already throws, meaning it looks like it's traveling on the same trajectory before deviating. It could serve as an in-between pitch -- like a cutter often does a fastball and slider -- in terms of velocity, break or both. Maybe it better aligns with a pitcher's natural tendency to pronate or supinate, or how he moves most efficiently and effectively.

          With the season's two-month mark approaching, it's an ideal time to assess the success of the most prominent additions. There are phenomenal resources available in this space, from Lance Brozdowski's daily notes to Major League Baseball's official pitch-classification account, which meticulously tracks new pitches (as well as old ones that got a tuneup). Thanks, too, to ESPN Sports & Information Group's Evan Garcia for tracking new pitches.

          Here are the dozen most worthy of highlighting, starting with the pitch that has helped a former relief pitcher become the starter with the third-most strikeouts in MLB.

          The pitcher: Garrett Crochet, LHP, Chicago White Sox

          The pitch: Cutter

          The goods: Crochet's evolution in the past two years -- from Tommy John surgery in 2022 to the bullpen in 2023 to the rotation in 2024 -- begged for a new pitch. He settled on a tweener to complement his 97 mph fastball and 84 mph slider, and the 92 mph cutter has exceeded all expectations. His command of it is exceptional. He's throwing it more in recent starts and still generating swings and misses more than 40% of the time. And with 19 of Crochet's 74 strikeouts in 57⅔ innings coming via the cutter, its introduction can't be seen as anything other than a rousing success.

          The pitcher: Logan Gilbert, RHP, Seattle Mariners

          The pitch: Cutter

          The goods: Some pitchers are gifted in their ability to try a new pitch and manifest it to click. For the second consecutive year, Gilbert, one of the Mariners' aces, mastered a fresh offering almost instantaneously. Last year it was the split-fingered fastball replacing a traditional changeup. This year it's the cutter, which is not replacing anything but rather allowing the 27-year-old to just show off, as if a 96 mph fastball, 88 mph slider, 84 mph splitter and 83 mph curveball aren't enough. According to FanGraphs' Stuff+, a metric that attempts to measure the quality of a pitch based on its velocity and movement characteristics, Gilbert already throws the nastiest cutter of any starter in baseball, ahead of Corbin Burnes, Marcus Stroman, Kutter Crawford and all others. Gilbert's feel is exceptional. It's also not unique on the Mariners' staff.

          The pitcher: Bryce Miller, RHP, Seattle Mariners

          The pitch: Splitter

          The goods: A splitter works best when paired with a dominant fastball, and Miller established as a rookie last year that his fastball is elite. This addition was most important, though, to give Miller a third pitch to solidify his status as a starter. Two-pitch starters do exist, but only a handful have the stuff to pull it off. So to see Miller not only use the split to destroy left-handed hitters but do so with the best Location+ metric of any splitter in baseball makes the experiment well worth the effort.

          The pitcher: Zack Wheeler, RHP, Philadelphia Phillies

          The pitch: Splitter

          The goods: Considering the proliferation of pitching injuries this spring, there's a solid argument to be made that the 33-year-old Wheeler is the best healthy starting pitcher in the major leagues. That didn't stop him from finally committing to throwing a splitter after toying with one for years. It's around 86 mph, softer than the one with which he'd previously experimented. Wheeler relied on it more in his early starts this season before tamping down slightly, only to unleash a dozen splits last Friday and seven more in his win Thursday that was the Phillies' 29th win in 35 games. The best getting better. Just what the rest of the National League needs.

          The pitcher: Spencer Turnbull, RHP, Philadelphia Phillies

          The pitch: Sweeper

          The goods: Unlike Wheeler, Turnbull needed something new. He missed most of 2021 and all of 2022 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, and after a poor start to 2023, Detroit demoted him, leading to a monthslong fight with the organization. When he reached free agency, Philadelphia saw opportunity and signed him for $2 million, and he learned the pitch of 2023: a sweeper. Though Turnbull has only recently begun to coax elite movement out of it, his sweeper has been wildly effective -- and had been reliable for Phillies over six starts. Now that he's in the bullpen, Turnbull is leaning on the sweeper even more -- 26 of 54 pitches in a recent relief outing -- in hopes the 127 Stuff+ (27% better than average) continues to play.

          The pitcher: John Schreiber, RHP, Kansas City Royals

          The pitch: Cutter

          The goods: Following a 2023 in which opponents' OPS jumped 170 points, Schreiber sought a middle-ground pitch between his fastball and sweeper. He found an 89 mph cutter that, because of its bullet spin, darts downward, not horizontally like a classic Mariano Rivera-style cutter. It has worked wonders. Schreiber is back to holding opponents to a sub-.600 OPS, and he sports a 1.25 ERA for a Royals bullpen that needed stability. The result: Kansas City, now 32-19, is off to its best start since winning the World Series in 2015.

          The pitcher: Seth Lugo, RHP, Kansas City Royals

          The pitch: Cutter

          The goods: Even more of the Royals' success is due to Lugo blossoming into an ace at 34 years old. Unlike Crochet and Gilbert's cutters, Lugo barely uses his -- about 3.3% of the time. But, as Brozdowski pointed out, Lugo's jump in strikeouts beginning with his sixth start of the year coincided with using his cutter against right-handed hitters after throwing it only against lefties earlier in the season. The mere knowledge of a pitch's existence can drastically change the calculus of a hitter, and Lugo is now playing in rare territory with his arsenal. He throws three fastballs (four-seamer, sinker, cutter), three sliders (traditional, sweeper, slurve), a curveball (the best in the big leagues) and a changeup. Now, after spending most of his career as a reliever, Lugo leads the American League in innings per start and would be right there with Detroit's Tarik Skubal in first-two-months AL Cy Young voting.

          The pitcher: Jordan Hicks, RHP, San Francisco Giants

          The pitch: Dialed-back fastball

          The goods: Hicks, the first of two starters-turned-relievers we'll cover here, and Reynaldo Lopez were both fireballing one-inning options who had failed to lock down rotation spots early in their careers. Free agency offered both new opportunities, and they've run with them. Hicks' average sinker velocity is down from 100.1 mph to 95.1 -- and his walk rate has been sliced from 4.9 over his six-year career to 2.9. His ERA is 2.38 after his latest gem, during which he was sick and his heater didn't even exceed 92 mph.

          The pitcher: Reynaldo Lopez, RHP, Atlanta Braves

          The pitch: Dialed-back fastball

          The goods: Lopez had been a more effective starter than Hicks but had settled into the bullpen nicely, throwing 98.2 mph last year. He's down to 95.2 this year -- and his 1.54 ERA is third in all of MLB among qualified pitchers. Lopez has allowed just two home runs, and both came on changeups, with batters hitting .247 and slugging just .321 against Lopez's fastball compared to the leaguewide numbers of .255 and .412.

          The pitcher: Dean Kremer, RHP, Baltimore Orioles

          The pitch: Splitter

          The goods: This is a complete TBD, but it also illustrates why adding a pitch isn't always about the pitch itself. Stuff+ does not like it -- perhaps because among the 65 pitchers who have thrown at least 25 splitters this season, Kremer's ranks 58th in velocity (83.5 mph) and 63rd in spin (777 rpm). That lack of spin, though, might not be a bad thing. In addition to its solid downward movement, Kremer's splitter tails from lefties, against whom he has thrown nearly three-quarters of the pitch. And so while Stuff+ and Pitching+ both are dubious, batters are hitting .143 in 21 at-bats that end on the split. It generates swings and misses. It plays with his other pitches. It has been effective. No harm in using it until all those elements are no longer.

          The pitcher: Erick Fedde, RHP, Chicago White Sox

          The pitch: Split-change

          The goods: This isn't exactly a new pitch. It's just new to MLB. When Fedde left the majors following the 2022 season, he was a bust -- a first-round pick who, over six seasons with Washington, posted a 5.41 ERA and was annually one of the worst starters in baseball. During a one-year sojourn playing in Korea, Fedde learned a sweeper and splitter, won KBO MVP and returned on a two-year, $14 million deal with the White Sox. He's 4-1 with a 3.10 ERA, and the split -- which is held with his index and ring fingers hugging the outer edge of the ball and his middle finger the last digit to touch it -- is holding hitters to a .205 average and .295 slugging percentage. Only in his last start did Fedde allow his first homer on the split-change, but it's not like he hung it. Daulton Varsho had to reach below the zone to golf it out. Even good pitches -- and Fedde's is very good -- aren't infallible.

          The pitcher: Yoshinobu Yamamoto, RHP, Los Angeles Dodgers

          The pitch: Two-seam fastball

          The goods: When a pitcher signs the largest contract ever for his position in a league in which he has never pitched, this is the potential consequence. Yamamoto has been very good, even great at times, but a $325 million pitcher should not have a four-seam fastball that's getting tuned up to a .453 slugging percentage and 50% hard-hit rate. So he is tinkering, trying something new, listening to suggestions from the Dodgers -- going about it slowly. First, on May 7, eight two-seamers sprinkled in -- a called strike, a foul, a foul tip and five balls. Six days later, it was six -- five for strikes, including the last one, a weak sixth-inning popup. In his most recent start, the two-seamer was a weapon: three groundouts among the 11 he threw, all running in on right-handed hitters. Maybe Yamamoto is finding a new fastball, one that works here. Maybe he isn't. Either way, it's fascinating to see unfold.