Paul Skenes, Jackson Jobe and three other notable pitchers who experimented with new offerings this spring

One of the beautiful aspects of a new baseball season is the concept of reinvention. Everyone starts with a fresh slate come Opening Day, and any and every course seems traversible over the coming six months if things break just right.  The reinvention notion extends to an individual level, with some pitchers taking the whole idea literally by adding to or otherwise tweaking their arsenals. 

In that spirit, below you’ll find five notable pitchers who are working on at least one new offering ahead of Opening Day. 

It ought to go without writing that we’re not attempting to chronicle every single new pitch being experimented with across the league — even among pitchers who can be classified as “notable.” Rather, these pitchers were included for various reasons: either they’re super interesting overall, their new pitch appears promising, or we just wanted to write about them. (What’s the good of having the creative license if you aren’t willing to employ it at a whim?) In other words, do not be disturbed or annoyed if we didn’t include someone from your team.

Now, let’s get to it.

The pitches: Cutter, two-seamer

Skenes has enviable size and strength, but don’t overlook the importance of his curiosity for the craft. This is someone who clearly loves to tinker with the baseball during his free time, hoping to unlock a new weapon for his arsenal. 

Need evidence? Last year, when he was already the sport’s No. 1 draft pick and top pitching prospect, he fashioned a sinker (sometimes referred to as a splitter or a “splinker”) ahead of what proved to be a historic rookie season. That pitch ended up being one of his top offerings, generating a .184 average-against and a 29.3% whiff rate. 

Now, Skenes is trying his hand at forging two more pitches: a cutter (with gyro movement) and a running two-seamer. It’s to be seen how much he actually implements either offering once the games begin to count — remember, this is someone who already possessed four pitches with a usage rate of or above 10% — but he’s expressed confidence in making them work. “You’ve just got to mix it in,” Skenes said early in spring. “I learned some stuff about it. It’s going to be good, I think.” 

The pitch: Changeup

Ray, entering his 12th big-league season, has done well for himself over the years. He’s a former All-Star and Cy Young Award winner with a career 108 ERA+ who should wrap up his career with nearly $150 million in total earnings. Despite all that, Ray has never really had much of a changeup to his credit — to the extent that he’s thrown 21 total since the start of the 2022 season. He’s instead always gotten by relying heavily on his outstanding fastball-slider combination.

It’s notable, then, that Ray is experimenting with a cambio this spring that uses a grip he borrowed from reigning AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. While he hasn’t yet thrown the changeup at a park with ball-tracking data, he seems to have the right perspective on what he needs from the offering.

“It’s just another look and something that has some arm-side movement, something I don’t normally do,” Ray told NBC Sports Bay Area. “Everything (I threw before) is kind of hard-in to righties. You’ve seen it so far this spring, it’s been really effective getting righties off my fastball-in. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a swing-and-miss pitch, it’s just something that gets them off of my swing-and-miss pitches. I definitely think it’s going to be a big pitch for me.”

The pitches: Curveball, sinker

Jobe is the top pitching prospect in the game, but he’s not resting on his laurels. His big-league stint last season saw him throw four pitches: a four-seamer, cutter, changeup, and sweeper. He’s since overhauled his arsenal, adding a sinker and replacing the sweeper with a curveball that features more depth —  a worthwhile move in our eyes given that his arsenal was, by his own admission, otherwise short on verticality and more dependent on east-west movement. 

“The idea behind the curveball is just to have a bit more of a north-south approach and work off the four-seam [fastball] that I’m throwing 40-plus percent of the time,” Jobe told MLB.com. “It just gives me a better option.”

Jobe’s curveball has averaged more than 2,900 rpm this spring. While spin rate isn’t necessarily the end-all, be-all for any pitch, that figure would’ve ranked him in the top 10 in the majors last season (min. 200 thrown). Four of the nine pitchers ahead of him saw opponents hit below .200 on those curves. Jobe’s sweeper, for comparison, surrendered a .286 average between MLB and Triple-A.

The pitch: Changeup, two-seamer

Leiter’s career hasn’t gone according to script since being drafted No. 2 overall back in 2021, but count him among the hurlers attempting to gain weapons. In his case, he’s experimenting with a pair of new pitches: a changeup and a two-seamer. It’s worth being familiar with Leiter’s new weapons if only because the particular kind of changeup he’s trying to harness, the so-called kick change, is part of a growing trend around the league that he first learned about from journeyman reliever Matt Festa.

“It’s kind of like all the craze in pitching,” Leiter explained to MLB.com. “I think the guys at Vanderbilt are throwing it. Clay Holmes did an interview talking about how he’s throwing it. I think [Andrés] Muñoz from Seattle, I saw him throwing it. It’s literally just however you normally throw your changeup, but you kind of just spike this middle finger a little bit to make these even lengths. It kind of just sets the ball on a better axis. So I just throw. I just grip it and throw it like a fastball and it moves like so.”

Leiter’s new changeup is generating more swings and misses than his old cambio did, albeit in a small sample. The new changeup features a few more ticks of velocity as well as five more inches of drop.

The pitch: Sweeper

Luzardo finds himself on a new team for the first time since 2021, and he’s taking the opportunity to potentially introduce a new pitch to his repertoire. Mind you, he already threw one kind of slider — a so-called bullet slider that featured close to zero horizontal or vertical break on average. 

His new sweeper features … well, more “sweep” to it, making it the only pitch in his arsenal that seems likely to have glove-side movement on average. The rest of his arsenal is heavy on pronation, a fancy way of saying that everything moves toward his arm side. He’s only thrown a few sweepers to date, meaning that there’s a lot to be learned about his confidence in the pitch and the effectiveness of it. That isn’t preventing Luzardo’s catcher from daydreaming about what it could do for him.

“It’s something he can mix in to righties, maybe for a backdoor strike,” J.T. Realmuto told MLB.com. “I think it can be a real weapon against lefties because it’s a little bigger, maybe a little more swing-and-miss to those guys with two strikes. It’s a really solid pitch.”