'Good Luck': Blue Jays Weigh In On Baseball's Splitter Frenzy

Splitters are becoming more common in baseball. Here's how the Blue Jays are adapting.

TORONTO — Kevin Gausman still gets surprised when young pitchers ask to learn his splitter.

The mechanics of the pitch are tricky. Gripped with fingers spread wide and thrown with the velocity of a fastball, the splitter is the ultimate disguise pitch, cloaking itself as a heater until tumbling like a knuckleball at the very last moment. 

When perfected, it’s nearly impossible for hitters to square up. If its powers are harnessed properly, the splitter can elevate pitchers to new heights. Not everyone can throw it, yet the obsession remains.

"It’s weird," Gausman said, "because that's such a hard pitch to learn."

This season, baseball has seen a higher percentage of splitters than ever before. The split has made up 2.1% of all pitches in 2023, which doesn’t seem like much, but that represents a 50% increase from 2008 when Baseball Savant began tracking pitch percentage data.

The splitter is also more effective this year than ever before. Hitters are batting just .176 against the pitch (the lowest since data tracking began) and striking out 35.8% of the time (the highest since data tracking began). Launch angles have plummeted this season, too, with hitters averaging just 0.8 degrees, meaning most splitters are getting pounded into the ground.

Data from Baseball Savant

"It's a pitch you can throw to righties and lefties," Gausman said. "Every other offspeed pitch other than a changeup, I think sometimes you can't throw it to certain-handed batters, or [pitchers] just don't want to. And I think that's why the split is so good."

That utility is part of what prompted Erik Swanson to pick up the splitter several offseasons ago after watching videos of Gausman. Now, the Blue Jays reliever is gradually becoming more comfortable throwing the pitch to lefties and righties, and the whiff rates have followed.

Anthony Bass has also tinkered with his splitter for a while. The righty’s one season in Japan, where the split is more common, in 2017 opened his eyes to how effective the pitch can be. Since then, Bass has really leaned into it as a complement to his wipeout slider.

But this year’s splitter frenzy extends beyond guys looking for an auxiliary pitch to use on occasion. Like Gausman, other pitchers, especially late-inning power arms, have incorporated the split as an irreplaceable component of their deadly arsenal. Nowadays, Félix Bautista with the Orioles, Jhoan Durán from the Twins, and Royals closer Aroldis Chapman all terrorize opposing hitters with diving splitters.

Blue Jays manager John Schneider attributed the splitter phenomenon to a constant thirst for evolution in pitching philosophy.

"We're starting to see sinkers and fastballs down in the zone kind of come back," Schneider said. "Much like how high heaters and 12-6 curveballs were a thing—they still are—but I think the split is just a pitch that has had a lot of success because it looks just like a fastball. And guys are learning how to harness it a little bit."

As the splitter has grown in popularity, hitters have adapted to combat it, which hasn't been an easy adjustment.

"It’s an offspeed league now, in my opinion," said Blue Jays center fielder Kevin Kiermaier.

Kiermaier explained that during his rookie season in 2014, he rarely saw anything other than fastballs in 3-0 and 3-1 counts. Now, offspeeds pop up in any count, forcing hitters to revise their approach.

Basically, as multiple Blue Jays coaches explained, hitters will isolate the lower quadrant of the zone and force themselves to let everything go, regardless of the pitch type. That way, each hitter protects himself from chasing a low splitter disguised as a fastball. This change in approach offers some explanation for why, on occasion, Gausman gets clubbed for lots of hits.

"I saw Houston make a change on Gausman," Bass said, referencing his teammate’s eight-run outing versus the Astros on April 17. "It seemed like if they saw something low in the zone, they let it go. They weren't chasing his split like other teams have, and that really helped them get to Kevin."

The challenge of hitting a splitter isn’t completely dependent on pitch selection. Each splitter is unique to the pitcher that tosses it. Gausman, for example, grips his split like a circle changeup, letting it tumble off his fingers with upwards of 1500 revolutions per minute. Bautista in Baltimore buries the ball in his hands like a true forkball, which generates just 990 revolutions per minute and a knuckleball-esque tumbling action.

And that’s where training to hit a splitter becomes nearly impossible. Pitching machines can simulate the velocity and drop of a traditional splitter, but they can’t emulate the random movements the pitch occasionally produces. As Gausman put it, sometimes his split will spontaneously cut or run more than usual, and there’s no way for a hitter to anticipate that.

There are no signs the wave is crashing anytime soon either. Swanson said he expects the number of splitters in baseball to increase over the next two or three years. This winter alone, three pitchers reached out to the Blue Jays reliever about his new-found specialty pitch.

"Definitely a weird feeling, but kind of cool as well," he said of other pitchers asking for advice. "But I think I'll probably get that question a few more times here throughout the next couple of years as guys try to figure out how to throw that pitch."

If more and more pitchers hop on board, that’s very bad news for hitters.

"I always tell young guys, ‘Good luck trying to hit this for the rest of your career," Kiermaier said. "It's gonna keep evolving, and guys are gonna get better, which is scary to think about."