I went back a bit on the board watching the pitch movement of one player or another, and got to thinking about cutting and rotating teams. Often, broadsides and circles are joined right in the middle of those cards. The dromon represents the gap between the breaking ball and the top of the team joint, and, as the name suggests, the sliding wheel leaves the hand with a gyroscopic thread that stabilizes the ball’s flight. I began to wonder who throws the truest pitch in baseball, throwing the absolute smallest pitch. I will write about that later this week. It’s not an issue today, but once I went down that road, I found it branching.
I started to wonder who was hitting and sinking fastballs and sinkers. Which pitch zone reaches the edges most often? Which hitters are fools in the consequences, and what are the fools in catching the pitch? What pitch tricks do you call challenging? Whose voice would the bats miss the most and the last? Which voice should be dragged, or thrown out, or mostly thrown into the ground? We’re looking for extreme voices in baseball, so now that the 2026 season has passed, we won’t leave any track untrodden by the black leaves. We spend the week delivering some superlatives. There is only one part, and it should be focused on speed.
The rules of the exercise are simple. Each pitch can qualify as long as it is thrown at least 152 times in the regular season of 2026. If that round number sounds strangely un-sound to you, that’s because it is. A’s outfielder Carlos Cortes finished a whopping 2026 by pitching in nine different games, and was credited with throwing 151 home runs. This is a superlative choice, but that makes the sloppiest cutest in 2026. You know what? Get it, let’s make it official. Now that’s a bold one: Carlos Cortes’ was an ephesus The sloppiest pitch of 2026. To celebrate, he threw the highest pitch of all time. The match came in a lopsided 23-2 game against the Nationals.
It wasn’t the slowest pitch Cortes threw of all time, but it was certainly the greatest. I would like to draw your attention to two particularly funny things about this pitch. First look at where this ball ended up. Appropriately for the pitch, which was overlooked by the general board of the house, it crashed into the Circa Sports sign. They got there in three hops, and that was not the end of the journey. Crazy drove the ball back towards the middle of the field, as if Cortes was going to go home from either side, but the first thing he needed on this pitch was to take a huge swing. Amazingly, none of the leading men in the corps, pitcher, catcher, batter, or umpire, noticed that the ball had taken such a prodigious journey. Second, keep your eye in the middle of the screen, between the mound and home plate and a little to the right. After Cortes throws a pitch behind Jacob Young, you’ll see a white pop-up to indicate where Statcast thought the pitch crossed the plate when it — for lack of a better term — crossed the plate. If such a thing could be done, I would say that the robots would start sarcasm.
While we’re on the subject of ephesus, we should probably give it up The slowest single pitch Superlative to James McCann, whose feat occurred in the Diamondbacks-Brewers game on April 28. It was a 30.3-mph arc on the first pitch in the bottom of the eighth, and he let it go as the Brewers scattered, still showing the group’s promo tickets. When they finally got to the game, the ball was so deep that it was extinguished from the whole body.
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Second, everyone who was still watching this 13-2 smile at home must be wondering if the game got so out of hand that the teams huddled between innings and decided that pantomime was the most humane way to get things done.
Alright, let’s get into the real stuff. James Misiorowski’s fastball should start. Misiorowski didn’t win the award for Fastest Fastball, although at 100.6 mph, he deserves credit for throwing the fastest fastball for starters, not this season, but in world history. He does it to win Each pitch is very fast for this 105.5-mph Pete Crow-Armstrong heater on June 26, let’s try to give PCA a lot of credit for making contact with the third-fastest pitch of the Statcast era.
Misiorowski’s four-seamer is also a superlative win The most important syntax. He shot 1,677 times. No pitch has been thrown more in baseball, though second place to former teammate and World Series opponent, Freddy Peralta, who threw 1,568 four-seamers. Unfortunately, by law it means we can no longer refer to Peralta as Fastball Freddy. From then on, only Misiorowski would bear that moniker. These are the rules and they are iron. So we are open;
superlative for The most common fastball José Alvarado continues to be a left-hander for the Phillies, who has thrown either a triple or a sinker or a double 97.4% of the time. What Alvarado sent the other 2.6% of the time? That would be his curve, because when he threw it, they were not the only ones who threw it off balance. I included a random curveball trick from Alvarado’s Baseball Savant page, and here he earned a strikeout call on a pitch that didn’t all that close to reaching the top of the zone.
The really fun thing is that Stuff+ thinks Alvardo’s curveball is his best pitch, giving him a wild 152 degree. Because Baseball Savant didn’t like the running values of Alvardi’s pitch in 2026, and because the centimeter connectors at the top of each pitcher’s page combine all fastballs into one bar, it looks like Statcast also prefers that he almost never throws a pitch.
I think that’s enough of a preface for a big superlative. Our congratulations The fastest fastball the winner is Mason Miller. Miller’s four-seamer 100.4 mph We must also give an honorable mention to 2024 winner Ben Joyce at 101, and we must certainly mention Edgardo Henriquez, who finished in both third and fourth place with a 100.9-mph dip and a 100.7-mph dip. Here’s Miller’s fastest pitch of the year, a 104-mph ball to Hunter Goodman. I don’t know how Goodman could turn down this tempting offer.
I’m not sure if you’re surprised to learn this, but slowest pitch of the season was not a changeup. Chris Bassitt’s curveball earned that accolade with an average velocity of just 71.3 mph. In fact, Bassitt’s curveball has been either the slowest or second-slowest pitch in baseball in each of the past four years, and he finished in the top ten in 2022 and 2021. A true curve ball cannot slide (it cannot move so slowly that even a slight breeze can stop it immediately). Here is the slowest curve of his time, which was not remarkable in any other way;
We close the speed of our superlatives with the A changeable changeup. Pitch changes may not be the slowest in baseball, but their relative speed is still a big part of the story, so we’re looking for the biggest gap between a pitcher’s fastest peak and their pitch changes. Of course, there should be equality here. Both Dylan Cease and Hunter Gaddis had a 15.4-mph gap between their changeups and four pitches, but the band approaches the changeup more slowly. Gaddis was defeated on that front by a score of 79.7 to 81.4. so is our winner. (Just in case you’re curious, at 76.6 mph, Brent Suter’s slowest shift of the year belonged to him, but he doesn’t win. You hear me? He doesn’t win!) Excuse me, let’s get back on track. The slowest change of the times happened to Gaddis;
In a game against the Twins on July 23rd, Gaddis floated this pitch (which is a traditional delivery, even though it’s listed as a split in the stat) too far inside, but luckily for him, Lucas Keaschall caught the pitch right off the knot of his bat for a foul ball. In case you’re curious, the ball departed at an exit velocity of 50.3 mph. It is surprising that the most shocking group was not the slowest Keaschall group of Gaddis transformation in 2026. Pushes What Gaddis on May 9. different changeup to Keaschal that also he had thrown away the knot of his bat!
Gaddis’ change was not only changeable, but perhaps also the most game-changing. The concert will be touched upon in several settings later this week in two superlative sets.