This Pitch is Taking Over Baseball

In this video, we're going to talk about cutters, a pitch that's taking over baseball.

We'll explore everything from what it is, how it moves, how teams organizationally land on throwing the pitch so much, how Mariano Rivera's cutter moved, and why Kenley Jansen is a unicorn.

We'll even dig into some of the biases in current cutter teaching and consider the future of cutters... which the Yankees might already be locked on.

This is one of my favorite videos in a long time, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

Before Statcast, there was Pitch f/x, which measured pitch movement from 40 feet. It's my understanding that the Mariano Rivera cutter shape presented within this video is that old pitch f/x data extrapolated out to the current movement we read, which is at ~55 ft (60'6" minus the average extension in MLB). I actually have no idea what readings we'd get if we had Hawkeye back in 2013, but to my eye, this cutter shape of Rivera's seemed plausible enough for me to present it within this video.

Most of the stats presented within this video are as of July 31, 2025. The editing process sometimes takes me a few days. Apologies for any discrepancies relative to present-day results.

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Video and images: MLB, USA Today, Associated Press, MLB.tv

0:00 Are Cutters Boring?
0:29 The Nuts & Bolts of Cutters
1:18 Kenley Jansen is a Unicorn
1:58 Mariano Rivera's Cutter Metrics
2:25 The Curse of Chasing Good Cutters
3:24 It's Actually All About the Fastball...
5:00 The Brewers & Red Sox Get "It"
6:25 The Zero Line Bias
7:33 You Should Be Throwing ... Bad Cutters?
8:44 The Cutter Equation
9:22 Unexplored Cutter Trends
9:58 Max Fried's Seam-Shift Cutter
10:51 Main Takeaways