Starting Pitcher News: Jesus Luzardo’s sweeper, Brady Singer’s new pitch mix

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for us to visit the bump on Hump Day and discuss starting pitcher news. Each week in this article, I’ll be taking a deeper look at a few trending/surging starting pitchers to see what, if anything, is changing and whether or not we should be investing in this hot stretch.

The article will be similar to the series I ran for a few years called Mixing It Up (previously Pitchers With New Pitches and Should We Care?), where I broke down new pitches to see if there were truly meaningful additions that changed a pitcher’s outlook. Only now, I won’t just look at new pitches, I can also cover velocity bumps, new usage patterns, or new roles. However, the premise will remain the same: trying to see if the recent results we’re seeing are connected to any meaningful changes that make them worth buying into or if they’re just mirages.

Each week, I’ll try and cover at least four starters and give my clear take on whether I would add them, trade for them, or invest fully in their success. Hopefully you’ll find it useful, so let’s get started.

All the charts you see below are courtesy of Kyle Bland over at Pitcher List. He created a great spring training app (which he’s now carried over into the regular season) that tracks changes in velocity, usage, and pitch movement. It also has a great strike zone plot feature, which allows you to see how the whole arsenal plays together.

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Jesús Luzardo – Philadelphia Phillies (New Sweeper)

Coming into spring training, I wasn’t sure where to rank Jesus Luzardo. He struggled last year even before getting hurt, and had seemed to settle into being a 3.50 ERA type of pitcher with good strikeout upside, but would be moving to a much worse home ballpark. I thought we might still be dreaming about the version of Luzardo as an elite pitching prospect with the A’s, while he was more likely just a solid but not great MLB starter. Then, I saw his spring ADP remain depressed despite increased velocity, and I started to grab a few shares as an upside SP4-5 in some leagues. For now, I’m certainly glad I did.

In his 2025 debut, Luzardo allowed two runs on five hits in five innings but struck out 11 batters, and a big part of that is his new sweeper.

As you can see from Kyle Bland’s chart above, the sweeper averaged almost 87 mph in the first start with 2” of drop and 5.5” glove-side sweep. Even though Statcast has classified this as a sweeper, 87 mph is harder than the average sweeper, and 5.5 inches of break is also much tighter than a typical sweeper. However, it might work for Luzardo because it has essentially the same velocity as his traditional slider, which he is now throwing at 86.8 mph with slightly less movement. This now gives him sliders that he can throw to batters of each handedness, since he only used the sweeper to righties 5.2% of the time in this first game. It could also create some added deception since a hitter will see slider out of the hand and not be entirely sure which one it is. That being said, if he sticks to using the sweeper to lefties and the traditional slider to righties, then hitters may begin to get a read on it after a few more starts, so that potential deception is not a guarantee.

What is guaranteed is that Luzardo, with added velocity on his fastball, will be a good thing. In his first start, he averaged 96.9mph on the fastball, which is a significant bump from 2024 but in line with what we’ve seen from Luzardo when he was pitching well in 2022 and 2023. Given that Luzardo has below-average extension and doesn’t get great vertical movement (or rise) on his fastball, the added velocity is pretty crucial. It remains to be seen if the velocity and the deception from the new pitch mix carry over into subsequent starts, but these are both changes we can get behind, and I think Luzardo will continue to miss plenty of bats as long as they hang around. However, if you start to see the fastball velocity start to taper off, it may not be a bad idea to see what you could get for Luzardo in a trade.

Carlos Rodón – New York Yankees (New Sinker)

This off-season, I gave a presentation at First Pitch Arizona on the value of new pitches and then gave it again for PitchCon, which you can watch in full here. In that presentation, I mentioned that I believed a huge part of Carlos Rodón’s success in 2025 would depend on whether he continued to throw the changeup that he brought back into his arsenal last summer.

When Rodón was struggling to get swinging strikes with his four-seam fastball, he had to adapt and started to attack right-handed hitters with a changeup. The pitch ate up righties with a 26% Ideal Contact Rate (ICR), 26% swinging strike rate (SwStr%), and 32% CSW. From July 1st on, he used the changeup 20% of the time to righties and had a 3.34 ERA, 1.18 WHIP, and 31% strikeout rate in 15 starts. In his first start in 2025, Rodón threw the changeup 20% of the time, posting a 16.7% SwStr%. Now, his command of the pitch was not great in that first outing, with just an 11% zone rate, which led to a 22% CSW on the changeup, but I love that he’s still using the pitch often.

I also love that he added a new weapon to complement it with a new one-seam sinker. Ryan Garcia wrote about the pitch in the spring, and did a great job describing how one-seam sinkers function differently than a regular sinker because they rely less on heavy pronation of the wrist and more on seam-shifted wake (SSW) to generate movement: “SSW is the concept of using the orientation of a baseball’s seams to create movement by disrupting airflow in its flight path rather than through spin.” Since Rodón has an over-the-top delivery, pronating his wrist to throw a sinker with lots of vertical drop would be hard, but the one-seam sinker lets the seams of the ball create the movement for him.

We saw that on full display in his first start with a 93 mph sinker that had 3” of drop and 11” of arm-side movement. Given how high Rodón releases the ball, that’s a ton of drop. He threw four of them to righties and seven to lefties in the first start and had an above-average zone rate. It’s that location of the pitch with its movement profile that intrigues me.

If you look at this chart from Pitcher List, you can see that the green dots (changeup) and orange dots (sinker) have similar releases and movement profiles. The changeup is also seven mph slower. I love when pitchers can add that kind of natural deception to their arsenal in addition to the fact that the sinker is a truly unique pitch and just another weapon to keep hitters off of Rodón’s four-seam fastball. I’d be fully buying in here if you can get the left-hander for an affordable price in your fantasy leagues.

Jose Soriano – Los Angeles Angels (Sinker command and shape)

This is going to be a bit of a shorter one because we only have one major point to talk about, but when I wrote about Jose Soriano as a late-round draft target of mine in the off-season, I said that the determining factor would be his command. He didn’t get ahead in the count with either his sinker or four-seamer last year, which capped his upside because “he has a curve that posted a 15.1% SwStr% to righties and a 14.8% SwStr% to lefties, so he can use it to attack all hitters. He also has a slider that had a 19% SwStr% to righties as well as a splitter that registered a 17.1% SwStr% to lefties, so there are plenty of secondary options to choose from when it comes to getting whiffs.”

Well, in his first start last week, Soriano had a 64% zone rate on his sinker, which is way up from a 44% zone rate last season. Some of that command could be due to a new shape. He seemed to be “cutting” his sinker, which led to more drop but less arm-side run, as you can see below. Losing four inches of arm-side run on a sinker is generally not ideal, so you may see this pitch begin to get graded poorly, but the added sink is nice, and perhaps cutting down some of the run on the pitch made it easier for Soriano to keep it in the strike zone. That improved command would be the most important ingredient.

I also just want to note the new slider shape you can see above. It was only nine pitches, so we want to be tepid with our response, but Soriano threw his slider five mph slower than last year with more movement, in particular more drop. He had just a 33% zone rate with it in this one start, but had three whiffs and a 50% chase rate. Since he mainly threw it in two-strike counts, the whiff rate and chase rate are more important to us than the zone rate. This also ties back to the sinker. If he can get ahead with the sinker, then this slower and bigger slider could miss more bats and be a good swing-and-miss pitch to righties to complement the curve and splitter to lefties. Jury is still out (this was the White Sox after all), but there are some things to watch for here.

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Kris Bubic – Kansas City Royals (Lower Arm Slot)

Kris Bubic had a great first start with the Royals in 2025, going six shutout innings with eight strikeouts and only three hits allowed. After the start, Lance Brozdowski pointed out that Bubic seemed to lower his arm slot in the outing; yet he was still able to get almost 18 inches of vertical movement on his fastball, which allowed him to have an extremely flat approach angle (HAVAA below). That flat fastball, commanded well in the middle and upper parts of the zone, led to a stupid 11 whiffs, 23% SwStr%, and 46% CSW.

However, I hate to pour cold water on this one, but the rest of the results were not that great. His new sweeper had an impressive 77.3% strike rate, but it got only two whiffs primarily because he threw it gloveside just 36% of the time (13th percentile). He has to bury that thing low and away to lefties, and he didn’t do it. It’s a new pitch, so we need to give him time with it, but inconsistent command was a bit of the scouting report on Bubic when he struggled as a starter in previous years. We also had just one whiff on the changeup because that pitch, which he exclusively uses to righties, caught far too much of the middle of the plate. The sweeper is not a great pitch for a left-handed starter to throw to righties, so Bubic is going to need that changeup to pair with the four-seamer to have sustained success this year.

At the end of the day, the results were good, and I love the fastball improvement for Bubic, so I’m happy to add him and cross my fingers. However, I just didn’t see enough command of the secondaries here to make me think we’re really seeing a breakout. Is it possible? Sure, but I’m still a bit skeptical.

Brady Singer – Cincinnati Reds (Revamped Pitch Mix, New Cutter)

Brady Singer was lights out in his Reds debut, throwing seven shutout innings with one hit and eight strikeouts. I was only able to watch one inning of this live, so I was shocked when I went to Statcast early on Tuesday morning and saw he had thrown his brand new cutter just five times. I guess it’s the same old Brady Singer. Well, a few hours later and the page is updated to show 16 cutters, which had my attention before I went back and watched the start. I gotta say, I dig it.

The new cutter is 88.8 mph with almost 11” vertical break and 1.6” of glove-side movement. It’s not going to grade out tremendously on most “Stuff” models, and you can see from the chart below that it had just a 12.5% CSW with just two whiffs, but, as The Dude would say, “It really ties the room together.”

What we have now with Singer is a pitcher with three versions of a fastball (sinker, cutter, four-seamer) that are all within 3.5 mph of one another, but attack different parts of the strike zone and have slightly different movement profiles. Last year, Singer was 41% sinker and 42% slider. He would mix in his four-seamer, but he was essentially a two-pitch guy, and while the slider missed bats to lefties, the sinker had a 41% ICR, and the four-seam was even worse at 46%. Singer needed a fastball to prevent hard contact to lefties, and the cutter is exactly that. As you can see from the graphic below, Singer used the cutter inside the lefties a bunch in his first start, and all three of his fastball variations come out of the hand similarly and break off of one another.

That creates a deception that allows the four-seamer to get three whiffs (14.3% SwStr%) and the sinker to freeze hitters for 11 called strikes. He then continued to bury his slider low and away to righties as he had before, but just with a deeper arsenal to take the pressure off it. I still don’t love his home ballpark, but Singer’s arsenal should play OK there given that he has just a career 26% flyball rate. I’m not sure he’ll be this good moving forward, but I’m going to add him on the off-chance that he will be.