The grip
As the pitcher sees it from behind. Dashed: the thumb, underneath.
– mph
Every pitch in big-league baseball: how it’s held, how it spins, how hard it’s thrown and where it ends up. Pick one and throw it, or pitch to a hitter.
As the pitcher sees it from behind. Dashed: the thumb, underneath.
The hitter guesses what’s coming, and when he’s fooled he swings where the pitch he expected would have gone. Over thousands of at-bats he swings, chases and misses about as often as big-league hitters did in 2026, and each real pitcher’s pitches get missed about as often as his did, and he walks and gets hit as he did.
Pick a pitch and a spot, then throw it. The hitter has to commit at the decision point (the dashed ring on each pitch’s path), 0.175 seconds from the plate, and a swing at a pitch out of the zone is a chase. Strikes are red discs (called, swinging or fouled), balls green rings, balls in play blue squares.
The nine inside the frame are the strike zone; the ring around them is outside it.
A big-league pitch gets to the plate in about 0.4 seconds, and a hitter has to know what it is before then. Watch one come in from behind the plate and name it, or step in and try to hit it.
One of his pitches, at its own speed, the way he throws it to a batter on your side: only the ball, with nothing to say what it is. Then say what it was.
What was it?
He calls every pitch. To swing, tap the picture where the ball will cross the plate, just as it gets there; don’t, and you take it. How close you were, in place and in time, decides it, as it does for the hitter in Pitch to a hitter. Swing, or Space while the ball is in the air, swings down the middle.
Every type of pitch thrown in the 2026 regular season, in all. Tap one to throw it.
How far spin pushes a right-hander’s pitch on its way to the plate, compared with a ball thrown with no spin. Arm side is toward the pitcher’s throwing arm; glove side, the other way. Bigger dots are thrown more often. The faint oval round the chosen pitch, or one under the pointer, covers the middle 80% of the pitchers who threw it.
Share of all pitches, average speed, and how often hitters swing and miss.
Numbers: Statcast via Baseball Savant, 2026 regular season. Averages weight each pitcher by how many he threw; the knuckleball’s count only pitchers who threw 100 or more. “Spin moves it” is movement from spin alone, with gravity taken out; “Drops” includes gravity.