Pitching Grips

Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images For my final Postseason Manager Report Card of the 2026 season, I’m here to evaluate Kevin Cash , Rays manager and World Series loser. While Tampa Bay fell short of its first World Series championship in franchise history and ended the year with something of a whimper, Cash did a commendable job steering his club during its a deep postseason run. As both Ben Clemens and I have mentioned before each of our previous manager report cards this postseason, I care about process and not results here. It’s easy to say, “That was a great move because it worked,” or “That was a bad move because it failed,” but managers obviously can’t know the results of their decisions as they’re making them. I’ve tried my best to transport myself back to the moment of each decision — taking into account the pitches, innings, and plate appearances that led up to it — while ignoring the outcome. Lastly, before we get into the grades, I’ll als...

Brad Penner and Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images Welcome to part two of our pitching superlatives series. I’ll be here all week covering the pitches that stick out the most. Yesterday, I discussed the pitches that stood out the most due to their velocity . Today, we’re talking about movement, but before we get into it, I need to issue a correction. Yesterday, I credited James McCann with throwing the slowest individual pitch of 2026, but it has been pointed out to me that McCann only threw the slowest tracked pitch of 2026. Twenty-one times, a position player threw a pitch so funky that Statcast threw up its electronic shoulders and assigned it a velocity of “–”. Often, it did so because the pitch was so slow that the cameras didn’t know what to make of it, or perhaps (just a theory) because the slowness of the pitch forced the pitcher to throw such a high-arcing rainbow that it was out of the path where Statcast expects to find pitches. I mean, what are you supposed to do with th...