The whirly. The hand of God. The sweeper. The slutter. The riding slider.

Baseball’s newest pitch has many different names, but mostly one form. It’s a slider that, because of the way the seams are placed, doesn’t drop as much as batters expect. The result is a very sideways breaking ball that hitters often swing under. Here’s a good example of a new one, added by Pablo López this season, and how batters often react to it.

We spotted the pitch for the first time in late 2021, and it’s taken off since. Mostly because it was the second-most successful single pitch type last year — it limited batters to the second-lowest production, on average — pitchers everywhere are adding it.

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This year alone, Shohei Ohtani (by results, the best single pitch in baseball by results in the early going), Kris Bubic, Jameson Taillon, Brad Keller, Alex Cobb, George Kirby, A.J. Puk, Taijuan Walker and more have started throwing one. Its usage has nearly doubled in two seasons, and it’s come to the point that BaseballSavant, MLB’s stat wing, has joined Baseball Prospectus in having a pitch-type designation for it. It’s officially the sweeper, and it’s taking over baseball.

“In 2020, 15 percent of riding sliders had more than 10 inches of sweep,” pointed out Driveline Baseball’s director of pitching Chris Langin when he visited the Rates & Barrels podcast earlier this spring. “Last year it was 26 percent. And that was with the lockout, think of how many more we will see.”

Major-league organizations are handing the sweeper to their young pitchers en masse right now.

“We’ll probably start approaching a place where people are throwing this pitch and shouldn’t be, but if you look at the Yankees and Mariners minor-league numbers, they just have every single pitcher in their org throw it,” Langin said. “People think that’s oversimplified, but this pitch is good.”

It’s popular — but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. And now, as it’s proliferating, pitchers are learning about the potential pitfalls of this new pitch.

“Like any pitch, there are positives and negatives,” pointed out long-term sweeper-thrower and Giants lefty Taylor Rogers.

“Sweepers are a great asset and weapon to have,” said Dodgers’ assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness. “Obviously a number of our guys have them. I do think what can sometimes get lost in the thick of it is just, does it necessarily fit the throw? Does it take you out of your mechanics, and now what are you going to do against the opposite handed? Sweepers from righties really struggle to be successful versus lefties.”

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That’s the big flaw with the sweeper. It had the second-biggest platoon split among all the pitch types — the difference in production between same- and opposite-handed hitters is the second-largest in baseball over the last two years.

“It’s tough as a put-away against righties,” said lefty Rogers. “You can steal a strike, bring it around, get to 0-1, but it didn’t work as much when you wanted a swing.”

Maybe because the horizontal movement is so large, lefties get a good look at the pitch off of righties.

“The harder you can throw the sweeper, the better it is,” acknowledged the Yankees’ Clarke Schmidt. “Guys just take it, or sit on it so long if it’s too slow.”

So what do you do with a pitcher that has a great weapon against same-handed hitters and needs something for opposite-handed hitters? Scan down to the bottom of that list. The oldest answer in baseball: Get a changeup. The changeup is still the best way for a righty to get lefties out.

“It really helps if you can develop more pitchers that have more neutrality,” agreed McGuiness. “Curveballs, changeups are excellent neutrality pitches.”

A curveball can be tough to throw alongside a sweeper — Rogers said they blended together, and others agreed — so the changeup becomes key for pitchers with sweepers. But how does that help a pitcher who has always been told that he should have a changeup and doesn’t have one yet?

“Everybody still wants a starter to have a changeup,” said Langin. “But the difference is now, you can take it on the one-seam and just throw it, or do a splitter, a splitter with the pressure on these fingers. You’ll get a guy who doesn’t have a changeup, but the only changeup he’s been taught is to turn it over, and effectively he’s never been taught a type of changeup that fits his bias better.”

“Turning it over” means that a pitcher pronates, or turns his hand over towards the thumb. But pitchers often naturally either pronate well or supinate (the opposite) well, and pitchers that throw sweepers generally supinate well. They don’t have great fastballs, and aren’t spin efficient — they don’t turn all their spin in the fastball into ride, because they’re naturally on the pinky side of the ball.

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“Let’s say 100 percent spin efficiency is a pronator, anything under 85 percent is more of a supinator,” Langin said. “If you’ve got a guy with 85 percent spin efficiency and you’re going to try and tell him to turn over a changeup … you shouldn’t even be trying to teach him that.”

So, for non-sidearm pitchers comfortable on the side of the ball, the roadmap right now includes a sweeper … and then a splitter. Over on the Dodgers, Shelby Miller, Alex Vesia, Tyler Cyr, Gavin Stone, and Tayler Scott are, to varying degrees at least, working on some type of split- or split-adjacent changeup to pair with their breaking balls.

“It’s like a split-change,” said Stone. “Sometimes it tails, sometime goes straight down, just depending on how I throw it, really. That’s been the biggest help, is really the changeup, just being able to throw it for strikes and stuff.”

“It’s tweaking the repertoire to be able to get lefties and righties out with the same confidence,” said the lefty Vesia.

“The split change is nasty. It’s really good,” said Miller of his new splitter, which he has thrown in the past. “It hasn’t been near as good as this. This is a different grip. Just really easy to throw. Fits my mechanics, fits my throw, just makes a lot of sense. When you look at all the numbers and stuff, the metrics, it just fits my shape of pitches.”

The splitter was popularized in the early 1980s, perhaps most closely associated with Cy Young Award-winning closer Bruce Sutter. Once upon a time, Roger Craig taught everyone on his Giants staff the split-finger fastball as a safe alternative to the more stressful curveball that Craig himself blamed his own injuries on (“something snapped in my shoulder” he once told me of the last pitch he ever threw, a curveball).

“Everyone was throwing that pitch,” longtime Angels manager Mike Scioscia, a catcher for the Dodgers in the 1980s, told AP in 2011. “It was the pitch of the ’80s just like the pitch of the ’60s was a slider.”

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But then injuries ran through Craig’s staff — Dave Dravecky, Mike Krukow, Joe Price, Terry Mulholland, Mike LaCoss, and Kelly Downs were all injured in one year. So the splitter was associated with injury.

“You can just take your fingers and the more you put them apart, the more you put stress on the elbow,” Twins pitching coach Rick Anderson said in that same article. “It’s a pitch we really try to shy off of.”

“It’s very easy on your arm,” retorted Craig to me once. “I’m not that dumb. If it hurt, I wouldn’t teach it to people.”

There is no easy link between split-finger throwers and injury list data, though, so the subjective experience of modern pitchers can be a sort of guide.

“It blew my elbow out,” said José Veras.

“Every time I try the splitter, my elbow barks,” Adam Ottavino once told me.

But Tim Lincecum, Dan Haren, Jeff Samardzija, Kevin Gausman and many others never reported any pain due to the pitch.

If a pitcher has the sweeper, and feels like the splitter hurts or isn’t a fit, are there other options? Of course, the other oldest trick in the book when it comes to opposite-handed hitters: the cutter.

Drew Rasmussen with the Rays is a prototype here.

“I’m a natural supinator,” Rasmussen said. “I try to create lift with the sweeper. And I have a gyro slider, which has a little more depth to it than a cutter. We took some depth out to let me throw it harder. The reason we call it a cutter is because of the PitchCom. There’s only one slider button.”

A gyro slider is a bullet slider, a hard slider with little movement. It’s a little different than a cutter, but the idea is the same: a hard, tight breaking ball that a righty can command well and often put up and in to lefties.

“My goal with the cutter is to take over the usage of the four-seamer,” said Schmidt, another pitcher that has a natural inclination for the sweeper and needs more weapons against lefties. “I’ve always cut my four-seam, so the shape was always shitty so why not go straight to a cutter.”

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“I threw both a sweeper and a gyro last year,” said Yankees closer Clay Holmes. “The gyro, as long as I keep that pitch 88-89, it should be good. It looks bad to the eye, but it’s about location. If I can get to the zero line, -2 movement, at 88-89, theoretically it’s a good pitch. We call it a cutter in our computer model to distinguish it from the sweeper.”

Cutter, gyro slider, whatever, the idea is clear. Hard, tight, and commandable. The sweeper had the lowest in-zone rate among fastballs and breaking balls last year, and can be hard to harness, even for someone who has thrown it for a long time.

“Sometimes it’ll catch too much and just go, like a foot,” said Rogers. “When I was chasing sweep, day to day you didn’t know what was going to happen. You go from Colorado to Arizona to Miami, and you wonder what the hell is this thing going to do today.”

So then a pitcher has to make that tradeoff between stuff and command and add a breaking pitch that is easier to command, even if pitching analytics systems like Stuff+ aren’t as excited about them.

“Let’s take ten points of slider Stuff+ off,” says Langin of the process of adding a gyro slider to someone with a sweeper, “but if you throw a gyro pitch, we do have stuff in our research that says it’s easier to get this pitch closer to your target, and if you’re closer to your target, your balls are more competitive when you’re trying to get batters to chase.”

Of the 38 pitchers who have thrown a sweeper at least 50 times this year (according to Baseball Prospectus), 29 throw a changeup (five labeled as a splitter), and 16 throw a cutter (11 throw both). But that doesn’t even count the four pitchers (like Holmes) that have one slider designation and have reported that they throw a gyro slider as well as a sweeper, of which there might be more.

We might see this percentage grow as batters get used to the sweeper, and pitchers look for ways to soften the new pitch’s flaws.

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“Hitter behavior has been better against the sweeper over the last three years,” Langin said. “Better swing decisions. 59 percent in-zone swing percentage in 2019, now that’s up to 65 percent, and they are chasing it less. They are seeing the shape more and they have a better idea of how to hit it.”

It’s still a great pitch for so many.

“If you’re a right-handed pitcher and you have any capacity to supinate, it’s still a really good pitch if you can command it,” said Langin.

But there are more caveats these days when it comes to the sweeper, and some old pitches still have their usefulness in tandem with the trendy new thing. The old setup of fastball, breaking ball, changeup has just become more nuanced: Sinker, gyro slider, sweeper, splitter is how the modern pitcher might put it.

(Top photo of Rasmussen: Thomas Skrlj / MLB Photos via Getty Images)