How Ben Brown Got Hitters Off the Barrel

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images

Hitting is hard, unless a pitcher makes it easy for you. That's a fundamental truth of baseball; it's why batters who hit .300 make All-Star teams. The pitcher has all kinds of advantages in their showdown with the batter, up to and including the literal high ground. They also have a defense working as a team behind them.

Most of the time, to produce a valuable result, a batter has to hit the ball squarely and get at least a little lucky. They have to make an almost superhuman ballistic assessment of the pitch coming their way, adjust well and connect cleanly. They have to hit the right spot on the barrel of the bat, without hitting the top or bottom of the ball instead of the center, and they have to be on time to hit it in a good direction. All a pitcher has to do is disrupt one of those three aspects to win most of their battles.

Pitchers get paid incredibly well, though, so if pitching were as easy as all that, everyone would do it. In practice, the above often proves hard to do. Pitchers have to aim for a relatively small space from a relatively significant distance, and throwing the ball past the best hitters in the world while working in and near that square-shaped strike zone isn't as easy as it sounds. To produce enough speed to make a hitter's adjustments difficult, most pitchers must sacrifice some movement or command. To produce enough movement to fool them, most must give up some speed or command. To demonstrate sufficient command... look, you get it. Each side has to make tradeoffs.

Last season, Ben Brown mostly made the wrong tradeoffs. In fairness to him, though, he spent much of the season in a role to which he was not well-suited. Fifteen of Brown's 25 appearances for the 2025 Cubs came as a starter, but at the time, he was a two-pitch pitcher with little wiggle on his fastball. He needed to consistently wreck hitters' timing to succeed, either by overpowering them with his heater or by catching them hunting that pitch and throwing them his sharp curveball instead. At times, that did work, and his strikeout rate was a robust 25.6%. He didn't put batters on base for free very often, either, with a very good 6.8% walk rate.

However, pacing himself for full outings meant he didn't throw as hard as he needed to to beat hitters with the fastball most of the time, because his four-seam fastball doesn't have an especially good shape and is more reliant on speed than that of most starters. In just over 106 innings, he gave up 18 home runs. His ERA was 5.92, which is almost impossibly bad for a pitcher with such good strikeout and walk numbers. Batters simply found the barrel on him too often. Even when the ball wasn't clearing the fence, it zipped off the bat. He yielded a 91.2-MPH average exit velocity, and a lot of that contact was line drives.

What's changed this year? Well, you know about his new sinker, and his slightly increased faith in a changeup. If you hang out around here, you also know that he's lowered his arm slot this season, with delightfully beneficial effects. His strikeout and walk rates haven't improved at all. Can those small changes really explain the drop from an opponents' batting line of .279/.333/.467 last year to .170/.236/.205, and Brown's sparkling 1.74 ERA?

Thanks to new data from Statcast, the answer to that is 'yes'. What Brown is doing differently this year is responsible for much of the improvement in his numbers, even if some positive regression was inevitable, and even if he's been a bit lucky this spring. Here's what we're talking about.

Last season, righties were able to put up surprisingly competitive at-bats against Brown. A guy with a high-90s fastball and such a hard curve usually does very well against same-handed batters, but right-handed hitters had a .728 OPS off Brown in 2025. This year, that figure is .369. To understand why, first, look at these visuals from the new swing timing and miss distance leaderboard at Baseball Savant. This is Brown's profile against righties last year.

As you would guess, Brown's curveball (in blue) often got hitters out to (or beyond) the end of their bat, as seen in the left-hand image. It often forced them to be early (center image), and they often swung over the top of it (right-hand image). Those are all related, of course. A hitter sees the pitch, thinks it's the fastball they're trying to time their swing for, and attacks it. They're wrong, so their swing leaves the hitting zone too early, with the ball still out beyond the end of their flailing lumber. Usually, they've also misjudged where the pitch will end up, because they thought fastball and got the biting breaker.

However, notice how well hitters usually stayed on the sweet spot of their bat against his fastball (in red). The distribution in the left-hand image shows that Brown got to the handle or to the end of opponents' bats much less than some pitchers do with that four-seamer last year. He did sometimes force the batter to be late and to swing beneath the ball, but he wasn't exceptionally good at either thing. Plenty of times, righties were getting off a swing that made them on time, caught the good part of the bat and did it in the center of the baseball. That's why Brown got hit so hard.

Here's the same set of images for 2026, again against righties.

The introduction of the sinker (in orange) and the small change in his arm angle has changed everything. In the left-hand image, you can see that the sinker is producing more batted balls on which the hitter is tied up or jammed, where Brown got in on their hands. The four-seamer, both because batters are now trying to cover that sinker more and because adding the sinker has allowed him to focus on attacking the outer edge with the four-seamer, is getting to the ends of bats a bit more often. In the center image, look how much more often batters are late on his heater this year, as they try to discern between the sinker and the four-seamer and still get to whichever it is on time. The four-seamer is above bats more often, for the same reason. The sinker has gotten below them consistently, yielding some whiffs but even more help in the ground-ball department.

Hitters have, perhaps out of self-preservation, looked for the curve a bit more often this year. They're not early on it or swinging over it as much as they were in 2025. That's why the whiff rate on that pitch hasn't climbed at all. However, they're getting it off the end of the bat, when they do hit it, so the quality of contact is lower. Again, having the sinker to keep hitters honest on the inner third is helping a pitch that's usually going to the outer third.

Many of the same trends show up for lefties. He's throwing the curve more against them this year, and they've adjusted to that, so they're on time for that pitch as much as ever. It's not enough to make them effective against it, though. On the contrary, his whiff rate is still just under 50% on the curve to lefties. As he's thrown it more and they've tried to be ready for it, they've also been late and off the barrel on the four-seamer much more often.

Brown won't carry a sub-2.00 ERA all season. The changes he made this winter and spring, however, have turned him into a legitimate front-of-the-rotation starter. If he can continue to locate the sinker and work from an arm slot that gives his whole arsenal a bit more adaptability, he'll continue to dominate opponents—not just with whiffs, but by limiting hard contact better than he has in the past.

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