You’ve in all probability heard of Davis Martin, or somebody like him. Martin is a 6-foot-2 right-handed pitcher out of Texas Tech. However he’s not Tyler Davis, a 6-foot-2 right-hander who performed at Sam Houston State. Davis is Martin’s teammate. Neither is he Corbin Martin, a 6-foot-2 right-hander out of Texas A&M. Corbin Martin performs for the opposite Chicago group.
Davis Martin can also be not Caleb Kilian, his faculty teammate, who stands 6-foot-4 and performs for the Giants. Kilian performed at Texas Tech with 6-foot-2 right-hander Clayton Beeter, now of the Nationals, and 6-foot-1 right-hander Caleb Freeman. Freeman and Davis Martin each pitched for the White Sox final 12 months, however they’re not the identical man. Chris Martin is simpler to recollect: Texan and right-handed, however too tall and too previous. Austin Davis is a lefty. Austin Martin is a place participant. OK, I believe we’re out of the woods now.
Davis Martin (Proper? Sure. Davis Martin.) had an amazing Monday evening. He went to Anaheim and wrecked the Angels’ faces: seven scoreless innings, 10 strikeouts, no walks, 5 hits, 63 strikes on simply 85 whole pitches. Behold, if you happen to dare:
At that price, Martin in all probability had no less than one other inning in him — he’d thrown 97 and 98 pitches in his earlier two begins — however I suppose he was too far out from a theoretical most pitch depend to go for the shutout. Chicago supervisor Will Venable determined to not put the additional lap on his no. 1 starter’s odometer.
No. 1 starter? Oh yeah, as a result of that’s precisely what he’s pitched like up to now this season. Martin is 5-1 in seven begins, averaging greater than six innings per look. He has a 1.64 ERA and a 2.46 FIP. He’s third amongst certified starters in WAR and sixth in strikeout-to-walk ratio.
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I need to spotlight one pitch Martin threw on Monday. It is a fifth-inning strikeout of Yoán Moncada:
To begin with, it’s not each day you see a known as strike three on a pitch that the catcher missed. However Martin hit the sting of the strike zone and Moncada didn’t see it coming. Second, as of this pitch, Martin has gotten no less than one known as third strike on every of the six pitches in his repertoire. After Monday’s video games, he’d gotten the batter trying on 14 out of his 43 strikeouts, which was tied for the Thirteenth-highest share among the many 113 pitchers with no less than 25 punchouts this 12 months. (Two of the highest 5 are Dustin Could and Nick Martinez, who even have names that sound like clumsy aliases for Davis Martin.)
Martin is merely an above-average strikeout man (his Ok% is within the seventieth percentile), and he’s not doing an amazing job of suppressing contact when the hitter does get the bat to ball. Martin’s xwOBACON is .411, which is within the backside 10% of certified starters. He’s additionally outperforming his xERA by 2.57 runs; clearly there’s some regression to return right here.
There are two issues which might be working very well for Martin proper now, and a 3rd factor that makes him type of bizarre, and may very well be driving extra of his success.
The very first thing Martin has going for him is he’s not strolling anybody. He walked 8.0% of opponents final 12 months; up to now this 12 months, it’s all the way down to 4.7%, which is within the high 5 amongst certified pitchers. The less free baserunners you quit, the extra you’re in a position to dwell with singles and even the occasional solo homer. A pitcher with a stroll price underneath 5% has lots of room for error.
The opposite factor Martin has going for him is his pair of breaking pitches: a good high-80s slider and a looping low-80s curveball with depraved side-to-side motion. James Fegan, who’s forgotten extra in regards to the White Sox than I’ll ever know, advised me that Martin has been utilizing this tougher gyro-action slider since Could of final 12 months, and it’s utterly modified his recreation.
Opponents are hitting underneath .100 towards each of Martin’s breaking balls. His changeup — a kick-change, new as of August 2024, James says — has additionally gotten some terrific outcomes, however with some scary looming arduous contact. (Opponents have a .186 wOBA towards Martin’s changeup, however a .365 xwOBA and a 64.3% hard-hit price, towards a whiff price of solely 14.3%.)
No such caveats are crucial for both the slider or the changeup. Opponents are whiffing greater than 1 / 4 of the time once they swing on the changeup, and Martin’s slider has led to a genuinely outrageous 59.6% whiff price. The one pitch in baseball this 12 months with the next whiff price is Mason Miller’s slider. Martin’s slider additionally has the seventh-best opponent wOBA and fourth-best xwOBA of any pitch within the league.
Opponents are additionally hitting solely .091 and slugging .213 off his curveball, which has been the final pitch in 11 at-bats: 5 area outs, 5 strikeouts, and one single.
The curveball can also be fascinating as a result of it’s the one one in every of Martin’s six pitches that doesn’t exist on a continuum. That’s an odd option to clarify issues; let me put it one other means.
Right here’s a velocity plot of Tyler Glasnow’s numerous pitches. His two fastballs have about the identical velocity, however there’s lots of separation between them and his slider, and his slider and his curveballs:
The identical with Glasnow’s motion. 5 pitches, 5 fairly distinct motion patterns:
If I had been constructing a pitcher’s repertoire from scratch, it’d look one thing like this. I would like the pitches to tunnel proper out of the hand, however for every to maneuver in its personal path at its personal velocity. If a hitter misreads the pitch or guesses mistaken, he’s going to swing and miss. Positive sufficient, as of Tuesday morning, Glasnow has the fourth-highest strikeout price amongst certified starters and the seventh-lowest contact price.
Glasnow’s numerous pitches appear to be a collection of particular person clouds. Martin’s pitches appear to be a rainbow:
Every pitch has its personal motion profile, however the changeup runs into the sinker, which runs into the four-seamer, which runs into the cutter, which runs into the slider. And the boundaries are even blurrier whenever you chart motion as a substitute of velocity:
The 2 huge modifications in Martin’s recreation from 2025 to 2026 are his elevated curveball utilization and the addition of a cutter. Not solely does that oblige me to throw one other greenback within the “he ought to be taught a cutter” swear jar, it matches with a pattern Zach Crizer wrote a few couple days in the past: Increasingly pitchers are going to a three-fastball method, with a four-seamer, sinker, and cutter. Which introduced me nice pleasure, as a result of this was the definitive energy of two of my favourite pitchers of the previous 10 years: Lance Lynn and Hyun Jin Ryu. The extra of this the higher.
Besides, now we’re operating into the opposite factor I find yourself writing about as soon as every week: Is Martin’s cutter extra of a fastball, or is it extra of a tough slider? Everybody ought to be taught a cutter, however nobody is aware of what a cutter is.
Once I was speaking to James about Martin’s slider, I discussed that with out the good thing about Baseball Savant’s tags, I’d do not know which pitch was which. The unfold in velocity and motion is vast sufficient that I’d in all probability be capable of decide that there are two distinct pitches in there, however there’s a lot overlap I’m at a loss as to the place the boundary is:
Davis Martin’s Slider and Cutter, or So We’ve Been Informed
| Pitch | Worth | Velocity | Glove-Aspect Mov. | IVB | Spin price (RPM) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slider | Most | 89.1 | 9 | 8 | 2,819 |
| Slider | Imply | 87.1 | 4.6 | 1.8 | 2,548 |
| Slider | Minimal | 84.5 | -1 | -3 | 2,227 |
| Cutter | Most | 91.8 | 7 | 17 | 2,723 |
| Cutter | Imply | 89.5 | 1.9 | 7.5 | 2,551 |
| Cutter | Minimal | 86.9 | -4 | 2 | 2,324 |
Supply: Baseball Savant
And issues solely get extra sophisticated from there. Most guys who throw six pitches have one set of pitches for all sides of the plate. (I went into the mechanics behind this in a publish about Andrew Painter a month in the past.)
Martin has a desire for sure pitch sorts towards lefties and righties, or no less than it appears that evidently means on this small pattern. However he throws 5 totally different pitches between 10% and 30% of the time, no matter what facet of the plate the batter’s standing on. Righties see extra sliders and lefties see extra curveballs; in any other case, the hitter is getting one thing from the thriller field.
I now should ask that you just indulge a little bit of an off-the-wall metaphor. Each gas-powered automotive has a transmission, which takes the spinning movement of the engine and makes use of it to show the wheels. Relatively than have the wheels spin on the similar velocity because the crankshaft, the transmission makes use of larger or smaller gears to maintain the engine turning at its most effective velocity, no matter how briskly the wheels are spinning.
More often than not (in guide or automated transmissions), this comes within the type of particular person gears. Begin with an enormous gear, decide up velocity, and when the engine is revving on the high of its energy vary, change to the subsequent gear. That is what’s occurring when a automotive’s engine noise climbs in pitch, then drops — the transmission shifts up and the revs drop.
More and more, passenger automobiles are being match with one thing known as a constantly variable transmission, or a CVT. As a substitute of gears, it makes use of two spinning cones related by a belt. So relatively than having to take a step change up or down, the belt might slide up and down the cone, giving the automotive a theoretically infinite continuum of drugs ratios. That means, the engine is at all times turning the best variety of revs:
On this metaphor, Glasnow is pitching by means of a five-speed gearbox and Martin is pitching by means of a CVT.
The explanation I normally don’t prefer it when pitchers do this can be a bit squishy: In case your pitches run collectively — particularly breaking balls — you may find yourself throwing an unsatisfying hybrid of two or extra pitch sorts. That’s why “slurve” is a unclean phrase. But when Martin can hold 5 pitches in his head, even with minute variations in velocity and motion, he might throw absolutely anything on that rainbow curve.
I believe this is the reason he’s getting so many known as third strikes; hitters don’t know what to do with a pitch that might are available in anyplace over a 10-mph band, anyplace alongside that parabolic motion graph. Typically they guess proper, and hit the ball on the screws. However Martin is operating a career-high chase price, a career-low in-zone swing price, and a contact price that’s down 3.6 share factors from final season. So the hitters are guessing mistaken quite a bit.
To be clear, I do not know if that is going to work, or what changes Martin could make if it out of the blue stops working. Absolutely he’s not going to hold a sub-2.00 ERA all season — it’s nonetheless the primary week of Could — however his number of choices, and his slider from Hell, have made him among the finest starters within the league up to now this season. On the very least, you must bear in mind his title.