Landen Roupp Changes Sides | FanGraphs Baseball

It’s not clear why Landen Roupp is right, but maybe it’s time to find out.

Roupp’s 2.54 xERA is seventh among qualified starting pitchers. He hits hitters, gets ground balls, and focuses on plays. He is tied for 15th in the majors with 0.9 WAR. That’s about 70% of what FanGraphs Depth Charts projected at the start of the season. It is one of the most amazing games of April.

Most pitchers are “good” because they miss bats, or attack the zone, or both. That doesn’t apply to Roupp this year. His whiff rate of 25.1% is about the median among qualified pitchers, and his spot rate of 37.1% is fifth lowest. In fact, he doesn’t throw a ton of strikes.

The underlying “object” metrics are no longer invasive.

Roupp doesn’t throw hard, or show any outside movement, or place near the top of any leaderboard I know of. However, he succeeds. Where does all that importance come from?

Well, he might be the last eligible pitcher of 2026 who hasn’t allowed a barrel. His 25.0% slugging rate is the best in the majors, and his .277 xwOBACON allowed is second best, just behind Max Fried and ahead of Shohei Ohtani. Hitters can’t seem to bowl him over, hitting grounders in the dirt 56.0% of the time, or soft line drives.

This contact pressure all starts with the sink. He throws about 40% of the time, regardless of whether he’s pitching. He’s been worth seven runs above average so far in 2026, tied for third among season’s most efficient pitches. It doesn’t have the speed or movement on the surface, but it still shows the hard, bowling action that has been proven effective in finding grounders.

It’s worth pointing out that Roupp has been a little lucky with that sinker so far, with just one hit allowed on 20 grounders — xwOBA thinks his sinker is among the luckiest places to make contact with him this year. However, the contact he allows is soft, low, and generally non-threatening. A few more singles here and there shouldn’t have much impact on his streak going forward.

Another pitch he plays is a big, curved curveball. It’s great, and it always has been. In fact, Eric Longehagen and Travis Ice gave it an 80/80 grade in their Roupp Report Giants Top Prospects for 2024 list (despite a modest 40-FV grade overall). He throws it about 29% of the time, which is actually down a lot from his days as a prospect, when he was among the rare hook pitchers (something he discussed with David Laurila last year).

The pitch has tons and tons of movement, especially on the glove side. Good at getting whiffs, good at getting chases, good at inducing soft contact. I mean, just watch it:

Happily none of this has really changed. He had a sinker and curveball last year, as well as a changeup and cutter that was underutilized. Admittedly, the cutter is a little different now, with some more movement on the glove side. But, basically, the things he throws and the way he throws them are the same – it just works in an instant.

To be clear, Roupp wasn’t bad by any means last year. His 3.92 FIP was more than passable as a rotation starter, even if minor elbow inflammation and a knee injury cut short his season. But he certainly wasn’t a top-10 pitcher in the majors, or someone you’d bet on being one.

Here’s the only real change I could test:

Roupp is throwing the ball almost a full inch farther from third base than he was in 2025. Also, the arm angle is the same, and he doesn’t release the ball very differently. Instead, he went smack-dab between the rubbers to stand as far off the sideline as the right-handed pitcher couldn’t stand. Check out the two screenshots below, this season on the left and last year on the right:

The question is, does this matter? I don’t know. Indeed, this starting point is the only change I could find, unless we count the tweaks to the cutter (only thrown 12.4% of the time). The other thing I can think of is, you know, the small sample size, and that’s just not a happy answer.

But the theory of change here is hard to wrap my head around. My first thought was perhaps that this new situation allows Roupp to pitch in better places. Not really. In some ways, his command has been worse this year – passing is the one thing he hasn’t done well so far.

Instead, what I think is happening is that Roupp changes the angle when his pitches approach the plate horizontally. The sinker in particular enters the area from far left to right, jumping from a 70th-percentile approach angle in 2025 to a 95th-percentile one in 2026, according to Baseball Prospectus. To be clear, I’m not Alex Chamberlain, who wrote a primer on the horizontal (and vertical) angle of this website years ago. And I’m not one of the writers who wrote about approach angle and pitcher position a few years ago. This is far from my area of ​​expertise, but my understanding of what is happening here is complex, with such a change having various causes and effects.

However, I think this makes sense precisely for two reasons. One is probably the most obvious: A different tackle will get a different part of the bat, and that part of the bat so far has really been everything but the barrel.

But I also wonder if this changes the way hitters see the pitch coming. His sinker and curveball look like two different pitches that are clearly out of hand, and hitters have to be pretty good at guessing which is which. Last year there were.

Maybe changing the sides of the rubber changes that view. For example, righties now see a sinker from the first base dugout and lefties see it go behind their ear. Then there’s a big, slow, violent hook in the other direction. Add in Roupp’s funky-hitch windup and low arm hole, and you create a strange, rather extreme look from the absurd repertoire.

Take this from Bo Bichette. Roupp gets him in the first inning on a back sinker when Bichette is clear up the middle.

Then, in his next at-bat, Roupp launched Bichette with a curve, in almost the same spot, chased badly and missed.

I like this theory of perception because of the following table. One of the things we know about the pitcher-hitter matchup is that hitters start to gain an advantage as they get used to the arsenal. This was a problem for Roupp last year because, again, he struggles to hide his pitches with his release point, without the raw materials to fix it. When the batter starts to appear, the jig is up.

This year, wouldn’t you know it, Roupp has been as successful as he has been in the game.

Again, not much has changed in terms of how he releases the ball, nor his tuning or his stuff. My guess is that it’s just the way the ball looks to hitters that makes them miss, which helps his sinker play higher while the curveball hides dangerously.

If this represents a new level for Roupp, I can’t help but find this hilarious. He’s unremarkable in many ways, and switching to the other side of the rubber is about the easiest change a pitcher can make. However, sometimes that is all that is needed.