Let’s start with the table.
Top 10 Reliever ERAs in Baseball, 2022-2026
From June 6
And what a wild table. Brooks Raley was secretly better than I thought. I bring this up to show how dominant Jason Adam has been over the past five years: By many measures, one of the best pitchers in baseball. By ERA, the best reliever has had a regular career by far. Adam’s breakout season was 2022, and since then he has posted an ERA under 2.00 four times in five years, including 2026. His one year down: 2023, when he posted a 2.93 ERA in 54 1/3 innings. Most pitchers would kill to struggle like that.
Adam has had moments in the sun: He made Team USA in 2023, and made the All-Star game last year. But most of the time he went under the radar. Despite his gaudy run prevention numbers, he spent most of his career in deep bullpens with big stars. He has only 25 career hits. He doesn’t throw particularly hard or strike out the league-leading hitter percentage.
In fact, two of Jason Adam’s most famous incidents would not lead one to think pleasant thoughts. A bad quad injury kept him out of last year’s play-offs; Adam stepped into a running position on the returner and, in an instant, he went down clutching his leg as if he had been shot. It’s really painful to watch. Adam was also one of five Ray pitchers (and Raley, incidentally) who made headlines in 2022 by refusing to wear the team’s Pride Night cap and jersey.
Adamu would have been in the headlines that year no matter what; 2022, his first year in Tampa Bay, is the year he combines for the first time. Adam has always had a very short hand, of the last days of Lucas Giolito, but when he arrived in St. Petersburg, he changed his footwork to cover his front shoulder like Tim Lincecum. After many years of not working, he began to run wild and miss many bats in the area. His pursuit rate rose dramatically, falling just outside the top 10 among professional pitchers.
Adam does two things well: First, he hides the ball with his unusual, short-arm delivery. The ball looks like it’s coming out of his ear. Second, he spins the ball well. Adam isn’t the fastest pitcher in the league, but we’ve gotten used to his fastball sitting in the 2,600-to-2,700 rpm range, which is some of the highest marks you’ll get from a four-seamer.
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Spin switching is a bit idiosyncratic; The best off-speed pitches in the league come in all shapes and sizes. Devin Williams’ Airbender-like screwball spins more than two and a half times faster than a changeup you’ll see from Clay Holmes or José Soriano, and four times faster than Logan Gilbert’s splitter.
Adam isn’t quite on Williams’ page, but revving above 2,000 rpm is unusual. What that means for Adam is that his fastball has a lot of late life and rise, while his changeup has an above-average sink. Fenway Park has a great center field camera angle, and you can see what I’m talking about here:
It’s not like Adam’s fastball grows legs and skedaddles when the batter changes. The best way to look at it is this: You expect it to go down and it doesn’t. At that time, the switch moves a few centimeters more to the other side:
The biggest change in Adam’s game over the past five years has been his breaking ball. Back in 2022, he threw a big two-plane sweeper, but since moving to San Diego, he’s gradually replaced it with a solid gyro slider:
You can see this pitch take a visible arc, but that’s because Adam throws it down and gravity pulls the ball through the air for a split second. (And the camera angle at Dodger Stadium isn’t that great. If I were the dictator of the world, we’d set up a center field camera in every ballpark in the league, but until then, we’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got.)
According to Statcast, this pitch had no movement in any direction. Like I said, Adam doesn’t throw that hard or strike out that many batters. You guys will go with him. But with these locations and the tricky windup, it’s very difficult to replicate. As of 2022, he is below 20% of the barrel rate and 10% below the HR/FB ratio. (“Low” here means low percentage, not “worst.”)
Here’s what happened this year. This graph shows the pitching averages of Adam’s three main pitches over the past three years:
You’ll notice that his fastball spin has dropped about 150 rpm over the past two years, with a similar drop in his slider. Reverse backspin on a fastball means less upside, which can be problematic: Adam’s fastball depends on that little zing that spin provides, and by losing as little as an inch or two of movement on each axis, his fastball goes from anomalous to normal. It’s not dead space-y now, but it flirts with dead space.
And if Adam was bleeding too fast, he would be in real trouble…
Oh, no.
That’s not only bad for the obvious reason – the hitter has more time to react – but because the ball is in the air longer, gravity has to act on it. That means the little sinker that hitters have been waiting for is finally here. Adam’s fastball is down about three inches more than it was two years ago.
In honor of the Rule of Thirds, here’s a graph of Adam’s stroke rate from year to year:
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwrrrrrr… (explosion sound)
Adam’s strike rate was in the high 20s or low 30s for most of his tenure – it’s 14.3% now. In comparison: Last year, Paul Skenes, Dylan Cease, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto all struck out between 29% and 30% of the batters they faced. Pitchers with over 14% and under 15% hitting in 70 or more innings include Jack Kochanowicz, Mitchell Parker, Michael McGreevy, and Miles Mikolas.
That is a great way to fall. And more than a drop in strikes… actually, “drop” might be the wrong word here. It’s a small sample, but Adam’s strikeout rate is half of what it was two years ago. His beating got Thanos’d.
However, Adam also allows heavy contact, as evidenced by career highs in both strikeout rate and opponent strikeout rate. The latter is at .247, up from .207 last year and .158 in 2024. Adam has given up three home runs in 22 innings in 2026, after giving up just four in 65 1/3 innings last year and five in 73 2/3 innings two years ago.
Adam’s FIP is 4.51. Over the past 10 years, there have been more than 5,000 pitcher seasons of 20 or more innings. Adam surpasses his FIP with the eighth-highest average in those 5,000 seasons.
On the other hand, that’s an alarming statistic. On the other hand, it only reinforces something odd about Adam’s season: His ERA is 1.64. That’s where it’s been.
An interesting thing to do with FIP-based WAR is highlight this contradiction: Adam has the 20th highest ERA among professional pitchers and a negative MPI.
Adam’s strange season of 2026 makes me think of Abraham Lincoln. (I’m sure this comes as a relief to those of you who read “highlight the contradiction” in the last paragraph and expected me to quote a different world history leader.)
There is a special place in Hell for people who distort the meaning of useful proverbs or sayings: “A few bad apples…” or “The customer is always right.”
So did Lincoln’s 1858 speech, which began with: “A house divided alone cannot stand.”
Given what happened three years later, and Lincoln’s role in those events, people like to use that quote as a call to find common ground with people we disagree with. If you read on, you will find that Lincoln meant the opposite.
Speaking of the division between the antebellum states and the free states, he said, “I don’t expect the house to fall, but I do expect it to stop falling apart. It’s all going to be one thing or the other.”
Adam’s effects and elements are in such a state of instability of opposition. (Though one of very little historical significance, unless you’re Craig Stammen, maybe.) Either he’ll regain rotation and speed, or he’ll find some other way to compensate. If not, his results will soon appear to reflect his peripherals, rather than his stellar track record.
They will be everything else or everything else.
