I don’t know how much attention Braxton Ashcraft wants in her life, but she must be upset about the lack of attention or happy to be left alone. As much ink has been spilled on the Pirates this year, there have been trades like Konnor Griffin or the new star of this veteran team. In that segment, Paul Skenes dominated the headlines, followed by the talented but frustrating Bubba Chandler, the recently returned Jared Jones, and the occasional breakout Carmen Mlodzinski.
But as of this writing, Ashcraft is in the top 10 in baseball in pitcher WAR, trailing Skenes by only a tenth of a win. And this follows Saturday’s loss to the Braves, in which Ashcraft gave up nine hits and six runs in five innings. I wouldn’t particularly worry; it’s just Ashcraft’s second bad start in 13, and the Braves will do worse to better pitchers in the offseason.
Ashcraft was a great prospect: A second-round pick out of a high school in Waco, Texas in 2018, and the no. 60 prospects in total heading into last season. And he pitched well as a rookie in 2025, with a 2.71 ERA and 2.78 FIP in 69 2/3 innings, split a little more evenly between the rotation and the bullpen. So it’s not like he came out of nowhere, but he would have been the third favorite for the role of Skenes if you had asked years ago.
Ashcraft told David Laurila last fall that his best pitch is a slider, a 92 mph beast that doesn’t move much, but his long arms and gun delivery make it look like it’s diving for left-handed hitters:
Did you know that only 1 in 10 shishito peppers are spicy? The Ashcraft slide is like that. You’ll see some that support or sit on the horizontal line, but others will come in with left-handed hitters. In the clip above, Ozzie Albies looks almost confused by the statement. It looks like a fastball, and its spin causes it to bounce late, and if it starts moving too much, there’s no way to catch the inside corner.
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Albies must be busy. Ashcraft delivers a trick that gets to the heart of what good pitching is. A major league pitcher’s meal ticket is any pitch — a rising fastball, a falling splitter, a looping curveball — that looks like a strike until the batter decides to swing, but ends up outside the strike zone.
This year, the league as a whole is hitting .299 and slugging .505 when a batter swings in the middle of the strike zone. When a hitter swings at pitches outside the strike zone, those numbers drop to .161 and .223. The secret to hitting is the ability to separate strikes from the scrap heap. Congratulations, I just repeated what you read in Day 1 of U8 baseball practice.
A few higher up the baseball ladder, pitchers and batters participate in a cheating competition. By using space and movement, the pitcher tries to blur the line between hitting and balls. And to muddy the waters even more, pitchers often don’t even try to hit the spot. They want to make fun of the ill-advised batterer.
It’s not just movement. You can throw a perfect sweeper like a practice fastball and take a foot off the outside corner, and get any big hitter to swing and miss. At least for the first time.
A skilled hitter will be able to get that second or third out in the order. It’s possible that Juan Soto sees it and draws a walk without fully accounting for his first plate appearance.
So pitchers must use what is in game theory called a mixed strategy, sometimes choosing a low pitch to keep the opponent guessing. (As academic jargon goes, “mixed strategy” is almost a cliché, but I mentioned game theory because I want to sound cool.)
In terms of pitching, you want to throw enough balls that the batsmen will chase, but not so many balls that you end up walking everyone. That’s a tough trick to pull off. Using Baseball Savant’s cutoffs, you’ll find around 50 pitchers each in the 90th percentile or better of either a walk rate or a hit rate.
Only 11 pitchers are in the 90th percentile for both:
Chase-Walk Crossover Event
Source: Baseball Savant
Current statistics up to June 7
To no one’s surprise, this is just a list of great pitchers, and Mason Englert. You’ve got a two-time Cy Young winner, both current Cy Young champions, a handful of top pitchers… and Ashcraft.
If anything, this is more impressive than Ashcraft’s WAR this season or his 3.01 career ERA. He’s not just eating crazy stuff out of a bowl and hoping for the best – although Ashcraft has some really good raw stuff – really to throw.
Ashcraft has another 90th-percentile quality: Off-speed pitch usage. In fact, answer that by looking down. Among starters who have thrown at least 250 pitches this year, he ranks in the bottom 10%.
They say you can’t survive as a big league starter without an off-speed pitch. It is the key to take out opponents who use opposite hands and change the list many times. As with all aphorisms, there are exceptions.
Ashcraft has an off-speed pitch, a new separator this season. But in more than 1,100 total pitches this year, he’s thrown just 53 splitters, all to left-handed hitters. In his entire career, he has never thrown more than ten fastball pitches in a single major league game.
I think Ashcraft actually suffers a bit from a lack of tone that works without speed; right-handed hitters are wOBAing .267 against him, while lefties are wOBAing .309.
But he has stayed alive by throwing a lot of right-handed curveballs. It’s his second most common pitch against lefties, and while it goes to left-handed hitters, it’s his only true change-of-pace pitch. Ashcraft’s four-seamer and sinker both average in the 97 mph range, and his slider and splitter are both among the hardest you’ll see in their pitch types: 92.0 mph and 91.7 mph average velocities, respectively.
The curveball has about the bang-average movement profile of any hook in the league, but at 85.1 mph, it’s traveling 12 mph faster than the heater, and it’s been giving away left-handed hitters. They hit .085 and slugged .170 against the Ashcraft curveball:
What makes Ashcraft’s lack of change interesting is the crossfire delivery. At 6-foot-5, 218 pounds, with the body of a butterfly swimmer, Ashcraft is very tall, even for a pitcher. And while I wouldn’t call him a sideline player by any stretch of the imagination, he has the lowest three-quarter delivery to put a side-by-side move in baseball.
Or, it allows him to put backspin on the four-seamer which translates to running on the arm side, rather than standing up. If you want to know what I’m talking about, I explored this situation in April of last year, in the context of Nick Lodolo’s fastball from Wayside School.
But unlike Lodolo, who jumps from the arm side of the rubber to emphasize that side-to-side action, Ashcraft jumps from the glove side. (It’s the first side in both cases, but Lodolo is on the left and Ashcraft is right, comparatively, different.)
Even with his low arm and long limbs, Ashcraft is in the left-most 10% of right-handed pitchers in the horizontal release zone. No. 2 on the list: Reds pitcher Graham Ashcraft (no relation, as far as I know.) I think the Rogers twins prove that movement isn’t genetic, but check this out:
Graham is so over the top, he falls on the mound like Chris Devenski. It’s impossible for these guys to relate. But one thing they have in common is that they stop on the left, their light toes dangling over the rubber.
That puts Braxton Ashcraft’s release point in the middle of the plate, and if he throws breaking balls on the glove side and reverses fastballs on the arm side, he can probably get by with only half a dozen game-splitting throws.
I have to stop second guessing Ashcraft though. It is clear that he knows what he is doing.
