There’s this idea in evolutionary biology called the Red Queen Hypothesis. Taking its name from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking-Glass, and specifically from the Red Queen’s race in which “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”, the hypothesis suggests that evolution is driven by species endlessly adapting to each other, so that they don’t go extinct. The prey adapts so that they can avoid predators better, which forces the predator to adapt so they can keep catching and eating their prey, which forces the prey to adapt again, onward and onward.
A pitcher and a batter aren’t quite different species, but the hypothesis might as well apply to them. The pitcher develops new ways to confuse and paralyze the batter, the batter adapts, and the pitcher must adapt again in response if they want to keep their ERA low enough to avoid the little extinction of a lost job or roster spot. And few are better at handling this (for a pitcher, literal) arms race than Zack Wheeler.
Wheeler has continued to tweak, change, and modify throughout his career. Last year, like so many other hurlers, he added a sweeper. This year, he put a splitter in his quiver. Re-added would be more accurate; per an interview with FanGraphs this past February, he had the splitter as a prospect in the Giants system, put it on the back burner at their request, and then deployed it sparingly (“Five to 10 times a year, maybe”) once he made it to the bigs. This past offseason, desiring a pitch that would break away against left-handed batters, he chose to make it a larger part of his arsenal.
Wheeler is throwing his splitter 7.8% of the time this season, making it a consistent piece of his arsenal, though it is the least-seen of his 6 pitches. Per Baseball Savant, Wheeler hadn’t thrown a splitter at all since 2020, when he deployed it 2.5% of the time. Given his statement that he threw it a few times a year, this gap might be the result of some issues with how the pitch tracking classified it rather than a true disappearance. Nevertheless, it’s certainly safe to say that he’s deploying the splitter more than ever before. The addition comes largely at expense of the usage of his cutter (14.4% in 2023, 10.4% this year) and curve (11.4% in 2024, 9.9% this year). That makes sense given the context that he needed something that would break away from lefties; the splitter does, the curve and cutter don’t.
Sure enough, Wheeler uses the splitter much more often against lefties (11% of pitches to them) than righties (3.9%). He’s much more likely to use it when the batter is behind than when the batter is ahead (11.5% vs. 4.7%), and only rarely throws it as a first offering (2.6% of first pitches). When he throws it it’s typically low; only 30% of his splitters end up in the strike zone. Compared to other splitters league-wide, Wheeler’s breaks a little more than average horizontally, and a little less than average vertically.
Of course, knowing when he throws it, and what it looks like when he throws it, only tells us so much. What happens when he throws it is what we want to know, and a quick look at the data shows us Wheeler’s splitter is pulling its weight. He throws it for a strike 40.5% of the time and induces whiffs 38.5% of the time; both the highest figure of any of his pitches.
When batters do make contact on it, they tend to do relatively little damage; the slugging percentage against his splitter is .257, as compared to .391 for his 4-seamer and .439 for the cutter. The fact that he’s continuing to throw it this far into the season is proof of its efficacy; with so many pitches at his disposal, he wouldn’t use it if it wasn’t helping. But while the addition of a new pitch can be transformative for a hurler (e.g. Mariano Rivera discovering his famed cutter midway through his third season), Wheeler still looks largely like the same pitcher. Part of that is due to the fact that as one of the league’s true aces, he simply doesn’t have all that far to rise. But it’s also due to the fact that the improvement in Wheeler’s game brought about by the splitter has been countered by (and helps to counter) the adjustments opponents have made against him. It takes all the running you can do…
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