The Continuously Variable Davis Martin

You’ve probably heard of Davis Martin, or someone like him. Martin is a 6-foot-2 right-handed pitcher out of Texas Tech. But he’s not Tyler Davis, a 6-foot-2 right-hander who played 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 plays for the other Chicago team.

Davis Martin is also not Caleb Kilian, his college teammate, who stands 6-foot-4 and plays for the Giants. Kilian played 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 both pitched for the White Sox last year, but they’re not the same guy. Chris Martin is easier to remember: Texan and right-handed, but too tall and too old. Austin Davis is a lefty. Austin Martin is a position player. OK, I think we’re out of the woods now.

Davis Martin (Right? Yes. Davis Martin.) had a great Monday night. He went to Anaheim and wrecked the Angels’ faces: seven scoreless innings, 10 strikeouts, no walks, five hits, 63 strikes on just 85 total pitches. Behold, if you dare:

At that rate, Martin probably had at least another inning in him — he’d thrown 97 and 98 pitches in his previous two starts — but I guess he was too far out from a theoretical maximum pitch count to go for the shutout. Chicago manager Will Venable decided not to put the extra lap on his no. 1 starter’s odometer.

No. 1 starter? Oh yeah, because that’s exactly what he’s pitched like so far this season. Martin is 5-1 in seven starts, averaging more than six innings per appearance. He has a 1.64 ERA and a 2.46 FIP. He’s third among qualified starters in WAR and sixth in strikeout-to-walk ratio.

I want to highlight one pitch Martin threw on Monday. This is a fifth-inning strikeout of Yoán Moncada:

First of all, it’s not every day you see a called strike three on a pitch that the catcher missed. But Martin hit the edge of the strike zone and Moncada didn’t see it coming. Second, as of this pitch, Martin has gotten at least one called third strike on each of the six pitches in his repertoire. After Monday’s games, he’d gotten the batter looking on 14 out of his 43 strikeouts, which was tied for the 13th-highest percentage among the 113 pitchers with at least 25 punchouts this year. (Two of the top five are Dustin May and Nick Martinez, who also have names that sound like clumsy aliases for Davis Martin.)

Martin is merely an above-average strikeout guy (his K% is in the 70th percentile), and he’s not doing a great job of suppressing contact when the hitter does get the bat to ball. Martin’s xwOBACON is .411, which is in the bottom 10% of qualified starters. He’s also outperforming his xERA by 2.57 runs; obviously there’s some regression to come here.

There are two things that are working really well for Martin right now, and a third thing that makes him kind of weird, and could be driving more of his success.

The first thing Martin has going for him is he’s not walking anyone. He walked 8.0% of opponents last year; so far this year, it’s down to 4.7%, which is in the top five among qualified pitchers. The fewer free baserunners you give up, the more you’re able to live with singles or even the occasional solo homer. A pitcher with a walk rate under 5% has a lot of room for error.

The other thing Martin has going for him is his pair of breaking pitches: a tight high-80s slider and a looping low-80s curveball with wicked side-to-side movement. James Fegan, who’s forgotten more about the White Sox than I’ll ever know, told me that Martin has been using this harder gyro-action slider since May of last year, and it’s completely changed his game.

Opponents are hitting under .100 against both of Martin’s breaking balls. His changeup — a kick-change, new as of August 2024, James says — has also gotten some terrific results, but with some scary looming hard contact. (Opponents have a .186 wOBA against Martin’s changeup, but a .365 xwOBA and a 64.3% hard-hit rate, against a whiff rate of only 14.3%.)

No such caveats are necessary for either the slider or the changeup. Opponents are whiffing more than a quarter of the time when they swing at the changeup, and Martin’s slider has led to a genuinely outrageous 59.6% whiff rate. The only pitch in baseball this year with a higher whiff rate is Mason Miller’s slider. Martin’s slider also has the seventh-best opponent wOBA and fourth-best xwOBA of any pitch in the league.

Opponents are also hitting only .091 and slugging .213 off his curveball, which has been the last pitch in 11 at-bats: five field outs, five strikeouts, and one single.

The curveball is also interesting because it’s the only one of Martin’s six pitches that doesn’t exist on a continuum. That’s an odd way to explain things; let me put it another way.

Here’s a velocity plot of Tyler Glasnow’s various pitches. His two fastballs have about the same velocity, but there’s a lot of separation between them and his slider, and his slider and his curveballs:

The same with Glasnow’s movement. Five pitches, five pretty distinct movement patterns:

If I were building a pitcher’s repertoire from scratch, it’d look something like this. I want the pitches to tunnel right out of the hand, but for each to move in its own direction at its own speed. If a hitter misreads the pitch or guesses wrong, he’s going to swing and miss. Sure enough, as of Tuesday morning, Glasnow has the fourth-highest strikeout rate among qualified starters and the seventh-lowest contact rate.

Glasnow’s various pitches look like a series of individual clouds. Martin’s pitches look like a rainbow:

Each pitch has its own movement profile, but 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 when you chart movement instead of velocity:

The two big changes in Martin’s game from 2025 to 2026 are his increased curveball usage and the addition of a cutter. Not only does that oblige me to throw another dollar in the “he should learn a cutter” swear jar, it fits with a trend Zach Crizer wrote about a couple days ago: More and more pitchers are going to a three-fastball approach, with a four-seamer, sinker, and cutter. Which brought me great joy, because this was the definitive strength of two of my favorite pitchers of the past 10 years: Lance Lynn and Hyun Jin Ryu. The more of this the better.

Except, now we’re running into the other thing I end up writing about once a week: Is Martin’s cutter more of a fastball, or is it more of a hard slider? Everyone should learn a cutter, but no one knows what a cutter is.

When I was talking to James about Martin’s slider, I mentioned that without the benefit of Baseball Savant’s tags, I would have no idea which pitch was which. The spread in velocity and movement is wide enough that I’d probably be able to determine that there are two distinct pitches in there, but there’s so much overlap I’m at a loss as to where the boundary is:

And things only get more complicated from there. Most guys who throw six pitches have one set of pitches for each side of the plate. (I went into the mechanics behind this in a post about Andrew Painter a month ago.)

Martin has a preference for certain pitch types against lefties and righties, or at least it seems that way in this small sample. But he throws five different pitches between 10% and 30% of the time, regardless of what side of the plate the batter’s standing on. Righties see more sliders and lefties see more curveballs; otherwise, the hitter is getting something from the mystery box.

I now have to ask that you indulge a bit of an off-the-wall metaphor. Every gas-powered car has a transmission, which takes the spinning motion of the engine and uses it to turn the wheels. Rather than have the wheels spin at the same speed as the crankshaft, the transmission uses bigger or smaller gears to keep the engine turning at its most efficient speed, regardless of how fast the wheels are spinning.

Most of the time (in manual or automatic transmissions), this comes in the form of individual gears. Start with a big gear, pick up speed, and when the engine is revving at the top of its power range, change to the next gear. This is what’s happening when a car’s engine noise climbs in pitch, then drops — the transmission shifts up and the revs drop.

Increasingly, passenger cars are being fit with something called a continuously variable transmission, or a CVT. Instead of gears, it uses two spinning cones connected by a belt. So rather than having to take a step change up or down, the belt could slide up and down the cone, giving the car a theoretically infinite continuum of gear ratios. That way, the engine is always turning the ideal number of revs:

In this metaphor, Glasnow is pitching through a five-speed gearbox and Martin is pitching through a CVT.

The reason I usually don’t like it when pitchers do this is a bit squishy: If your pitches run together — especially breaking balls — you can end up throwing an unsatisfying hybrid of two or more pitch types. That’s why “slurve” is a dirty word. But if Martin can keep five pitches in his head, even with minute differences in velocity and movement, he could throw just about anything on that rainbow curve.

I think this is why he’s getting so many called third strikes; hitters don’t know what to do with a pitch that could come in anywhere over a 10-mph band, anywhere along that parabolic movement graph. Sometimes they guess right, and hit the ball on the screws. But Martin is running a career-high chase rate, a career-low in-zone swing rate, and a contact rate that’s down 3.6 percentage points from last season. So the hitters are guessing wrong a lot.

To be clear, I have no idea if this is going to work, or what adjustments Martin can make if it suddenly stops working. Surely he’s not going to carry a sub-2.00 ERA all season — it’s still the first week of May — but his variety of offerings, and his slider from Hell, have made him one of the best starters in the league so far this season. At the very least, you should remember his name.