I might have a thing for guys who throw a lot of different fastballs. Earlier this week, I looked into Drew Rasmussen’s novel approach to pitching: just make the entire arsenal out of fastballs. Rasmussen used to mix four-seamers and cutters, but then he added a sinker and kicked things up a notch. The multi-fastball approach has swept baseball in recent years, in fact, to the point where pitchers with only one option in their toolkit now stand out to me. But I think I’ve seen a new variation. Ben Joyce throws two fastballs, and one of them is an offspeed pitch.
You probably think of Joyce as one of the hardest throwers in baseball, if you think of him at all. He was a standout at Tennessee, showing big league velocity while closing games for the Vols. He threw a pitch 105.5 mph in 2024, still one of the five fastest pitches recorded in the Statcast era. He’s always been a little wild. He reaches back for everything he possibly has. It’s the kind of profile that makes you wonder what he’s going to pair with that absurd fastball.
In 2024, Joyce started experimenting with a splinker, a splitter/sinker hybrid. He turned to that pitch partway through the year after discussing sinker grips with some of the other Angels pitchers, and he spent a lot of that season playing with the different ways he could throw it. It was very much still a work in progress – he changed the shape and velocity of it quite a lot as he learned the grip – but adding something that sat between his fastball and slider was a great success, so much so that Michael Baumann blogged about his two fastballs way back in January 2025. Then Joyce got hurt five games into the year, had shoulder surgery, and missed the rest of the season.
Joyce returned to the majors a week ago, and he’s featuring his sinker — or whatever you’d like to call it — more than ever. He uses it differently than you’d expect for a secondary pitch. He attacks the zone (or tries to — he’s pretty wild) and loves starting counts with it. It doesn’t act like a splitter. It looks more like, well, a sinker:
Sure, that’s a very hard sinker at 98 mph, but it generally looks like a fastball, flying true without much in the way of wiggle. His grip gives the ball a bit of seam-shifted wake, but it’s a fairly normal amount for a sinker, perhaps even a bit less than average. The real key is the movement the pitch doesn’t get.
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For the average pitcher generating enough arm speed to throw a sinker in the upper 90s, spin is unavoidable. Sinkers don’t actually “sink”; they’re thrown with grips that produce backspin. The term “sinker” comes from the fact that they appear to sink relative to the trajectory of a four-seam fastball, the “true” flight path that our eyes and brain expect. Cristopher Sánchez gets my vote for the best sinkerballer in the majors today; his sinker gets four inches of vertical break and 18 inches of horizontal, because he does a very good job of limiting the amount of lift and maximizing the amount of fade that his spin imparts on the ball. Joyce throws his sinker at roughly the same velocity, but he creates an inch less vertical movement and four inches less horizontal movement.
Why? It’s a matter of physics. Joyce generates far more arm speed than Sánchez; I know that because only one of the two of them is touching 105. He’s moving his arm with enough force to throw the ball much harder than Sánchez, in other words. The reason he doesn’t when it comes to his sinker is that his grip doesn’t let him. That’s on purpose; by holding the ball in a way that doesn’t transmit force from his arm to the ball as cleanly as his four-seam fastball, he’s creating far less spin. It’s marginally more complicated than that, but generally speaking, he’s sacrificing velocity to get less spin, which in turn means less lift.
One way of thinking about it is just to look at the RPMs. Only one pitcher in baseball, Josh Fleming, throws a sinker with a lower spin rate than Joyce’s offering. Given that spin and velocity are correlated, Joyce’s pitch stands out even more. The closest comparable pitch I can find to Joyce’s fastball is that of his former teammate, José Soriano; his and Joyce’s sinkers produce nearly identical movement at very similar velocities. Amusingly, Soriano helped teach Joyce this grip because he throws a splinker of his own, though his is slower than Joyce’s and basically looks like his sinker (his primary fastball) with a tiny bit taken off.
Don’t get too caught up in the classifications. Regardless of what you call Joyce’s pitch, it moves like a sinker. It looks a lot like the very good sinkers Sánchez and Soriano throw, regardless of how he gets there. But unlike those guys – and unlike anyone else in the game, whether you call what they throw a sinker or a splinker – Joyce can reach back for an extra six or seven miles an hour by simply gripping and ripping his four-seam.
No one else creates that kind of velocity differential between his fastballs. Jhoan Duran, who popularized the term “splinker” with his version of the pitch, throws his about three ticks slower than his primary fastball. Paul Skenes has a similar gap this year; at his best, he approached a five-tick differential. Soriano is somewhere near five miles an hour as well, and Joe Boyle is in the same range in a tiny sample – those are the only guys who I think make sense as comparables. And both Soriano and Boyle are throwing something closer to a regular splitter; they’re in the low 90s, not Joyce’s rarefied air.
Why am I harping on the velocity differential so much? Because the interplay between his two fastballs is letting Joyce treat his four-seamer like a secondary pitch. He’s starting people off with a heavy sinker, then using the same delivery with a different grip to speed up by five or six ticks, with the result that the ball falls 15 inches less on its path home. The only other pitcher in baseball generating that kind of differential is Soriano, and he likes that four-seam/splinker pairing so much that he’s more than doubled his usage of each pitch this year.
For Joyce, the new fastball has been transformational. I can explain the difficulty of attacking hitters with Joyce’s old, sinker-less arsenal with a single plot:
Those are the two pitches Joyce threw in 2023. With a comical 14 mph of separation and massive movement differentials on both axes, they didn’t pair particularly well. To locate a slider anywhere near the middle of the strike zone, Joyce had to start it on a trajectory that wouldn’t make any sense for a fastball. To make matters worse, he doesn’t exactly have surgical command, which made it much easier for pitchers to distinguish what was coming. Ball starts on an upward trajectory? The odds are high that it’s an in-zone slider. He wasn’t fooling anyone because he just wasn’t telling a convincing story of what the pitch might be. That’s fixed now:
With a sinker that lives halfway between his other two offerings, every pitch is giving opposing batters multiple looks. Is that a sinker low or a four-seamer high? Is it a slider off the plate away, or a sinker on the inner third? Given that Joyce’s command is scattershot – he’s effectively wild, in the classic sense – the puzzle is even harder for hitters. Is that a sinker at the ankles or a four-seamer for strike three? Wyatt Langford still isn’t sure:
One more picture to show you what was on Langford’s mind as he challenged a pitch that was completely inside the zone:
Baseball Prospectus publishes arsenal metrics that attempt to quantify the interaction between pitches. By their formulation, Joyce’s sinker has made both his four-seamer and slider harder to identify, because they both look somewhat like the sinker. Joyce hasn’t thrown enough innings this year to have anything approaching a sufficient sample, but he’s never missed more bats, never drawn more chases, and never made batters look more foolish.
Maybe everyone should find some new fastball to add. I have to admit that I was down on Joyce’s outlook when he first hit the majors; I didn’t think that a pitcher could survive on just a fastball, no matter how good that fastball was. And truthfully, he wasn’t that great at first; in his first two seasons, he paired a below-average strikeout rate with an ugly walk rate. But by leaning into what he does best – throwing fastballs – and experimenting with new ways to get the most out of it, he’s turned into something wholly different. He’s still extremely wild, but I have a feeling that the two-fastball version of Joyce is going to end up as one of the best relievers in baseball in the next year or two.