I’ve written before about one of my favorite baseball traditions: The Rays make a run to the playoffs, and because they’re not the Yankees or Red Sox, and they turn over their entire 40-man roster every 24 months, they show up on TV with a bunch of guys the average sports fan has never heard of.
Come October, America is introduced to a weird reliever when he throws three perfect innings in the ALDS. “Who the frick is this guy?” America asks. “And how does anyone hit him?”
There was a time in the fall of 2019 when I was telling people my favorite active ballplayer was Diego Castillo. The next year, the Rays came prepared with half a dozen idiosyncratic relievers — the infamous Clock Bullpen — and rode them to Game 6 of the World Series. Remember when Ryan Thompson was a shutdown high-leverage reliever? That was weird!
Up here in 2026, the Rays reliever production line giveth once again, because Bryan Baker is laying low all who oppose him. Baker is far from a hot young ingenue; this is his sixth major league season, the Rays are his third big league team, and he’s 31 years old.
I didn’t realize this when he started showing up near the top of the Baseball Savant leaderboards, but I’ve seen Baker pitch in the playoffs before. He was part of a woeful Orioles bullpen that rolled out the red carpet for the Rangers in the 2023 ALDS. Baker appeared in one game and walked three of the four batters he faced; all three came around to score. (This was Game 2, an 11-8 Texas win at Camden Yards in which Corey Seager walked five times, to his escalating annoyance.)
Three years later, Baker is one of the top closers in the AL. He has a 1.56 ERA and 28 saves in 31 opportunities. Earlier this month, he made the All-Star team for the first time, though his appearance in the game itself — five pitches to record the last out of the ninth inning in a somnambulant 4-0 win — will likely only be remembered by those close to Baker himself.
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Obviously, something has changed since October 2023. Most obviously: He stopped throwing his slider. When he was with the Orioles, Baker threw his slider more than a quarter of the time, with intermittent effectiveness. In 2023, opponents hit .146 with a .171 slugging percentage off Baker’s breaking ball, but the pitch only got whiffs 25.5% of the time. That was simultaneously a career high for Baker and 164th out of 200 pitchers who threw 200 or more sliders that season.
Baker’s other two pitches are far more interesting. He throws from one of the highest arm slots in the league — 55 degrees. He is 6-foot-6 and doesn’t get great extension, which means he’s letting go of the ball from an outrageously high release point. Out of the 378 pitchers who have thrown at least 500 pitches in the majors this year, he has the 11th-highest average vertical release point.
There are two things you can do with a high release point like this. First, you can do what I’ll call the Pete Fairbanks approach, contrasting a pure backspin fastball with rise and cut against a breaking ball with violent downward drop. Trevor Megill works like this too, as does this year’s Tigers first-rounder Cameron Flukey.
Pitching in an elevator shaft maximizes the vertical distance between fastball and breaking ball without inducing much horizontal movement on either pitch, and thus avoiding platoon issues. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s definitely one approach.
Baker never pitched like that. His slider, despite being a traditional slider rather than a sweeper, always had more side-to-side movement. But he also throws a changeup. A good one, in fact.
The other way to work out of a high release point is the Trey Yesavage approach: Same cut-action four-seamer, but with an offspeed pitch with spin-based based movement that mimics the fastball. But because the changeup comes in slower, it has more time to drop and fade. This leads to a devastating tunneling effect.
The spin axes of Baker’s fastball and changeup are only separated by a couple ticks, but the observed movement on the two pitches is terribly different. The fastball backspins to give the perception of rise, while the changeup wanders off at a little past two o’clock, from Baker’s perspective.
Consider the plight of Travis Bazzana, a fellow first-time All-Star, who met Baker over the weekend. Bazzana recognized a first-pitch changeup, but too late to check his swing.
The next pitch looked like it was headed toward the same spot, but by the time Bazzana realized it was a fastball at the top of the zone, it was by him.
It’s incredibly difficult for a hitter to read which pitch is which. So why throw anything else?
The Rays traded for Baker a little over a year ago, and they’ve had him make some tweaks since then. He’s throwing harder, and he’s using a new changeup grip for 2026, but it looks like the first thing the Rays had Baker do when he got to St. Pete was stop throwing that ridiculous slider.
The pitcher with the unhittable fastball-changeup combination is now all fastball-changeup, all the time. And he throws those two pitches in roughly equal proportions to both right- and left-handed hitters. He has one pitch that always tells the truth and one pitch that always lies.
Those adjustments have had an indifferent effect on Baker as a bat-misser. He ranks 34th out of 167 qualified relievers in K% and 54th in whiff rate, and his strikeout rate is actually a few points lower than it was last year.
But while he’s not missing the entire bat, he’s missing the barrel as well as anyone in the league. Baker ran a 12.6% barrel rate and a 48.3% HardHit% last year; those figures were second- and fifth-worst in the whole league among qualified relievers.
This year, his barrel rate is in the 75th percentile and his HardHit% is in the 84th. His xwOBACON went from the worst 1% in the league to the best 4%. And this is without a real breaking ball to speak of; half of these results are coming on a four-seamer.
Among the 270 pitchers who have thrown 200 or more four-seamers this year, Baker has the second-best opponent batting average and the 10th-best wOBA. And yeah, anytime a career middle reliever turns into prime Jonathan Papelbon out of nowhere, there’s some batted ball luck involved, but even accounting for that, Baker’s opponent xBA on his four-seamer is just .193, which puts him one spot ahead of Paul Skenes on the leaderboard.
Baker’s changeup is tying hitters in knots as well; he’s sixth in opponent wOBA and fifth in opponent xwOBA. Both figures come in under .200, placing him among such pitchers as Dylan Cease, Cristopher Sánchez, and the up-and-coming Padres hurler Bradgley Rodriguez.
Unless the Rays fall into a swoon for the ages, we’re going to see Baker get another shot at the postseason. Remember the name when the time comes; you’ll look smart in front of your friends.