2025 World Series: How the splitter became October's top pitch - ESPN

TORONTO — In Game 6 of the World Series on Friday, two of the foremost practitioners of the pitch that has defined October will duel at Rogers Centre. Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto is trying to save his team's season, and Toronto Blue Jays right-hander Kevin Gausman is trying to win his franchise's first championship in more than 30 years, and both will rely heavily on the split-fingered fastball, an offering that for almost 20 years teetered on the brink of extinction in Major League Baseball.

The rise of the splitter over the past half a decade — fueled by the emergence of elite pitching from Japan, where the the offering is a standard part of nearly every pitcher's arsenal, and the softening on its use by MLB teams that at one point had forbid the pitch, fearful that it directly led to elbow injuries — has transformed baseball even more than the cutter and sweeper once did. Because it's a superior pitch to all of them.

«If you can throw it near the strike zone,» Clayton Kershaw said, «it's the best pitch in the game.»

In recent years, Kershaw began throwing a split-change, finally finding a comfortable variation of a changeup after spending his 18-year future Hall of Fame career in search of one. He is far from alone. This postseason, 32 pitchers, representing nearly a quarter of playoff hurlers, have thrown splitters. Since the advent of pitch tracking in 2008, the highest percentage of splitters thrown among overall pitches in October was 3.2% last year. Most seasons, it ranged between 0.2% and 2%.

This October, 6.8% of all pitches have been splitters, a staggering number that reflects the game's wholesale embrace. It's not just Gausman (who has thrown the pitch 41.4% of the time in the