The most important trend in pitching right now has nothing to do with velocity. It has to do with shapes.
As Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci recently detailed, pitchers across baseball are adding weapons to their arsenals at an unprecedented rate—developing “lab-grown” pitches in technology-driven facilities, throwing three different fastballs, creating movement in multiple directions to keep hitters off balance. The result is a game increasingly hostile to hitters, who must now decode not just velocity but an ever-expanding menu of shapes on every pitch.
The Houston Astros, believe it or not, have been ahead of this curve. The problem is that their most interesting pitchers keep ending up on the injured list before anyone can appreciate what they’re doing.
What’s Been Lost
Take Tatsuya Imai. The right-hander signed from Japan this offseason brought one of the most unique arsenals in the sport: a “reverse” slider with arm-side movement instead of the typical glove-side break, and multiple splitter grips designed to produce different looks. Pitch analysts struggled to classify his breaking ball. It behaved, at times, like a screwball. Three starts into his Astros career, he was on the injured list with arm fatigue. Houston barely got to see what he could do.
Hunter Brown, the staff ace, had trimmed his approach to a cleaner four-seamer, sinker, and curveball mix before his Grade 2 shoulder strain ended his season in early April. Cristian Javier, who built his career on the kind of pitch-shaping deception Verducci describes, followed shortly after with the same diagnosis.
The pitchers who remain have been adapting in real time.
What Remains
Lance McCullers Jr. arrived at spring training having largely reinvented himself, ditching the sweeper that defined his 2025 return and building around a sinker-cutter-curveball approach with improved velocity. Spencer Arrighetti added a sinker to his arsenal this winter to give himself a sixth pitch option, and in his first start of 2026 leaned into a revamped curveball, throwing it to left-handed hitters at a 51% clip, generating a 42% swinging-strike rate on the pitch. Mike Burrows has been throwing fewer four-seamers and introducing more sinkers, while his slider has gained nearly three miles per hour and significant movement, enough that analysts believe it may soon be reclassified as a cutter.
These are not accidental changes. Astros pitching coach Josh Miller has been working individually with each starter to expand and refine their arsenals. Arrighetti has spoken openly about wanting to avoid becoming two-dimensional against right-handed hitters, which is precisely the kind of self-awareness that drives the pitch-shaping trend Verducci documents.
The challenge, of course, is that none of it matters if the pitchers can’t stay on the mound. Houston has already used 10 different starters through its first 26 games, a number that, as one analyst recently noted, typically represents a team’s full complement for an entire season. The revolving door has made it nearly impossible to evaluate what the rotation actually is, or what it might become.
What we know is this: The Astros are not ignoring the evolution of the game. Their starters, healthy or not, are moving in the direction the sport is heading. The question is whether enough of them can get and stay healthy to show it before the season slips away.
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