Year of the splitter? Once a dark art, the pitch is primed to take over baseball

By Zack Meisel, Cody Stavenhagen and Stephen J. Nesbitt

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — A decade ago, on a dusty baseball diamond in Puerto Rico, a veteran pitcher shared with Fernando Cruz the secrets of throwing a splitter, a pitch treated like a black-market product, a dark art best learned in the shadows and deployed at one’s own risk.

Cruz was a converted infielder pitching in winter ball back home and trying to catch on with a major league organization. He couldn’t command the splitter. “Started hitting people with it,” he said. “Started bouncing it.” But he stuck with it because, when it was right, it was like sorcery. Hitters read it as a fastball and couldn’t recover as the baseball dived below their bat path.

By the time the Cincinnati Reds signed Cruz in 2022, he had wrestled the splitter into submission. Triple-A pitching coach Casey Weathers told him, “Use it, because nobody can hit it.” Cruz made his major league debut at 32. He said he owes it all to the splitter, which has generated a .085 batting average and one of the highest whiff rates of any pitch in baseball.

“I call it my gift from God,” Cruz said.

The baseball weapon known as the “Pitch of the ‘80s” became a devastating tool Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling and John Smoltz deployed to pile up strikeouts in the ‘90s. Then it all but disappeared as it earned a reputation for wrecking pitchers’ arms due to the strain it was believed to put on the pitching elbow. Some organizations forbade its use entirely. 

That meant learning to throw the pitch required meeting with an expert in a discrete location. Eddie Guardado spread the splitter gospel in the Seattle bullpen in the mid-aughts, teaching J.J. Putz his grip as they sat on folding chairs 400 feet from home plate. Putz relayed the code to Bryan Shaw in Arizona’s pen in 2011. Ten years later, Shaw shared the secrets with Trevor Stephan in Cleveland. It was a local legend, a haunting myth passed down by word of mouth.

Now, the stigma is softening. Almost every day this spring, it seems, a big-league pitcher unveils his new splitter: Zack Wheeler with the Phillies, Hunter Greene with the Reds, Jordan Hicks with the Giants, Bryce Miller with the Mariners, Matt Manning with the Tigers. Yoshinobu Yamamoto makes his MLB debut for the Los Angeles Dodgers Thursday in Korea, after riding a feared splitter — which could immediately be the best in MLB — to a $325 million contract. Splitters accounted for 2.2 percent of all pitches last season, the highest mark since pitch-tracking began in 2008.

That might have been but a precursor to the next pitching revolution we’re about to witness. This winter, people throughout the sport posited that 2024 could be the Year of the Splitter, as a long-forbidden pitch threatens a return to the mainstream.

“I feel like it was taboo for the longest time, right?” Tigers pitcher Casey Mize said. “It’s just whispers and conversations. ‘Hey, I really want to throw this pitch. How do you do it?’”

In the late 1970s, a minor leaguer named Hal Baird learned the splitter in a hotel conversation with Fred Martin, the coach who had taught it to Bruce Sutter. Sutter’s splitter carried him from Cubs farmhand to Hall of Famer.

Baird went on to coach at Auburn and continue proselytizing about the splitter. Most of his pitchers picked one up. John Powell set an NCAA strikeout record. Tim Hudson became an MLB All-Star. At Auburn years later, Mize was working to develop a third pitch, and Baird pupil Scott Sullivan passed along photos of his grip. Mize would be the No. 1 pick in the 2018 draft.

“I never knew anybody who had a really good one that didn’t find a way to be successful,” Baird said.

One morning inside the Reds clubhouse this spring, Cruz held his right hand to his thigh, his index and middle fingers spread wide in a “V” shape. As he talked about his splitter, he mimicked an exercise he uses to perfect the way he grips his best pitch. He has practiced it so many times, so many ways, it’s now habitual. He holds his iPhone like he’s gripping a splitter.

“If you want to get to the big leagues,” Cruz said, “you need something special.”

Cruz’s splitter was responsible for 80 of his 98 strikeouts last season, even though he threw the pitch only 35.9 percent of the time. He recorded the fifth-best strikeout rate of any MLB pitcher.

But Cruz does so with eyes wide open, fully conscious of its reputation and why it vanished for so long from the pitching landscape.

“It’s a life-changing pitch, no doubt,” he said. “But it could be the end of anybody’s career.”