Logan Gilbert and the tinker, tailor, soldier, thrive approach

The Mariners righty keeps improving

Sometimes I hesitate to write about Logan Gilbert because I don’t want to be the guy who only ever writes about Logan Gilbert. (I have no such hesitation about writing about Gabe Speier because he needs more public recognition.) But as I mentioned on Saturday’s episode of Meet at the Mitt, I recently discovered that Gilbert’s having an historic season, so people need to know.

This year, 17.7% of Gilbert’s pitches have gotten swinging strikes, which is the most dominant outcome a pitcher can achieve. Dating back to 2002 (as far back as the FanGraphs data set goes for this), there have been 4,137 player-seasons in which a starter has pitched at least 50 innings. Of those 4,137, Logan Gilbert is fifth—fifth—by swinging-strike rate. That is, only four times has a starter had a larger percentage of his pitches result in a whiff. Ahead of him, you’ve got three seasons in a row spun by Jacob deGrom from 2020-2022 and then Spencer Strider in 2023. Past that, Gilbert’s 2025 stands alone. Gerrit Cole’s never reached Gilbert’s peak. Neither has Chris Sale. Nor Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, or Max Scherzer.

As you’d expect for a pitcher who’s a famous tinkerer, Gilbert has made some changes that are helping him achieve this result. But it’s a different kind of tinkering. He spent most of the early part of his career adjusting his pitch mix, trying out new ones, changing the shapes of others. Look at how much he used to play with his pitch usage, with colors swinging up and down, disappearing and reappearing.

I’ve written about this evolution a fair amount (see here, here, and here), but he’s essentially locked it in at this point. He’s down to essentially just four pitches, all of which are good. His slider’s his best pitch, and you’ll see it the most, just over a third of the time. His fastball is the foundation everything else plays off, and you’ll get that about a third of the time too. The last third will be filled up with splitters and Uncle Charlie, using more splitters against lefties and curves against righties. He’ll also throw a couple sinkers a game just to annoy Cal Raleigh.

What I’ve covered less has been the other way he tinkers: with his mechanics. This was most noticeable last season when he began pulling his hands farther back as part of his motion, also leaning back, which winds his body up more. Check out side-by-sides from 2023 and 2024 at the same points in his delivery.

To get an idea of both changes, try reading the letters on his jersey in the bottom photos. In 2023, his hands are blocking it, but in 2024, it’s clear. And even if his hands weren’t blocking it in 2023, you’d still probably only get the first half of the word, compared to the full thing in 2024.

The change in his hand position originally developed coming into 2022 as a way to keep runners on second from seeing the ball in his glove, which he says he did after looking at how Corbin Burnes does it. But it led naturally to the other adjustments that developed over the course of two-plus seasons until arriving at the change in his body. These adjustments didn’t really start to click until the Mariners’ April 2024 series in Toronto. “If I remember it, I was warming up before the game . . . and when [my hands] were coming from higher in catch play, it felt like my arms were just unwinding better, putting me in a better spot.”

“Any time I came back here, then I’d start counter-rotating, and I was coming from a good place,” he says. “I knew what I was trying to do and it was a drastic change, and then I kind of found what’s comfortable within that. And that’s what you use long-term.”

The hand positioning was a deliberate change, but that kicked off a string of other little adjustments to make it work. In other words, first he tinkered, then he tailored.

Similarly, moving into this year, he’s been adjusting his arm slot. As you can see from the Baseball Savant visual, he’s gone from pretty hard over the top to something more like three-quarters.

One of the results has been that over time, he’s been cutting down on his vertical approach angle, knocking half a degree off between 2023 and 2025. That’s a rather extreme adjustment as VAA goes. It means his fastball looks like it’s going to fall more in the zone than it actually does, so a batter is more likely to swing underneath a fastball. That’s an incredible advantage for Gilbert since his arsenal is based so much on vertical movement. His slider has much more vertical break and less horizontal break than average, and splitters and curves are designed to fall off the table. By increasing the contrast with his four-seamer, all four pitches play up, and he’s missing more bats.

Having made those adjustments, he’s just absolutely powering through this season with less game-to-game variation than we’re used to seeing out of Gilbert. In particular, he appears to have the feel for his splitter basically every time he takes the mound this season, which is hard to do with a feel pitch. Despite the interruption in his season, the stentorian righty has been the same version of himself in each outing. He tinkered, he tailored, and now he’s soldiering.

It’s led to an almost 10% bump in his strikeout rate, which is all the way up to 36.8%, and he’s doing that without a corresponding increase in his walk rate. If it weren’t for a somewhat fluky home-run-per-fly-ball rate, this would definitively be Gilbert’s best season ever. Statcast agrees, giving him an xERA (which accounts for strikeouts, walks, and HBPs as normal, but then adjusts contact for what you’d typically expect based on the quality of contact rather than the result) of just 2.63, the fifth best among starters this year. Tinker. Tailor. Soldier. Thrive.