America’s Most Sideways Pitcher Is Having Another Unusual Start

I’ve gotten prematurely excited about Nick Lodolo before. This is not that. I’ve consulted my physician and I’m working on the problem. But he’s such a weird pitcher I can’t completely forget him.

What’s he up to now? Well, believe it or not, El Cóndor del Río Ohio is not walking anyone. Maybe that’ll change when he starts against the Mariners tonight, but through his first three starts, Lodolo has faced 71 batters and walked only one. And while he suffers the same predilection for hitting batters that plagues many long-levered sidearmers, Lodolo has plunked just one opponent in 2025.

Last season, Lodolo was pretty unremarkable in terms of command and control. Out of 126 pitchers with 100 or more innings pitched, Lodolo had the 57th-highest walk rate. He was 57th in Zone%, and 111th in Location+. PitchingBot was a little nicer to the big lefty, giving him a 52, which was 80th among 100-inning pitchers.

This year, Lodolo is throwing more strikes: He’s up to 28th out of 85 qualified starters in Zone%. And while opponents are swinging more at pitches in the zone, they’re hitting about 100 points worse on those pitches than they did last year.

The small-sample red flags are present (sub-.200 BABIP, lower whiff rate, similar chase rate despite much higher Z-Swing%), but Lodolo’s done this against pretty good competition. One of his starts came against Milwaukee, which, eh, whatever. But he’s now faced a red-hot Giants team twice and shut them down both times. Coming out of the weekend, San Francisco has scored two runs in 12 innings off Lodolo and 73 runs in 120 1/3 innings off all other pitchers.

For those of you who didn’t click through to the article I linked in the first graf, first of all: Shame on you. But unless you’re an NL Central fan, you might not be intimately familiar with the Reds left-hander. In which case, you’re confused by my attempt to stick him a sobriquet like “El Cóndor.”

Lodolo is 6-foot-6, with arms long enough to embrace the moon, and he throws from one of the lowest arm angles you’ll see from a starting pitcher. The only two left-handed starters, or starter-adjacent-type guys, who throw from a wider horizontal release point are Chris Sale and Ryan Yarbrough. And both Sale and Yarbrough start with their shoulder a good six inches further from their center of mass than Lodolo does.

If you have even a passing familiarity with Sale, or with Randy Johnson, you know that a pitcher with an arm angle this extreme seemingly releases the ball behind a same-handed batter. See poor Sal Frelick in the video above; if it looks like he thinks the ball is going to hit him, that’s because if Lodolo threw a pitch straight forward from that release point, it would.

That extreme angle means that for all practical purposes, Lodolo pitches sideways. Everything he throws spins in a different direction than you’d expect from a lefty. For instance, the backspin that gives a four-seam fastball rise actually does nothing of the sort from Lodolo’s arm angle. In fact, it pulls the pitch hard left. As a result, Lodolo’s fastball has two inches more induced horizontal break than any other four-seamer in baseball, but it also drops precipitously.

Actually, let’s compare Lodolo to two other really good left-handed pitchers who generally inhabit the Jack Skellington body type: Max Fried and Blake Snell. Both Fried and Snell throw from either a high three-quarters angle or over the top, depending on where you draw the line, and look at the difference in spin direction on the three pitch types all three pitchers throw.

The effect is extreme. Lodolo gets — and this is not an exaggeration — over 18 inches more arm-side run on his four-seamer than Fried does. At the same time, Fried gets — likewise, not an exaggeration — over 18 inches more IVB on his curveball.

My favorite thing about Lodolo’s hot start, however, is what happens when the ball doesn’t spin very much.

Last year, Lodolo’s changeup was pretty unremarkable. Opponents hit .232 and slugged .390 off it, and Baseball Savant had the pitch as a run below league average. This year, he’s taken about 10% of the spin — 200 rpm, give or take — off the pitch. The movement is more or less the same as it was last year, and it hasn’t turned into a monster swing-and-miss pitch. He’s thrown 59 of them so far this year, generating a whiff rate of 18.9%.

By contrast, 24 of Lodolo’s changeups have been put in play, including one sacrifice bunt. And I’m a little annoyed, to be honest, because we almost had a situation where Lodolo’s 24 changeups in play resulted in 24 outs: one single, one double play, and 22 field outs. Unfortunately, there’s an error sprinkled in there, which I imagine annoys Lodolo for reasons other than lost symmetry.

My man, you have got to keep your eye on the ball.

That error is what it is; hitters can get wood on Lodolo’s changeup pretty easily, but they’re having a devil of a time hitting it hard. Of those 24 balls in play, 13 came off the bat at less than 85 mph. Only three came with an xBA over .300. Baseball hasn’t seen weak contact like this since Dermot Mulroney’s attempt to stay in touch with his son in Angels in the Outfield.

It is interesting that opponents are hitting the stuffing out of Lodolo’s four-seamer, but can’t square up a pitch with virtually identical horizontal movement and not that big of a velocity spread.

If this is anything other than small-sample wonkiness, my working theory is this: While the velocity difference between Lodolo’s fastballs and his changeup is modest, his consistency of velocity within the pitch type is excellent. If a hitter comes out of his shoes swinging at what he thinks is a fastball, but it’s a changeup, he’s not going to miss it, but he is going to get on top of the ball for a weak grounder. Which is what we’re seeing here. And because Lodolo’s changeup is exclusively in the 85-to-88 mph range, there’s no chance of the hitter squaring it up by accident.

Anyway, questions persist about America’s most sideways starting pitcher, but he’s been exceptional through three starts. Whether those gains are real, and if so, whether they persist remains to be seen.