Sweeper (ST)

Definition

A sweeper is a variant of a slider that has become popular in the Major Leagues over the last few seasons. The main characteristic of a sweeper is a large amount of horizontal movement, as opposed to a traditional slider, which has "tighter" break.

A sweeper tends to be thrown slower than a traditional slider, which gives it more time to "sweep" across the strike zone. Where the average MLB slider breaks about six inches horizontally, the average sweeper breaks about 15 inches. You might hear a sweeper referred to as a "Frisbee slider" because of the way it moves.

While a harder slider tends to rely more on deception by resembling a pitcher's fastball, a sweeper is effective because of how much it breaks across the plate. The sweeper's amount of movement makes it hard for a hitter to square up the ball, so sweepers can often produce weak contact or swings and misses.

Grip

There's more than one way to throw a sweeper, but the pitch tends to be thrown either with side-spin (with the pitcher "getting around" the baseball) or with a two-seam grip.

The orientation of the seams in a sweeper grip can make the baseball move a larger amount horizontally than the hitter expects due to a concept known as "seam-shifted wake," where the way air moves around the ball on its flight toward home plate creates additional movement.

A traditional "gyro" slider, by contrast, is thrown with bullet spin -- that is, it spirals like a football on its way to the plate.

Origin

The sweeper is still a relatively new pitch, with more and more pitchers starting to throw it. Though pitchers like Adam Ottavino and Yu Darvish have been throwing sweeping sliders for years, the sweeper first became trendy as its own pitch type from late 2021 into early 2022, when it was popularized by teams like the Dodgers and Yankees and other pitchers around the league and the "sweeper" name started to become increasingly used.

Pitchers can -- and do -- throw both a sweeper and a "normal" slider. Because of the sweeper's distinct shape and movement, Statcast added it as a new pitch type classification in 2023.

In A Call

"sweeping slider," "Frisbee slider"