2025 In A Discarded-On-The-Dugout-Floor Nutshell
I’m not going to put his season in a discarded nutshell, because that’s what his season was itself. You should not care about Jordan Hicks’ results in 2025. Someone reading this, or someone reading the
headline and nothing else, is going to see that he finished the season with a 6.95 ERA and write him off entirely. I’m here to tell you not to do that. You’re going to do that anyway, but don’t. Please.
The Good
Hicks’ sinker averaged 97.5 mph. It also came with about 17 inches of horizontal run. The list of pitchers who can throw a sinker with that much movement that hard is a very short one. The pitch returned a 68% ground ball rate, but hitters still hit .297 against it, thanks to a .341 batting average on balls in play. That screams positive regression in the future.
The Bad
The results. Most of the results were bad. I am not trying to convince you that Jordan Hicks was good. He was objectively bad. The Red Sox acquired Hicks because of his stuff. He was injured when he was acquired and tried to make adjustments on the fly. He raised his arm angle, tweaked some pitch shapes, and tried to make other adjustments on the fly. It didn’t work. Bear with me; I’m getting to the good stuff, I swear.
Best Game or Moment
He got the final five outs in a one-run game against the Dodgers for his second save as a member of the Red Sox.
The Big Question/2026 and Beyond
No two players are the same, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make comparisons. Garrett Whitlock was a shutdown reliever when he first debuted in 2021, and the was shifted to the rotation, where he struggled with injuries. When he returned to the bullpen, he became a shutdown reliever once again. Aroldis Chapman struggled with command at every step throughout a very long career. Then he arrived in Boston, and suddenly became a strike thrower after one offseason with the team. Jordan Hicks is something of a combination of the two of them: a reliever who turned into starter who’s dealt with injuries and had trouble throwing strikes, before being turned back into a reliever. Yes, he had a terrible season. No, that doesn’t mean he’ll be terrible forever.
The Red Sox aren’t going to ask Jordan Hicks to start (I hope). The last time he spent a full season as a reliever, his sinker averaged 100.1 mph over 65 appearances. In 2025, the league hit .200 against sinkers 99 mph or faster. With a healthy offseason, working only as a reliever, he’ll likely improve on his 97 mph average in 2025.
The big question is, can he get strikes with his secondary pitches? His sinker plays against both sides of the plate. It returned about a 66% strike rate, with lefties hitting it on the ground 62% of the time, and righties 73% of the time. The issue is where he goes from there.
Against lefties, he didn’t have a single secondary pitch with a strike rate over 60%. His sweeper was a decent weapon against right-handed hitters when he was with the Giants, returning a 46.5% swinging strike rate and 66% strike rate. When he arrived in Boston, though, he ditched his sweeper for a more traditional slider, which was incredibly ineffective.
Looking back at his most effective seasons in relief, we see a pattern of him keeping it simple. In 2019, when he registered a 3.14 ERA, his sinker and slider accounted for 94.1% of his pitches. In 2023, when his ERA was 3.29, he used his sinker or sweeper 84.1% of the time. In 2024, he cut his sinker usage and introduced more splitters. It was a necessary adjustment because he was working as a starting pitcher and seeing more left-handed hitters, but it wasn’t the most effective. Last season, he used both his sweeper and slider, as well as splitters and four-seams.
My suggestion, assuming Hicks works as a reliever, is to go back to the basics. Let the sinker eat against both sides of the plate, and pick one of either the slider or the sweeper to use as a breaking ball. As a reliever, I don’t need to see five pitches. Use the sinker a ton, pick one of the two breaking balls, ditch the four-seam, and mix the splitter in against lefties if you want. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Red Sox try to give him a cutter, because that’s what the Red Sox do with low-strike righties, but I don’t think he needs it.
When the Red Sox traded for Jordan Hicks, they knew he had issues. He was injured when they acquired him, and didn’t have a ton of time to work out the kinks before he was thrown into the fire. With a healthy offseason and time in the organization, Hicks could become a late-inning weapon to share the load with Aroldis Chapman and Garrett Whitlock.
