Emerson Hancock, the breakout star of the vaunted Mariners rotation in 2026, turned in another strong start last night against the Mets, going six innings with seven strikeouts and giving up just two runs, both on solo homers. This, in and of itself, is not particularly surprising; Hancock, one day after his 27th birthday, has settled into a steady hand in the Mariners rotation, and this kind of line now feels like just another day at the office for Hancock.
What is surprising is how he got there:
last year, Hancock’s four seam-sinker combo accounted for over two-thirds of his pitches, with his changeup accounting for the bulk of the rest and a slider/sweeper rounding it out. He was a classic pronator, working within what Mario Delgado Genzor has termed the “pronator’s triangle.” Here’s Hancock’s pitch mix in 2025, with his particular pronator’s triangle skillfully drawn in for you:
A quick review, if you don’t know: Pitchers with a supination bias, or supinators, get on the outside of the ball as they release it (you can remember this by imagining scooping up a big spoonful of delicious soup), leading to glove-side movement. These kinds of pitchers excel at pitches that rely on horizontal movement like sweepers, cutters, and curveballs. Pitchers with pronation bias, on the other hand, stay to the inside of the ball, ending palm-out. Pronators are able to get significant arm-side run. While pronators tend to throw a very spin efficient fastball, leading to more ride up in the zone, that comes at a cost of horizontal movement, limiting their options to enhance their arsenals with things like sweepers or cutters.
But in 2026, Hancock changed up his pitch mix, somehow magically developing all those pitches that are supposed to be off-limits to pronators, as Michael Rosen examined in his article on FanGraphs about how Hancock dropped his arm angle and spin efficiency and in doing so escaped “low slot pronator jail”. All of a sudden we don’t have a triangle so much as we have…Massachussetts.
The cutter, while still classified as a hard pitch like the fourseam or sinker, has a totally different movement profile – while the sinker and four-seamer move armside, the cutter moves gloveside, although Hancock will still throw it to both sides of the plate, making things even less predictable for hitters.
Pronation and supination bias is just that – a bias, a tendency. Not every pitcher will throw every pitch exactly the same, and some pitchers are neutral, able to stay behind the ball as they release, creating backspin. It’s very hard for a dominant pronator to become a full supinator, though, and vice-versa. But it seems that Emerson Hancock has achieved at least part chameleon-status, and in doing so, unlocked a whole new arsenal for himself.
“I think in the past I’ve been a pronator – it’s not something that I really pay attention to,” said Hancock this week. “But I struggled with spin for a while, so then I practiced it a ton and then got better at spin. So I feel like it does kind of balance out, and it might be more supination biased now.”
Don’t let this high-level pitching talk fool you, though. Hancock likes to keep things simple. He doesn’t train at a high tech facility full of advanced gadgets like TrackMan or Rapsodo; his small gym in Georgia has a nine-pocket net, the kind you can get at any sporting goods store, and occasionally a freshman catcher, home from Kennesaw State for the holidays. What he does do is set himself a goal and then pursues it relentlessly.
“I went into the off-season knowing what I needed to work on, and I think – for me it’s just about finding the right grip that feels comfortable, see what the movement’s doing, and then seeing like, is it worth chasing a little bit more here? Or is it like, that’s what that pitch is, let’s maximize it with that movement.”
The results might only be showing up for Hancock this season, but he’s been working on developing his sweeper since last year, when he started experimenting with mixing in the sweeper. Those early experiments were rough – hitters crushed the pitch to a .436 wOBA. But the underlying metrics (xBA, xSLG) were good, and the pitch also returned the highest whiff rate and highest K% of his career. For Hancock, who hadn’t been able to get his strike rate out of the teens in parts of three big-league seasons, that was enough for him to keep working on the pitch.
Experimenting this off-season, Hancock had twin objectives to conquer: find a way to get more movement on his pitches, and then get comfortable with the unpredictable nature of those pitches. With the sweeper, especially, the pitch location can be…unpredictable.
But Hancock has found a way to make that unpredictability work for him.
“When I think about the movement of the pitches, it’s like, is it good to have a pitch that you know is going to move exactly the same every time, or is it good to have a pitch that’s slower and might not move the same? So understanding when the pitches don’t move as much as you think they did, understanding why, and then the pitches that did do more, what did you do differently, to try to fix that?”
“With the sweeper, at times you can see when it really catches and takes off, there’ll be 20; sometimes it’s 13. So it’s like understanding, in my opinion, a lot of it is how your body’s moving. So I think as I trained it that off-season, it probably started leaning a little bit more supination, like, spin, spin, spin, and then maybe getting through that four-seam a little bit more. And even as a supinator, you can still find a way to have sinkers that have a lot of movement on them.”
The sweeper is getting the lion’s share of attention in Hancock’s revamped arsenal, but not enough attention has been paid to the other big change: his addition of a cutter. Like the sweeper, the cutter is a pitch Hancock toyed with in previous years, mostly in 2024. The pitch got crushed, this time without any of the fun whiff numbers of the sweeper, and Hancock subsequently eliminated it from his arsenal in 2025 while focusing on the sweeper. But in 2026 he’s brought the pitch back, and it’s given him a weapon for both suppressing contact and creating whiffs.
The big difference for the cutter has been a significant increase in horizontal movement – from 2.6 inches in 2024 to 4 inches of glove-side movement in 2026.
“[The cutter] was a pitch that at times in the past had been slower, and I know that if I was going to play the game of having a slow pitch and a fast pitch, in my head it’s like, something needs to be in the middle. The bridge pitch. The one that kind of keeps everything going. Keeps them off the sweeper, keeps them off the fastball, helps with left-handed hitters, as well. Over the off-season, as I continued to throw it, I got good feel with it, so I was able to throw it a little bit harder. I feel like that’s helped me in a way, because I know when I need to take a little bit off it, and when I want to get on one a little bit more, I can.”
In addition to changing up the velocity on the cutter, Hancock has also been able to vary where he locates the pitch, equally willing to back foot it to a lefty at 85 mph or dial it up to 88 and bore it in on a righty’s hands for weak contact outs in the air. In varying his locations and velocities, Hancock not only keeps hitters off his fastball or sweeper; he keeps hitters off the cutter itself.
“[I have] the ability to be like, all right, I know that I need to go under with it, to keep them from knowing like, hey, if something pops on the outer half it’s probably that cutter.”
Unlike the sweeper, which can sometimes have a mind of its own, Hancock feels he is master and commander over the cutter despite it being a newer addition to his arsenal. For Hancock, the actual feel of the cutter wasn’t his challenge; instead, it’s the conviction behind the pitch he had to learn, where it fits and how he wants to use it.
“You can use [the cutter] early, but you also know where you’re targeting two strikes late. For me, it’s kind of easy for me to throw. It feels really good coming out of the hand, and just knowing the purpose behind each one in each count, that helps…It’s so hard to describe. You hear a lot of pitchers talk about the feel of the ball in the hand. For me, when I release it, I can feel that. So it’s so hard to feel the same every time, but you try to coordinate the feel to what’s actually happening in your mind.”
The addition of the sweeper and cutter haven’t just improved Hancock’s overall arsenal in more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts fashion; they’ve transformed him as a pitcher, from someone stuck in the pronator’s triangle to a pitcher who can pick, choose, and adjust to game situations better than ever before.
“They all complement each other in a way,” he said of the pitches in his arseanl. “If you have the two heaters that keeps you off each one, you know the sweeper is slower, it’s different; the cutter is kind of in-between; and then the changeup for me is something that I feel like is always there, even if it’s like a game by game basis. If it feels really good, we know we can use it. So I think going game by game with those pitches is like seeing where you’re at, seeing what’s feeling good, and then we can go from that. In the past, we didn’t have that option. You kind of had to pitch a certain way and hope you were able to get weak contact in certain situations, and now it feels like we have a little bit more options.”
Last night, Hancock was able to put yet another wrinkle into his game facing the lefty-heavy Mets, pulling the infrequently-used curveball out of his arsenal, using the cutter unpredictably in counts, and once in a while popping in the sweeper to remind the Mets he had that in his toolkit as well.
“That’s huge. If you feel like you have to pitch one certain way…I mean, this game is so hard, the hitters are so good, it can be so unpredictable at times. So I think it’s like, on an inning by inning basis or a game by game basis, to be able to say this one feels good, this one doesn’t feel good this inning, but it might feel good in the fifth or the sixth, that’s allowed us to be a little bit more creative.”
For Hancock, it’s been the difference between pitching on his heels, constantly battling to outfox hitters, and controlling the at-bat, wrong-footing hitters with a pitch mix that’s as unpredictable as his own rise to prominence this year after spending the first few years of his career yo-yoing between Triple-A and the bigs, in the rotation and in the bullpen. Hancock is trying to take it all in stride and not get too far ahead of himself, focusing on one day at a time while not forgetting the struggles that have brought him here.
“It’s been a long journey, and it keeps going. I think about like, being here in 2020 when there were metal lockers here, and Covid, and everything that’s happened since then.”
“It’s really cool to see hard work pay off.“
