2025 In A Discarded-On-The-Dugout-Floor Nutshell
Hunter Dobbins debuted earlier than just about everyone expected and was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately, injuries cut his season short.
The Good
According to Baseball Savant, Dobbins threw six different pitches.
I’ll ignore his sinker, because there are only 13 of them, and they’re close enough to his splitter to assume they were just harder splitters. I believe Dobbins calls the splitter shown on Savant a “splinker”. I digress.
What’s important is that Dobbins was able to earn strikes with four of the five pitches. He has pitches he can throw against both sides of the plate, raising his ceiling and ability to get deep into games. The righty also didn’t hand out free passes (6.6% walk rate) and kept the ball on the ground (48.4% ground ball rate).
The Bad
A 17.6% strikeout rate isn’t high enough to succeed in a major league rotation over a full season. Dobbins only punched out 16.1% of the lefties he faced. Those numbers have to come up if he wants to win a spot in the rotation next season.
Best Game or Moment
Dobbins talked (potentially misinformed) shit about the Yankees, went into Yankee Stadium, and earned a win on Sunday Night Baseball. Less than a week later, he blanked the Yankees over six innings at Fenway. One of the fastest ways to earn the admiration of Red Sox fans is to publicly trash New York. Dobbins did just that and backed it up.
The Big Question/2026 and Beyond
Where will the strikeouts come from? His fastball, despite good velocity, hardly missed any bats at all. The pitch comes with unexpected cut from his arm angle, which allowed him to miss barrels, but doesn’t return whiffs. Against righties, he went to the sweeper frequently with two strikes, but it wasn’t a dominant option. His slider was used in the strike zone at a high rate, but could be an option with two strikes going forward.
Against lefties, the story is a little different. His curveball earned whiffs, and his splitter flashed swing-and-miss stuff at times. The issue was that Dobbins didn’t get to two-strike counts often enough. He threw his fastball 41% of the time against lefties and returned a 72% strike rate. However, of 185 fastballs thrown to lefties, he generated just five whiffs. The ball was in play before he could get to two-strike counts, preventing him from getting punchouts. Going forward, I’d expect a change in his mix to lefties. His fastball shape, as is, isn’t going to miss a ton of bats if he’s throwing it 40% of the time. He was able to throw his slider in the zone to lefties; increasing its usage at the expense of the fastball might keep the ball out of play more frequently. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Dobbins play with his splitter, moving to a more traditional splitter with more velocity separation from his fastball. Regardless, Dobbins’ ability to get to two-strike counts and subsequently put hitters away will be key in his future success.
