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Brandon Pfaadt — former top prospect, 2023 postseason hero, recipient of a long-term extension after just one full season of big league work — lasted only three starts in the major league rotation at the beginning of 2026. After allowing 12 runs in 16 2/3 innings, the Diamondbacks had seen enough. Big contract or no, Pfaadt went off to middle relief.

Pfaadt had a 5.94 ERA and 5.37 FIP when he made his last start on April 11. In 10 bullpen outings that followed — including, it must be said, a couple very strong bulk relief stints — Pfaadt posted a 5.91 ERA and 5.47 FIP in 21 1/3 innings. The next demotion was to Triple-A Reno, an indignity for a pitcher who’d started 65 games across 2024 and 2025. Only Logan Webb and Jake Irvin had made more big league starts in that time.

Pfaadt spent less than four weeks in the minor leagues. When he came back, he went straight back into Arizona’s rotation, and immediately started pitching better than he ever had before.

Pfaadt has gone at least five innings in all 11 starts since June 30. He also pitched six innings in his last start before he got taken out of the rotation; that gives him 12 straight starts in which he qualified for a win. That’s the eighth-longest active streak in the majors. Since June 30, Pfaadt has the 10th-best ERA among pitchers with at least 40 innings; that’s tied to the hundredth of a run with Jacob Misiorowski. He’s eighth among pitchers in WAR and third in WPA since his return to the rotation as well.

And all that’s in spite of a bumpy past two outings; from June 30 to August 14, Pfaadt threw 54 2/3 innings over nine starts. In that time, he went 7-0 with a 1.15 ERA.

That’s a remarkable turnaround, but Pfaadt is both prodigiously talented and quite experienced, and lesser pitchers go through similar metamorphoses all the time. The thing that’s given me a crisis of faith is how Pfaadt has pitched so well.

At the risk of being reductive, the simplest, cleanest way to prevent runs is to prevent contact. I can think of no better example than Misiorowski, whom we were just talking about. Since June 30, the Brewers ace has struck out 70 in 46 innings. Pfaadt has thrown almost half again as many innings as Miz, but in 67 innings, he’s struck out only 41 batters. Out of 113 pitches with 40 innings since June 30, Pfaadt is eighth from the bottom with a 15.8% strikeout rate.

That’s unusual, but again, not unheard of. Pitching to contact got a bad name about 20 years ago when anti-sabermetrics types were trying to hold back the tide. Any right-hander who threw in the high 80s with a K/9 rate under six suddenly became Greg Maddux to those people. The real Maddux, whose command, athleticism, fastball movement, and off-speed stuff were as good as any pitcher’s in history, should’ve sued for defamation every time his name came up in a conversation about Kyle Kendrick or Nick Blackburn.

Now, we know that a pitcher like Pfaadt, who has a six-pitch arsenal and a pristine walk rate, can sneak the ball over or under the barrel of the bat with some expectation of repeatability.

Here’s the thing: Pfaadt had a 5.25 ERA and 5.28 xERA last year, when he was throwing the same six pitches as now. Here’s Pfaadt’s arsenal over the past two seasons, divided at the point of his midseason demotion:

Pfaadt is throwing more four-seamers and changeups, and fewer sinkers and sweepers. He’s tilted his curveball a little, trading about an inch and a half of glove-side movement for an extra two inches of drop. And he’s done the same with his cutter, which now moves slightly arm-side with more rise than before.

I can see how each of those tweaks might help around the margins. He’s getting more separation between his breaking balls now, and his sinker and changeup are a bit more distinct than they were earlier. But none of that explains this:

Every pitch Pfaadt throws is getting fewer whiffs than before. At the same time, his hard-hit rate has also gone down on every pitch but his curveball, and his barrel rate has gone down on every pitch but his cutter. And in most of those cases, the difference is dramatic.

Pfaadt’s four-seamer is his most commonly used pitch. Since his recall at the end of June, his whiff rate on that pitch has gone down by almost half, from 20.7% to 11.6%. At the same time, his xwOBA has gone down by — you guessed it — almost half, from .426 to .244. That shouldn’t be possible when the rest of his repertoire has changed so little.

Is he throwing those pitches in different spots? Well, in some cases:

He’s throwing his sinker and breaking balls in the zone more, but as the season has gone on, batters have chased less and swung at pitches in the zone more:

That’d explain the decrease in whiff rate, but not in quality of contact.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve been poking around for a couple weeks now, trying to find Pfaadt’s secret. Obviously, he’s getting better contact-suppression numbers, but I couldn’t figure out how.

Last Friday, The Athletic ran a column by Tyler Kepner that centered on Pfaadt’s resurgence and featured an interview with the Diamondbacks right-hander. I rejoiced; surely, if Pfaadt had a secret, Tyler would be able to tease it out.

Pfaadt offered two explanations. First: He’s stopped worrying too hard about strikeouts. That’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t necessarily show up in the numbers, but could influence the results. Even so, Pfaadt has pounded the zone since he arrived in the majors; I can’t imagine his approach had too much room left to go in that direction.

The other thing is more obvious: From the time Pfaadt started pitching as a kid, he’s gone into his windup by lifting his hands over his head. When Pfaadt faced Max Scherzer in Game 3 of the 2023 World Series, a lot was made of how similar the two pitchers are in delivery. Here’s Scherzer:

Hands over the head, low arm slot, you can see it in Pfaadt here early this season:

Reno pitching coach Doug Drabek suggested that Pfaadt streamline his delivery by eliminating the hand motion, so here’s what he looked like by mid-August:

I’m all for cleaning things up, but Pfaadt didn’t have an especially complex delivery before. You can see that Scherzer repositions his plant foot two or three times during his windup, while Pfaadt’s stays glued to the rubber. Pfaadt’s command, or at least his control, was just fine, and he said he didn’t think he was tipping his pitches.

Pfaadt’s arm angle has dropped a couple degrees since his recall, but his overall release point change has been just at the edge of the margin of error. Each pitcher’s release point changes from pitch to pitch by a couple inches, except…hello, what’s that in red?

When a pitcher raises or drops his arm angle, or goes for more or less extension, he has to change his release point in the other two axes in order to compensate. The angle of the pitcher’s arm might change, but the length of said arm is constant. Unless he’s Inspector Gadget, which to my knowledge Pfaadt is not.

That’s a huge change in horizontal release point. With a marginally lower arm angle, Pfaadt’s horizontal release point should’ve moved a couple inches to the right. Instead, it’s moved nine inches to the left.

Take a look at the before-and-after videos of Pfaadt I just posted. Actually, you don’t have to watch the videos again; just look at where his feet are in these screencaps.

Here, in May, his right foot is smack dab in the middle of the rubber:

And in August, he’s way over to the first base side:

I think this is the secret. Changing position on the rubber can change everything about a pitcher. Lance Lynn used to slide over to one side or the other whenever something wasn’t working; in 2021, he told me that working from the third-base side helped him engage his legs more.

For a pitcher with a low arm angle and a varied repertoire like Pfaadt, moving to the first-base side of the rubber changes the angle of attack for his various pitches. And for a pitcher whose stuff moves side-to-side as much as Pfaadt’s does, that matters:

If you pitch to contact the way Pfaadt does, you’ve chosen to live and die with extremely small margins — as little as half an inch on the bat can make the difference between a double and a double play. That’s why most pitchers cut out the middlemen and just try to miss bats. It’s safer.

But the little tweaks Pfaadt’s made to his game — plus the one big one, moving across the rubber — have paid off in the second half. Some regression is to come (based on his comparatively rocky past two starts, it might already be here), but this version of Pfaadt is clearly much harder to hit than the one that came before.