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Last week, I saw Aaron Ashby lean on his loopy curveball when he found himself in a jam:

Later that day, I was watching the Tigers when Drew Anderson used his own big hook to finish off an at-bat:

I’m a longtime admirer of the giant 12-to-6 curveball, a pitch that is on the decline across the majors. There’s a good reason for that – without delving into it too deeply, velocity is very important. The league-wide curveball rate is down by nearly a quarter over the last decade, and the curves that remain tend to be harder and sharper than the ones I grew up seeing. But no amount of cold hard data about the pitch’s effectiveness would make it less visually enjoyable for me. So in this, the age of the looping breaker’s decline, I set out to find some good examples of my favorite pitch, even as guys throw it less and less frequently.

How do you define a looping curveball? My first thought was to look for the curveball that falls the most from its initial trajectory as it heads home. There’s just one problem with that definition, and that problem’s name is Victor Robles:

Amazingly, this clip doesn’t come from either the 22-0 or 19-2 blowouts the Mariners endured last week; they’re having some kind of month on the “getting blown out” front. But that perfectly located curveball had an absurd amount of downward movement because he threw it at 46 mph. I don’t even think it’s a curveball, to be honest; Statcast says it had nearly a foot of positive vertical break from backspin. In any case, clearly this criteria isn’t sufficient for our purposes.

That initial search got me on the trail of another delightful curveball artist, though. Robles throws the curve with the most total downward movement in the game, but it’s not a real curveball and he’s not a real pitcher. Alan Rangel is second on the list, and he fits both criteria. Look at his version of the big bender:

This is more like what I’m talking about. That’s still a slow curve, but at 73 mph on average, Rangel has 20 ticks on Robles. He also generates a mountain of induced downward vertical break, the third most in baseball (don’t worry, the guys ranked first and second will appear later in this article). As a side note, downward break induced and total downward movement differ because gravity also produces downward movement; to make your pitch drop more, you can either spin it faster or throw it slower. Rangel’s curve is truly a vertical breaker, too; he gets merely two inches of horizontal break (to the arm side, one of the few pitchers in baseball with that quirk).

Alas, if Rangel is our last hope for slow curves in the big leagues, we likely have no hope. For one thing, it’s both his fourth pitch and his least effective offering. For another thing, he’s a fringe major leaguer; he’s been optioned to the minor leagues five times in 2026 alone. The Phillies are no doubt extremely thankful for the 26 innings of emergency pitching he’s provided them this year, but with a 5.88 ERA in the majors and ugly numbers in Triple-A, they’re surely hoping not to require more of his services.

Rangel might not have the juice to consistently get big league hitters out, but he does give us a good blueprint for how pitchers can throw enormous curveballs in this style. He throws from a comically high arm angle:

I think of this delivery as the Oliver Drake special, at least partially thanks to Drake’s five-team odyssey in 2018. Start with a three-quarters or low-three-quarters arm slot, then tilt your entire torso left. Lean far enough, and you can turn any arm angle into an over-the-top delivery.

Why does that delivery lend itself to downward-breaking curveballs? It’s just physics. Curveball grips impart topspin. But topspin doesn’t point straight down automatically – it points down relative to the pitcher’s angle on the ball at release, because that’s the direction of spin that gets imparted on the ball when it rolls off the fingers. If you throw a curveball from a sidearm delivery, its topspin will point horizontally, not vertically. If you throw a huge curveball from a low-three-quarters arm slot like Matthew Liberatore, it’ll look more like this:

That’s still a visually appealing pitch, no doubt. It’s just not the thing I was looking for, because it’s a two-plane offering. You can see the horizontal movement from Cincinnati’s excellent center-field camera angle; the pitch starts on the outside edge of the zone and works its way to the inner half. Here’s Rangel throwing a curveball in the same park so you can compare ball flights:

Liberatore can really spin it, that spin just doesn’t move straight up and down because of where he releases the ball from. I classify Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Nolan McLean, and lesser lights like J.P. France and Mark Leiter Jr. similarly; they throw huge curveballs, just not huge 12-6 curveballs. They’re more like 2-8 or 10-4 breakers depending on their handedness, and while those are cool, they’re not what I’m looking for in this article. So we move on!

One pitcher springs to the top of the list when you look for high-arm-angle curveballs with huge break. That’d be Danny Coulombe, who releases from a near-Rangelian angle and gets an absolute ton of downward break. It’s not quite a pure 12-6, but man, it sure is pretty when it works:

“When it works” is a load-bearing phrase, though. That’s one of only two whiffs Coulombe has garnered with his curveball all season. He doesn’t throw the pitch often, and even worse, he’s not in the big leagues anymore. The Red Sox released him in July after 29 appearances — you only get one guess about how many he needed to trigger a $75,000 bonus — and while their motivation might have been partially monetary, he went through waivers unclaimed and hasn’t caught on anywhere since.

The best pitcher who fits the criteria I’ve laid out is almost certainly Nick Martinez. His curveball is extremely vertical, with nearly no horizontal movement at all. His high arm slot produces an archetypical shape:

Like many of his counterparts, though, Martinez throws his curveball very rarely. It’s pretty, but it hasn’t been particularly effective; our pitch models don’t like it, and Martinez clearly agrees, because he throws it just 5% of the time. Very few pitchers throw a ton of curveballs, and fewer still throw the slower, loopier version frequently.

If you already know who this article is about, I’m impressed. I knew of him only vaguely before I happened to turn on a Giants game this week and saw this absolute gem:

Goodness gracious, that’s a pretty pitch. Trent Harris checks every box you could want for a perfect rainbow curve. He generates a ton of spin. He doesn’t boast a ton of velocity, which means he throws plenty of secondaries. And most importantly for our purposes, his delivery is absurdly vertical, almost completely over the top:

No one in baseball has a higher slot. By releasing the ball essentially from the sky, he gets the pure up-and-down movement profile that I’m in search of. This is a truly funky offering, one that hitters just don’t have much mental catalog for. Only Coulombe induces more downward break. Only Coulombe gets more total downward break with better velocity. Most pitchers create this shape by taking a ton of velo off so that the ball has more time to break downwards. Harris is doing it by generating a ton of spin and pointing the movement that spin generates in the proper direction: straight down.

Oh yeah, and he throws it a lot! Sure, he’s only thrown eight big league innings so far this year, but he’s featuring his curve 21% of the time. He threw it about 20% of the time in the minors, too. It’s one of his best pitches according to both of our pitch models; they care quite a bit about velocity, even on breaking balls, which explains why so many looping curveballs don’t grade out well.

Like McLean, Harris generates so much movement with this pitch that he has intermittent issues commanding it. It has the highest swinging strike rate of any of his offerings, and yet the lowest chase and zone rates because he struggles to land it, and many of his misses are so uncompetitive that batters don’t offer. It doesn’t even come a little close to tunneling off the rest of his offerings:

So will it keep working for him? I don’t know. I imagine that the Giants are talking with Harris about overhauling the pitch, or possibly overhauling his arm angle more completely; it’s a strange fit for the rest of his arsenal, and it really does look harder to locate when you’re falling off the mound every pitch. That shows in Harris’ command; he sports a double-digit walk rate in both the minors and the majors this year. It would hardly shock me if he and the Giants worked together on some delivery change that emphasizes consistency, and almost any change in his delivery is going to make his curveball less visually pleasing than its current spectacular form.

For now, though, this is the best loopy curveball in the big leagues. If you haven’t caught Harris in the majors yet – and it’d hardly be surprising if you haven’t, he only has seven appearances – do yourself a favor and check out a Giants game soon. It might not be the most effective way to pitch, but from an aesthetic standpoint, I think that Harris might be my favorite pitcher in baseball right now.