Over the past week, we’ve gone over Whiff% rates for both hitters and pitchers. If you’ve missed any of those, be sure to check out our ‘Analytics’ page, which can be found with this link. Today, we’ll shift to exit velocities, as we look at which pitchers yielded the softest and hardest contact off the curveball.

Exit Velocity Criteria

In order to qualify for this list, a pitcher must have thrown at least 100 curves throughout the second half of 2019. Based off of pitch data collected by Baseball Savant, 109 pitchers met this criteria. Just keep in mind this, this is not how hard a pitcher throws his curveball. Rather, this has to do with how hard opposing batters are hitting the curve.

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Lowest Exit Velocity Off Curveball

Here are the pitchers who yielded the softest contact off the curve:

#	Team	Player	# of Curve Thrown	Opp. Mean Exit Velocity (MPH)
1	Rays	Ryan Yarbrough	146	71.2
2	Cardinals	Dakota Hudson	126	72.2
3	Nationals	Erick Fedde	115	73.9
4	Braves	Jerry Blevins	149	75.0
5	Rangers/Phillies	Drew Smyly	337	76.1
6	Red Sox	Nathan Eovaldi	185	76.2
7	Twins	Randy Dobnak	119	76.2
8	Marlins/Rays	Nick Anderson	141	77.0
9	Diamondbacks	Stefan Crichton	106	77.3
10	Mets	Steven Matz	188	77.5

Not surprisingly, nine of the ten pitchers, with the exception of Drew Smyly, on this list threw less than 200 pitches. Interestingly enough, one pitcher who just missed this list was Rays pitcher Charlie Morton. Morton, who threw the second most curveballs out of any pitcher during this time frame (526), was twelfth on this list with a mean exit velocity of 78.2 MPH.

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Highest Exit Velocity off Curveballs

Here are the ten pitchers who yielded the hardest contact off the curveball:

#	Team	Player	# of Curve Thrown	Opp. Mean Exit Velocity (MPH)
1	Mariners	Matt Magill	134	90.8
2	Twins	Kyle Gibson	155	89.4
3	Tigers	Tyler Alexander	142	89.3
4	Mariners	Yusei Kikuchi	112	88.0
5	Brewers	Adrian Houser	153	87.7
6	White Sox	Ross Detwiler	126	87.3
7	Twins	Devin Smeltzer	120	87.2
8	Angels	Dillon Peters	282	87.2
9	White Sox	Ivan Nova	204	87.2
10	Astros	Will Harris	173	87.1

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It’s worth pointing out that Orioles pitcher Asher Wojciechowski, who threw the eleventh most curveballs after the All-Star Break (310), just missed the bottom ten in the exit velocity category. Wojciechowski finished with the eleventh worst exit velocity on the breaking ball, as the mean velocity off the curve was 87.0 MPH.

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