Bailey Ober’s 2025 Struggles Came Down to One Costly Mistake: Trusting the Wrong Pitch

It was not a good year for Bailey Ober in 2025. While shaky command and a lingering hip injury played obvious roles in his uneven performance, the root of his struggles traces back to a more fundamental issue: trusting a pitch that simply wasn’t working.

That pitch was Ober’s slider.

According to Statcast, Ober threw his slider 418 times last season, and those pitches alone were responsible for eight runs allowed. His -1.9 Run Value per 100 sliders ranked as the eighth-worst mark in Major League Baseball, a troubling distinction made even more alarming by the context. Three of the seven sliders graded worse belonged to pitchers on the historically ineffective, altitude-plagued Colorado Rockies staff.

Run Value can occasionally mislead when a pitch is only put in play a limited number of times, allowing batted-ball luck to skew the results. That is not the case here. Ober’s slider was used frequently, and the poor outcomes were consistent enough to confirm a real problem.

Advanced Metrics Paint an Even Bleaker Picture

If Statcast raised red flags, Baseball Prospectus’ pitch-quality models sounded the alarm. Both StuffPro and PitchPro, which evaluate pitches based on movement, velocity, release point, and expected run impact (independent of results), rated Ober’s slider as a liability.

In these systems, negative values are good, representing run suppression. Ober’s slider failed badly by that standard as well, ranking among the worst breaking balls in the league.

This kind of consensus is rare. Pitch-quality models often differ in how they evaluate breaking pitches, particularly sweepers, which tend to “game” metrics due to their exaggerated horizontal movement. Some teams even discount pitchers whose strongest metric-driven pitch is a sweeper alone.

Ober’s case is different — and more concerning.

He possesses both a sweeper and a traditional slider, and both graded below average. Unlike Run Value, StuffPro attempts to ignore outcomes and focus strictly on pitch characteristics. Even stripped of results, the slider still failed.

Why Ober Kept Throwing It

Despite all the evidence, Ober never abandoned the pitch. He threw the slider just as often late in the season as he did early on. That persistence wasn’t stubbornness — it was necessity.

The slider was never meant to be an out pitch.

Instead, it functioned as a bridge pitch, existing primarily to obscure pitch identification. Sitting between his fastball and his breaking balls in velocity, and featuring a distinct spin profile, the slider was designed to make hitters hesitate just long enough to disrupt timing.

Ober’s arsenal depends heavily on deception. He lacks elite raw spin rates, but he compensates through spin manipulation, seam-shifted wake, and subtle movement deviations that break hitter expectations. In theory, the slider helped complete that illusion.

In practice, it did not.

Even by the standards of a bridge pitch — and even within Ober’s carefully constructed mix — the slider failed to do its job. Hitters were not fooled. Instead, they were comfortable.

The Fix Is Simple — But Not Easy

The solution is straightforward, though execution will require precision: Ober needs to throw the pitch harder.

Specifically, the slider should evolve into more of a cutter.

The foundation is already there. Ober’s slider naturally carries backspin, and with a modest grip adjustment and increased intent, the pitch could gain the velocity and late bite necessary to survive at the major-league level.

A firmer cutter would better bridge the gap between his fastball and his sweeping breaking balls, especially given the vertical lift on his sweeper and how he attempted to deploy the slider in 2025. It would also reduce the margin for error on location — a crucial improvement for a pitcher whose command wavered while dealing with injury.

Why This Matters Going Forward

Ober has other issues to address entering the next season, but none are as urgent as this one. There is a critical difference between a pitch that exists to enhance the effectiveness of others and a pitch that fails even at that limited task.

A bridge pitch cannot simply exist — it must function.

In 2025, Ober’s slider did not. If he continues to trust it in its current form, the results are unlikely to change. But if he commits to reshaping it into a cutter, he has a chance to restore balance to his arsenal — and reclaim the consistency that once made him a reliable piece of the Twins’ rotation.

In short, Ober’s slider was a disaster for him this season. He never gave up on the pitch, though, throwing it just as much late in the year as at the beginning. That’s because the slider isn’t really an out pitch for him; it’s a bridge pitch. Study the movement plot above, and it’s fairly easy to see what I mean.

Given his fastball shape and reliance on the changeup and sweeper, Ober used the slider to keep hitters from finding it too easy to identify his offerings out of the hand. The slider lives in between his fastballs and his curve and sweeper in terms of velocity, and it has a different spin profile than the rest of his pitches. image.png Ober is hardly alone in using a pitch that isn’t good on its own as an intermediate offering that muddies the picture for hitters trying to pick up spin and get started early on hittable pitches.

He lacks the ability to spin the ball at a high rate, but he does manipulate that spin relatively well and uses grips and seam shifting to induce movement that isn’t perfectly predicted by his spin axes, creating deception. Even by the standards of a bridge pitch and in Ober’s unusually deft care, though, the slider isn’t working at all.