Mid-season Report Cards 2026: Flunking Pitchers
Published 8/3/2026
We have made it to the final part of our series documenting the report cards of players around the league in the first half of 2026. We have covered some truly exceptional breakouts, such as Miguel Vargas and Jacob Misiorowski, and tried our best to understand how some players, like Cal Raleigh, can go from so good to so bad in a matter of months. Now at the end of our journey, we must give the same treatment given to Raleigh to pitchers around the league. There have been some truly abysmal pitching performances this year and we are going to find out why.
Hopefully we are all up-to-date on how The Baseball Board’s grading system works, but if not, here is our grades explainer.
Starting with Starters
Having earned a reputation over these past four seasons as a starter you don’t want to see pitching for your team, Miles Mikolas won’t be covered in this story, but nevertheless has a well-deserved F this season.
Starters have a unique relationship to teams around the league. When a fielder or reliever starts to play poorly on an annual basis, they are not long for their current roster and might not be long for the league, period. Starters, on the other hand, as long as they delivered a few reasonable seasons to start their career, have a penchant for sticking around for a much longer time, regardless of their performance. Is it because starters are so much harder to come by? Probably to some degree, but we cannot discount the mental tricks we play on ourselves regarding the expected performance of each rotation spot. For some reason, we have all collectively agreed that fifth and sometimes fourth pitchers in rotations are allowed to be bad. As such, as a pitcher starts to decline, it is easy to say, “he used to be the third man in the rotation and now he’s the fourth,” when what we are really saying is, “he used to be good, but now he’s bad.” Because of this, many of the poor grades among starters are names everyone will recognize, such as: Miles Mikolas, Colin Rea, and Randy Vasquez. To make this story a bit more interesting, rather than preaching to the choir that Miles Mikolas should not be starting major league games, we will focus in on a few of the more interesting falls from grace this year and there is no better place to start than where pitchers go to die, Colorado.
Rocky Starts in the Rockies
With a 4.50 ERA in the first half, Sugano looks like an ace compared to his fellow Rockies starters.
You might be thinking to yourself, "he just said we would be talking about 'interesting' pitching failures this year. Everyone knows Colorado always has bad pitching." I fully agree with you, it’s no secret that Colorado is hard to pitch in, even the infamous humidor stands no chance against the thin air of Denver. That is why this is not a segment amount Colorado pitchers, but rather the Rockies' front office. With the invaluable combination of terabytes of data about offensive results at Coors Field, coupled with thousands of hours of real-world experience observing how balls play there, you would expect the Rockies' leadership to be the leading experts on how to mitigate the devastatingly thin air. Instead, they consistently roll out both rotations and bullpens full of pitchers who are especially likely to suffer from the "Coors effect" and 2026 is no exception.
On paper, it looked like the Rockies were making an attempt to field a reasonable rotation this season, given their self-imposed, severe budgetary constraints. They signed Jose Quintana, Tomoyuki Sugano, and Michael Lorenzen on short-term deals this past winter, in the hope that they would provide some level of stability to last year's historically bad rotation and provide young arms, like Chase Dollander, some veteran presence as they try to adjust after a rough 2025. Instead, what they ended up creating was a rotation designed to be pummeled in an environment like Coors and a team ERA of 5.50 here at the half.
We will have a story in the future covering exactly how Coors impacts pitching and how to mitigate it, so for now you will just need to take my word that a rotation that has four pitchers that: have below average velocity, rely on their off-speed and breaking pitches, have below average groundball rates, and spend a lot of time in the zone are destined for failure at Coors. The fact that these type of pitchers struggle so mightily at Coors was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt when Kyle Freeland, Sugano, and Quintana all earned D-'s while attempting to get outs in Colorado this season, whil Lorenzen went one step further and got an F-. Dollander was the one bright spot of the Rockies pitching, starting as a reliever then trying to transition back to a starter, but pitcher injuries are always looming and he fell victim to one on May 22nd. In the end, Colorado was left with the worst rotation in baseball and everyone wondering how the front office let this happen again.
F is for Fifth Starter
The Rockies made things easy, letting me cover four of the worst starters this season in one fell swoop. Couple that with the fact that I have already promised not to talk about Mikolas and we only have two starters with at least 90 innings and an F left to talk about. Neither of these starters are necessarily surprising members of the F club, but I think it is fair to say that no one would have been surprised if each starter had a C instead.
Seth Lugo and Sean Manaea are two peas in a pod. Both turned in very strong 2024s and had everyone calling them capable mid-rotation veterans that would stabilize the otherwise rocky rotations they belonged to. Come 2025 and each turned in some truly hard to watch performances, a D- and D respectively, and seemed to be well on their way to the landfill. But no team can resist the urge to let a player try to rekindle their recent success, so both pitchers got the ball again here in 2026 and again delivered some low quality work. Lugo regained a lot of his lost movement this season and started got some of his command back, but for every skill he improved upon, he gave up two others. His fastball in particular has become whatever the opposite of a "plus weapon" is, as he has gotten into the habit of leaving it in very hittable locations and suffering the consequences. His fastball, while never being the primary pitch in his arsenal, served a very important purpose of setting up his sinker and breaking pitches; now without that imabalancing value, he has become a very easy to hit pitcher.
Manaea, is suffering from similar issues, where no matter how he tries to adjust, things just are not working out. He reintroduced a sinker to his arsenal, something that was absent in 2025, and it has actually proved to be a useful pitch, but Manaea's woes lie in his off-speed and breaking pitches, not his fastballs. With a sweeper he refuses to throw for a strike and a changeup he rarely throws at all and when he does it gets hammered, Manaea has no way to keep hitters off-balance before he delivers the killing blow with either of his fastballs. The result is hitters that can sit fastball, with the confidence that he will have to throw one in the zone if he wants to get an out, and punishing him when he does.
Unrelievers
We face quite the opposite problem with relievers that we did starters for this story. There are so many poor reliever performances (10 F's and 11 D-'s) and they are so well-distributed around the league, that it would be impossible to cover half of them, let alone all of them here. Instead of attempting that, we will focus in on two that were touted as two of the more stable and reliable relievers to get acquired this winter and were coveted by many teams before their subsequent signing and trade, one to the Marlins and the other to the Royals.
Gone Fishing
Somehow we found another image of a reliever looking at their stats for 2026.
Pete Fairbanks went into this last off-season as an unanimous top 5 reliever free agent and arguably top 3. This ranking was more than deserved, Fairbanks had delivered six straight seasons of quality relief for the Rays, at that point, and showed zero signs of slowing down. As such, it was considered a great signing and evidence of their intent to compete when the Marlins signed him to a 1-year deal worth $13,000,000. Since that signing, Fairbanks has delivered his worst performance since his rookie year, sporting a 6.50 ERA over 30+ innings and a much-deserved loss of his role as closer. This unexpected collapse is one of those rare cases that is not due to loss of velocity, command, or some other skill that he once had then lost, but rather a re-imagining of his profile gone horribly wrong.
From his debut through 2024, Fairbanks has been a fastball/slider reliever that sprinkles in the occasional change-up to throw a lefty off-balance. This is not only a common profile for righty relievers, but an exceptionally effective one. When you only plan to face a hitter once, you don't nee three to five pitches to keep them off-balance, a fastball up, followed by a couple nasty sliders away is often more than enough to do the job. This fact has held true for Fairbanks for six quality seasons, then in 2025 he made the inexplicable decision to start playing with a cutter. I say inexplicable, but there is truly nothing wrong with adding a new pitch to your repertoire; hitters are going to try and adjust to your game, why not add more versatility to make that even harder? What is actually inexplicable isn't his 2025 or the new cutter he began to throw 4% of the time, it is that in 2026 that cutter jumped up to 24% usage, becoming his #2 pitch, and started a domino effect that has completely disrupted his otherwise great skill set.
By starting to throw his cutter, which has proven to be just alright this season, 24% of the time, other pitches needed to be thrown less. The pitch that took nearly all of the brunt of this was his slider, going from 40% usage to 23%. This is the crux of Fairbanks's problems, because the slider was and remains his best pitch and a key piece to both his strikeouts and weak contact. By cutting his slider usage nearly in half and replacing it with a lesser pitch that is 6 mph faster, hitters are having an easier time sitting fastball and adjusting to the cutter, something that was nearly impossible with an 83 MPH slider. Whether or not Fairbanks can recapture his past excellence by going back to his old usage rates remains to be seen, but for now he has a D- I am sure he would like to improve upon.
Blown Leads in KC
Do I even need to say it at this point?
Fairbanks certainly stands out as the most disappointing relief signing of this past off-season, but if you include trades, Matt Strahm could certainly compete with him for greatest disappointment. Just like Fairbanks, Strahm has provided perennial stability to bullpens and has been doing so since 2018. Throwing a fastball/slider/sinker combo to lefties and a fastball/slider/changeup/cutter combo to righties, he has been one of the premiere long relievers in the game, and has been a major piece to the Phillies' consistent success these past few seasons. That all changed very rapidly in 2026, once he started pitching for the royals, with an ERA north of 7, he has proven to be one of the worst relievers in the game and an ill-omen that the Royals are about to blow a lead.
You might be tempted to hone in on the fact that Strahm started throwing his change-up much more frequently this season and that is the main source of his woes, but the truth is that his change-up is actually pretty good, it is his best pitch, the pitch that keeps every hitter off-balance, that has failed him this year. Strahm's slider, on paper, still looks pretty good, movement is roughly the same as last year, velocity is down a little, but nothing catastrophic, so why does his slider suck? He's facing the same problem realtors everywhere face, location location location.
Strahm's slider, like most pitchers and their sliders, is a weak contact and chase tool. The slider is either tailing out of the zone, trying to induce a chase or it's trying to mimic an inside fastball, but tail away causing weak contact. This has been Strahm's slider for many years and it is still serving him well in the chase department, but issues begin to arise when he leaves it in the zone. Normally, when he would throw his slider in the zone, it would end on the outside edge to lefties and inside to righties, now it is ending much more often right over the plate and there are few pitches more appealing to a hitter than a hanging slider. Since location troubles can be a much more difficult fix than pitch usage--mechanics, grip, arm angle, lingering injuries, and a million other possibilities could be at play here--there is no guarantee that Strahm, at 34, can find and make the necessary adjustments before his raw skills are too low to survive the majors. That means we could be seeing the end of an otherwise very effective relief career, but Strahm isn't totally without hope. His numbers have been trending in a relatively positive direction for a couple months now, but still very far from where he was. I don't think we can expect any sort of positive production from Strahm for the rest of the season, so let's just hope he can use the second half to get his ERA down to 5.
All Eyes on the Second Semester
That concludes our journey through first half performances in 2026. The second half is likely to provide just as many interesting report cards and player profiles as the first. PCA vies for an unlikely MVP, Misiorowski aims to keep the good K's rolling, and Luis Garcia Jr. surges towards a surprise A+. There will be no shortage of storylines to talk about from August through October, but until then, check out any of the parts of this series you have have missed or you are just desperate to read again!