Landen Roupp Switches Sides | FanGraphs Baseball

It’s not obvious why Landen Roupp is good, but it’s probably time to find out.

Roupp’s 2.54 xERA is seventh among qualified starting pitchers. He’s striking out batters, getting groundballs, and working deep into games. He’s tied for 15th in the majors with 0.9 WAR. That’s about 70% of what he was projected for by FanGraphs Depth Charts in the preseason. It’s one of the most surprising performances of April.

Most pitchers “get good” because they miss bats, or attack the zone, or both. That doesn’t apply to Roupp this year. His 25.1% whiff rate is about the median among qualified pitchers, and his 37.1% zone rate is bottom five. Frankly, he doesn’t throw a ton of strikes.

The underlying “stuff” metrics aren’t any more impressive.

Roupp doesn’t throw particularly hard, or display outlier movement, or place near the top of any leaderboard I know to check. And yet, he excels. Where is all that value coming from?

Well, he happens to be the last qualified pitcher of 2026 who has not allowed a barrel. His 25.0% opponent hard-hit rate is the best in the majors, and his .277 xwOBACON allowed is second best, just behind Max Fried and just ahead of Shohei Ohtani. Batters seem incapable of squaring him up, pounding grounders into the dirt 56.0% of the time, or otherwise getting jammed on soft lineouts.

This contact suppression all starts with the sinker. He throws its about 40% of the time, regardless of batter handedness. It’s been worth seven runs above average so far in 2026, tied for third among the most effective pitches of the season. It doesn’t have outlier velocity or movement, but it still shows that heavy, bowling-ball action that’s proven to be quite effective at getting grounders.

It’s worth pointing out Roupp has gotten a bit lucky with that sinker to this point, with just one hit allowed on 20 grounders — xwOBA thinks his sinker is among the luckiest pitches on contact this year. Still, the contact he’s allowed is soft, on the ground, and generally non-threatening. A few more singles here and there shouldn’t impact his line much going forward.

The other pitch he features is a big, bendy curveball. It’s simply tremendous, and it always has been. In fact, Eric Longehagen and Travis Ice gave it an 80/80 grade in their report on Roupp on the 2024 Giants Top Prospects list (despite a more modest 40-FV grade overall). He throws it about 29% of the time, which is actually down quite a bit from his days as a prospect, when he was among the rare primary-hook pitchers (something he discussed with David Laurila last year).

The pitch has tons and tons of movement, especially toward the glove side. It’s great at getting whiffs, it’s great at getting chases, it’s great at inducing soft contact. I mean, just look at it:

What’s interesting is none of this has really changed. He had the sinker and curveball last year, as well as the less-used changeup and cutter. Granted, the cutter is a bit different now, with a touch more movement to the glove side. But, fundamentally, the stuff he throws and the way he throws it is identical — it just happens to be working all of a sudden.

To be clear, Roupp wasn’t bad by any means last year. His 3.92 FIP was more than passable as a mid-rotation starter, even if a bout of minor elbow inflammation and a comebacker off the knee cut his season short. But he certainly wasn’t a top-10 pitcher in the majors, or someone you would have bet on becoming one.

Here’s the only real change I could spy:

Roupp is releasing the ball nearly a full inch farther from third base than he was in 2025. Again, the arm angle is the same, and he’s not releasing the ball much differently. Instead, he’s moved from smack-dab in the middle of the rubber to standing as far off to the side as a right-handed pitcher can possibly stand. Look at the two screenshots below, with this season on the left and last year on the right:

The question then becomes, does this matter? I don’t know. Truly, this starting spot is the only change that I could find, unless we’re counting the tweaks to the cutter (which he’s thrown only 12.4% of the time). The only other thing I can think of is, you know, small sample size, and that’s just not a fun answer.

But the theory of change here is hard to wrap my head around. My initial thought was perhaps this new stance is allowing Roupp to throw to better spots. That isn’t really the case. In some ways, his command has gotten worse this year — walks are the one thing he hasn’t done well so far.

Instead, what I think is happening is Roupp has changed the angle at which his pitches approach the plate horizontally. The sinker especially is entering the zone from a far steeper left-to-right angle, jumping from a 70th-percentile approach angle in 2025 to a 95th-percentile one in 2026, according to Baseball Prospectus. To be clear, I’m not Alex Chamberlain, who wrote the primer on horizontal (and vertical) approach angle for this website years ago. I’m also not any of the other authors who wrote about approach angle and pitcher stance several years ago. This is far from my area of expertise, but my understanding of what’s happening here is it’s complicated, with such a change having a variety of causes and effects.

Still, I think this makes sense intuitively for two reasons. One is probably the most obvious: A different approach angle is going to find a different part of the bat, and that part of the bat so far has been quite literally everything but the barrel.

But I also wonder if this changes the way batters see the pitch coming in. Roupp doesn’t score well by the various arsenal and tunneling metrics from BP. His sinker and curveball look like two distinctly different pitches out of hand, and batters should be pretty good at guessing which is which. Last year they were.

Maybe switching sides of the rubber changes that perspective. For instance, righties are now seeing the sinker from the first base dugout and lefties are seeing it zip in from behind their ear. Then there’s the big, slow hook, moving violently in the opposite direction. Mix in Roupp’s funky-hitch windup and low arm slot, and he creates a bizarre, rather extreme look from a repertoire that’s anything but.

Take this outing against Bo Bichette. Roupp gets him in the first inning on a backdoor sinker that Bichette is clearly in between on.

Then, in his next at-bat, Roupp starts Bichette with the curve, roughly in the same spot, getting a wild chase and miss.

I like this perception theory because of this next table. One of the things we know about the pitcher-hitter matchup is that hitters start to gain an advantage as they get familiar with an arsenal. This was an issue for Roupp last year because, again, he struggles to disguise his pitches with his release point, without the raw stuff to make up for it. Once the batter gets a look, the jig is up.

This year, wouldn’t you know it, Roupp is actually becoming more effective as he works into the game.

Again, not much has really changed about how he’s releasing the ball, and neither has his tunneling or stuff. My hunch is it’s simply the way the ball appears to batters that’s making them miss, helping his sinker play up while the curveball lurks menacingly.

If this represents a new level for Roupp, I can’t help but find this amusing. He is unremarkable in so many ways, and shifting to the other side of the rubber is about the simplest change a pitcher could possibly make. And yet, sometimes that’s all it takes.