Pablo López "Saw Flashes" of What Move Across Rubber Could Do for Him, But Has Come Home Again

Last month, I wrote—well, in fact, I wrote twice—about Pablo López moving from the first-base side of the pitching rubber to the middle of it. It's always interesting and valuable to know when pitchers make such moves, and López himself had a lot to say about why he was trying out the move at the time. It was about finding the best way to help his breaking balls play off his four-seam fastball, as they have become the secondary pitches on which he relies most to complement the heater. It also facilitated, in some small way, the development of his newfound kick-change, a second flavor of offspeed pitch for his ever-deepening arsenal.

Just a few weeks after I chronicled López's changes, though, they were history—not forgotten, and perhaps not fully scrapped, but tabled, for the time being. Since his penultimate start of April, López has been on the move back to the first-base side, and is now settled back into a spot that is very comfortable, although not quite the spot from which he started this journey in the spring. He's not where he was in 2024, exactly, but where he most often was in 2023, when he enjoyed a career year.

"I mean, that's what it was—it was an experiment. That's why spring training is beautiful. You get to try, you get to tinker, you get to experiment, without letting the results make you freak out or anything, or make you want to change your entire identity," López said Sunday, at Target Field. "So I tinkered with it. I saw flashes of what it could do for me, but then I also saw things that would, long-term, not just hurt me but hurt the team, like free passes, pitches leaking over the plate, taking away from [two-strike] execution with pitches going to my glove side. Because you have to keep in mind, like, six inches on the rubber can affect either the same amount or a little bit more, and that could be the difference between the barrel and the tip of the bat, or the tip of the bat and getting a whiff or things like that."

A student of his craft, López is always on the lookout for edges he can exploit, and that drove him to make a change well-founded in modern pitching theory. But he also used each game as more feedback from which to learn, and that learning led him back toward the place where he'd begun.

"So I pondered, and each time I pondered, I'd shift a little bit more, shift a little bit more, up to the point that I'm on the first-base side," he said. "But it's closer to where I was in 2023 than [where] I was in 2024. In 2023, it felt like my heel was at the edge of the rubber. In 2024, my heel was beyond the rubber. So I feel like I'm closer to where I was in 2023."

Acknowledging that he was better in several regards (most notably, putting hitters away) in 2023, López finds some comfort in the realization that that season's setup offers him a path back to that level of success. He also learned more about how his pitches play from different angles during his experiment, and has implemented some of those tweaks since getting back to his 2023 foothold.