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Simeon Woods Richardson looked to have found a missing piece of the puzzle in 2025: a new splitter that looked like a legitimate plus offering to round out his repertoire. So far in 2026, however, he’s been the most disappointing member of the rotation results-wise. What’s holding him back?
The Splitter Is Different
Woods Richardson’s splitter looked like a weapon in 2025. It led all of his pitches with a 32.5% whiff rate and completely disarmed opposing hitters when they made contact. The pitch was a big proponent of the strong stretch to end the season, in which he posted a 2.33 ERA and struck out 36 of the 104 batters faced over his last five starts. After he integrated the pitch midseason, it had a slow buildup, and the splitter finished as his fourth-most-used pitch. With an offseason ahead of him, we expected to see him turn to his new weapon much more often in 2026.
The splitter has been the second-most used pitch for him so far this season, but it’s not seeing the same success. He’s throwing it 27.7% of the time, as opposed to 10% in 2025. It’s down to a 22.6% whiff rate and is allowing an expected batting average of .285 and expected slugging of .519. He’s throwing the pitch about half a mile per hour faster, and it’s getting about an inch less of vertical and horizontal movement. If this is an active change Woods Richardson and the Twins made to this pitch that was so successful in 2025, it may be time to rethink things. It's more likely, though, that the pitch just isn't doing what he wants it to do.
The Whiffs Are Gone
The splitter may have been Woods Richardson’s best pitch in 2025, but he had other successful offerings to turn to. That has certainly not been the case in 2026. His slider has dropped from a whiff rate of 27.4% to 20% so far, and the xwOBA allowed has increased from .261 to a crippling .377. His fastball has been his only acceptable offering so far, but even with decent expected numbers with the heater, it’s dropped from a 21.8% whiff rate to 12.4% in 2026. This all culminates in an untenable 11.4% strikeout rate overall so far this season.
A lack of swing and miss leaves Woods Richardson exposed to the Twins’ poor defense, and we’ve already seen that come back to bite him on multiple occasions. He’s not pitching well, but even when he coaxes batted balls that should help bail him out of his frequent jams, his defense hasn’t made the plays for him. Any pitcher would have trouble with this little swing and miss, but this problem is magnified even further by how bad the Twins' defense is.
Some Bad Luck
In addition to the poor defense, Woods Richardson has experienced some bad luck. His 66.7% strand rate of opposing baserunners is a notable change from his 75.9% mark in 2025 and 73.6% mark in 2024. He’s putting plenty of runners on base, and those runners are scoring at an unexpectedly high rate. His batting average on balls in play allowed is also a career high of .291, which is particularly painful given how many batted balls he’s allowing.
His fastball has been his best pitch so far, and he’s gotten unlucky with it in several ways. The pitch has yielded a .284 batting average, which conflicts with an expected mark of .224. It’s allowed a .345 wOBA, compared to a strong .296 expected wOBA. To be fair, the rest of his pitches have actually gotten lucky in these metrics, but it doesn’t help that the one offering he can turn to has been unlucky in addition to everything else going on.
The heater also isn't setting up the rest of the arsenal as well as it has in the past. In 2024, his fastball was in the upper third of the zone or above it over 46% of the time. Last year, that number fell to 40%. This season, it's 33%. With the fastball coming in lower, there's less space to let his splitter or slider separate from that pitch. It means fewer whiffs when the non-fastballs are close to or in the zone. To create the differential you want to achieve a whiff, now, he often has to throw the slider and the splitter in non-competitive locations. Batters chased 30.9% of his sliders and splitters outside the zone last year. So far, in 2026, it's 24.8%.
There isn’t much going right for Woods Richardson right now. Either intentionally or unintentionally, changes were made to several of his pitches that were successful in 2025, and the results have been disastrous. His strikeout rate looks like something out of the 1990s, and he’s pitching in front of one of the worst defenses in the league to count on for turning contact into outs.
Given the injuries in the rotation, Woods Richardson has some time to right the ship, but the clock is ticking, with the Twins showing a newfound aggressiveness in calling up pitching prospects. Woods Richardson has a ton to fix if he wants to hold onto his rotation spot for the entire 2026 season. Can he pull it off?
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