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Trivia question for you: Which active pitcher has the lowest career ERA, with a minimum of 50 innings pitched? Paul Skenes is third, Jhoan Duran is ninth, Jacob deGrom is all the way down in 20th.

The answer is Erik Sabrowski, and by a pretty big margin. Sabrowski’s 1.47 career ERA is 0.41 runs lower than that of second-place Emmanuel Clase, who I guess is still technically an active player. He has Skenes beat by half a run.

In fact, Sabrowski has the second-best ERA in AL/NL history with that innings minimum. He trails only Chick Brandom, who is not who Yoda accused you of exchanging flirty Instagram DMs with, but rather a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1900s.

If you’re interested in strikeout rate, Sabrowski is fifth among active pitchers at 39.2%, trailing Mason Miller, Josh Hader, Aroldis Chapman, and Edwin Díaz. In other words: Four of the best closers of the past decade, plus a relatively unknown middle reliever. Sabrowski definitely has his boosters — he’s a recidivist star of David Laurila’s Sunday Notes column — but he’s a long way from having Miller or Hader’s star quality.

Great relievers often come from inauspicious origins; that would certainly describe Sabrowski. The 6-foot-4 Canadian left-hander was a 14th-round pick out of Cloud County Community College in Concordia, Kansas. Day 3 picks from Midwestern jucos only occasionally turn into Albert Pujols; Cloud County’s only major leaguer before Sabrowski was Jake Diekman.

Sabrowski got drafted in 2017; by the time he first appeared in David’s Sunday Notes, in November 2023, he’d gone through two Tommy John surgeries and been selected by Cleveland in the minor league phase of the 2021 Rule 5 Draft. That’s not even the fancy Roberto Clemente-and-Shane Victorino version of the Rule 5. That year’s minor league Rule 5 class included 51 players, of whom only 13 (including Sabrowski) have gone on to appear in the big leagues, for an average of 38 games each.

After all that, Sabrowski didn’t reach the majors until he was almost 27. His cup of coffee in September 2024 turned into some postseason experience, which augured a potential high-leverage role in 2025. But then his elbow started barking again, and he didn’t get going until the last week of June.

It’s not a long track record, but it’s a good one. The best since Chick Brandom, some might say.

So how is this rando striking out 46.7% of opponents this year?

Knowing nothing else about a pitcher with that strikeout rate, you’d expect a special fastball. And Sabrowski has one, but not in the way you’d think. His average four-seamer velocity is 94.2 mph this year, which is above average for a lefty, but only in the 45th percentile overall. It’s a pretty normal delivery and arm angle, too. Sabrowski’s extension is better than average, but in no way noteworthy in isolation.

He does hide the ball well. I just wrote about another Guardians lefty with an interesting fastball, Parker Messick. Sabrowski, like Messick, starts his motion with a big downward arm stab, but unlike Messick, he keeps his arm bent. This hides the ball behind his thigh until he’s almost ready to release it.

The deception helps, but while Sabrowski’s delivery is compact, he’s not getting down and pushing the way Messick does. The ball, in other words, isn’t coming at the hitter from an odd angle.

There’s one exceptional thing about Sabrowski’s fastball: Spin. When we talk about pitchers spinning the baseball, it’s almost always in the context of a breaking ball. The median spin rate for a slider or curveball in the majors is about 2,500 rpm. Sabrowski throws both of those pitches; each averages a hair over 2,600 rpm.

But the median four-seamer spins at around 2,300 rpm; Sabrowski’s fastball is averaging 2,534 rpm. That’s 20th out of 345 pitchers this year, one spot behind Miller.

There’s not much else to Sabrowski’s fastball. With that three-quarters arm angle, the ball comes off his fingers at an 11 o’clock spin axis, with a 96% active spin rate and zero deviation between spin-based and observed movement. But because he’s throwing that pitch with a lot of spin — and incredibly consistently — the ball gets sucked up and away from a right-handed batter.

Looking at Baseball Savant’s total movement vs. comparable pitches, only four left-handed pitchers are getting more rise on their four-seamer than Sabrowski. What’s interesting about those guys — Alex Vesia, Caleb Thielbar, Jack Dreyer, and Mason Montgomery — is that they’re putting rise on the fastball at the expense of arm-side movement. Messick does this too; he positions his four-seamer between a cutter and sinker, neither of which Sabrowski throws.

Sabrowski, on the other hand, is getting above-average arm-side movement on his fastball; ride instead of cut, if you will. The only other lefty relievers in this neighborhood — in terms of fastball velo and movement — are Jacob Latz and Dylan Lee, the subject of a Ben Clemens article yesterday. (“One of my favorite article genres to produce is ‘you’ve never heard of this reliever, but he’s great now,’” Ben began. Couldn’t agree more.)

Lee and Sabrowski are both big lefties with unusual fastball movement, but they have little else in common. Lee throws more than 50% sliders, while Sabrowski works mostly off his fastball, with a gyro slider and a big, low-80s curveball. Lee throws a changeup; Sabrowski doesn’t.

Sabrowski doesn’t need to lean on his breaking pitches as much because his fastball is giving opponents fits. Only four pitchers have a lower opponent batting average on their four-seamer this year. One is Latz; two of the three others are Skenes and Zack Wheeler. Sabrowski’s four-seamer is getting a 31.1% whiff rate, which is 17th in baseball; his strikeout rate on the pitch is 41.3%, which trails only Jacob Misiorowski’s four-seamer.

The heater is Sabrowski’s out pitch. He throws it 66.2% of the time in all situations, which is the fourth-highest rate in the league, and 60% of the time with two strikes, which is the 13th-highest rate in the league (minimum 50 total two-strike pitches). Out of the 66 two-strike fastballs Sabrowski has thrown, 19 have turned into strikeouts, which is the fifth-highest conversion rate among that cohort of pitchers.

Sabrowski’s fastball, in addition to having freaky movement on its own, interacts with his curveball and slider in an interesting way.

He throws both breakers to both lefties and righties, though the mix is a little more slider heavy to lefties and a little more curveball heavy to righties. The slider has below-average movement on both axes and actually drifts pretty close to the center line; the curveball has more drop than average but less arm-side movement.

You can see here that this gives those three pitches an interesting tic-tac-toe effect. The movement on each runs from one o’clock to seven o’clock, from the batter’s perspective, with the slider in the middle both in terms of movement and velocity. The hitter knows that whatever’s coming is going to break somewhere along that line; he just doesn’t know in which direction or at what speed. And with Sabrowski hiding the ball well, the hitter doesn’t have much time to react.

It’s a neat trick, and so far nobody’s figured out how to counter it. Now, this does not mean Sabrowski is a perfect pitcher. He’s walking 13.3% of opponents, and the massive separation between pitches cuts both ways. He is getting gobs of whiffs, but when the hitter does guess right, the ball gets hit hard.

Sabrowski is currently in the first percentile in both groundball rate (which isn’t a big deal for a pitcher who throws rising fastballs up) and opponent exit velocity (which is somewhat of a bigger deal). That leaves some boom-or-bust risk for Sabrowski.

At least in theory, because he doesn’t blow up that often. The 28-year-old has kept a clean sheet in 20 of his 22 appearances so far this year, and all four of the runs scored against him (including his only home run) came in a pair of consecutive appearances in mid-April.

So maybe he is unhittable after all. Watch out, Chick Brandom. Your record might not last much longer.