Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images

Let’s start with a table.

And what a wild table it is. Brooks Raley has secretly been way better than I’d realized. I bring this up to illustrate how dominant Jason Adam has been over the past five years: By most measures, one of the best relievers in baseball. By ERA, the best reliever who’s had a remotely normal career. Adam’s breakout season was 2022, and since then he’s posted an ERA under 2.00 four times in five years, including 2026. His one down year: 2023, when he posted a 2.93 ERA in 54 1/3 innings. Most pitchers would kill to struggle like that.

Adam has had his moments in the sun: He pitched for Team USA in 2023, and he made the All-Star game last year. But he’s mostly gone under the radar. Despite his gaudy run prevention numbers, he’s spent most of his career in deep bullpens with bigger stars. He only has 25 career saves. He doesn’t throw especially hard or strike out a league-leading percentage of opponents.

In fact, the two most famous distinct Jason Adam incidents wouldn’t lead one to think especially rosy thoughts. There was the gruesome quad injury that knocked him out of last year’s playoffs; Adam got into a fielding position on a comebacker and, out of nowhere, went down grabbing his leg like he’d been shot. Really agonizing to watch. Adam was also one of five Rays pitchers (along with Raley, incidentally) who made headlines in 2022 by refusing to wear the team’s Pride Night cap and jersey patch.

Adam would’ve been in the news that year no matter what; 2022, his first year in Tampa Bay, was the year he put it all together for the first time. Adam has always had an extremely short, latter-day Lucas Giolito-style arm swing, but upon arrival in St. Petersburg, he changed his footwork to close off his front shoulder like Tim Lincecum. After years of ineffective wildness, he started throwing more strikes and missing more bats in the zone. His chase rate skyrocketed, landing just outside the top 10 among qualified relievers.

Adam does two things well: First, he hides the ball with his weird, short-arm delivery. The ball looks like it’s coming out of his ear. Second, he spins the ball well. Adam isn’t the most spin-efficient pitcher in the league, but we’re used to his fastball living in the 2,600-to-2,700 rpm range, which is one of the highest marks you’ll find on a four-seamer.

Changeup spin is a little idiosyncratic; the best off-speed pitches in the league come in all shapes and sizes. Devin Williams’ screwball-like Airbender rotates more than two and a half times as quickly as the changeups you’ll see from Clay Holmes or José Soriano, and four times as quickly as Logan Gilbert’s splitter.

Adam isn’t quite on Williams’ page, but a changeup that spins at more than 2,000 rpm is unusual. What that means for Adam is that his fastball has a lot of late life and rise, while his changeup has above-average sink. Fenway Park has a pretty good center field camera angle, and you can see what I’m talking about here:

It’s not like Adam’s fastball grows legs and skedaddles off when the batter swings. A better way to look at it is: You expect it to drop and it just doesn’t. Meanwhile, the changeup goes a couple inches extra in the other direction:

The big evolution in Adam’s game over the past five years has been in his breaking ball. Back in 2022, he threw a big, goofy two-plane sweeper, but since moving to San Diego, he’s gradually replaced it with a tighter gyro slider:

You can see this pitch take on a visible parabolic arc, but that’s because Adam is throwing it downhill and gravity is pulling on the ball for the fraction of a second it’s in the air. (Also the camera angle at Dodger Stadium isn’t as good. When I’m dictator of the world, we’re going to standardize the center field camera at every park in the league, but until then, we do the best we can with what we have.)

According to Statcast, this pitch had zero induced movement in either direction. As I said, Adam doesn’t throw that hard or strike that many batters out. He’ll walk guys, too. But with these pitches and the deceptive windup, he’s very difficult to square up. Since 2022, he’s in the bottom 20% of pitches in barrel rate and in the bottom 10% for HR/FB ratio. (“Bottom” here meaning lowest percentage, not “worst.”)

Here’s what’s happening this year. This graph shows the spin rates for Adam’s three primary pitches over the past three years:

You’ll notice his fastball spin is down about 150 rpm in the past two years, with a similar drop for his slider. Less backspin on the fastball means less rise, which could be problematic: Adam’s fastball relies on that little extra zing all that spin gives it, and by losing as little as an inch or two of movement on each axis, his fastball goes from puzzling to ordinary. It’s not quite dead zone-y now, but it’s flirting with the dead zone.

And if Adam were also bleeding velocity, he’d be in real trouble…

Oh, no.

That’s not only bad for the obvious reason — the hitter has more time to react — but because the longer the ball is in the air, the more time gravity has to work on it. That means that little bit of sink that hitters expected is finally coming. Adam’s fastball is dropping almost three inches more than it was two years ago.

Out of respect for the Rule of Threes, here’s a graph of Adam’s strikeout rate year by year:

Nyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwrrrrrr… (explosion noise)

Adam’s strikeout rate was in the high 20s or low 30s for most of his run of dominance — it’s 14.3% now. For comparison: Last year, Paul Skenes, Dylan Cease, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto all struck out between 29% and 30% of the batters they faced. Pitchers with more than 14% and less than 15% strikeouts in 70 or more innings included Jack Kochanowicz, Mitchell Parker, Michael McGreevy, and Miles Mikolas.

That’s a big way to fall. And in addition to the drop in strikeouts… actually, “drop” might be the wrong word here. It’s a small sample, but Adam’s strikeout rate is literally half what it was two years ago. His strikeouts got Thanos’d.

Anyway, Adam is also allowing harder contact, as evidenced by career highs in both hard-hit rate and opponent batting average. The latter is at .247, up from .207 last year and .158 in 2024. Adam has surrendered three home runs in 22 innings in 2026, after giving up just four in 65 1/3 innings last year and five in 73 2/3 innings two years ago.

Adam’s FIP is 4.51. Over the past 10 years, there are more than 5,000 individual pitcher seasons of 20 innings or more. Adam is outpitching his FIP by the eighth-largest margin out of those 5,000 seasons.

On the one hand, that’s a pretty shocking statistic. On the other hand, it only reinforces the oddest thing about Adam’s season: His ERA is 1.64. Right where it’s always been.

A fun thing you can do with a FIP-based WAR is highlight this contradiction: Adam has a top-20 ERA among qualified relievers and a negative WAR.

Adam’s weird 2026 season has me thinking about Abraham Lincoln. (Which I’m sure comes as a relief to those of you who read “highlight the contradiction” in the last paragraph and expected me to quote a different historical world leader.)

There’s a special place in Hell for people who distort the meaning of useful proverbs or aphorisms: “A few bad apples…” or “The customer is always right.”

So too Lincoln’s 1858 speech, which began: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Given what happened three years later, and Lincoln’s role in those events, people like to wield that quote as a call to find common ground with people with whom we disagree. If you keep reading, you’ll find that Lincoln meant quite the opposite.

Speaking about the division between antebellum slave states and free states, he said, “I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Adam’s results and underlying stuff are in just such a state of oppositional instability. (Albeit one of far less historical significance, unless you’re Craig Stammen, maybe.) Either he will regain his spin and velocity, or find some other way to compensate. If not, his results will soon come to reflect his peripherals, rather than his stellar track record.

They will become all one thing or all the other.