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Joe Ryan is about as steady a pitcher as you’ll find in the big leagues. Since his first full season in the majors, 2022, Ryan has never made fewer than 23 starts. He’s never thrown fewer than 135 innings nor more than 171, and his season-by-season WAR has stayed between 2.2 and 3.1. He hasn’t been a front-end starter, but he’s making just $6.2 million, which is a tremendous bargain. He was a hot commodity who somehow stayed put during the Twins’ fire sale last summer; if Minnesota is out of contention again, you’ll probably hear his name come up at this coming deadline, as well.

It also helps that Ryan is having a career year at the right time. He’s already at 2.1 WAR on the season, and we’re only about a third of the way through the calendar. That puts him fifth in the league. He’s also sixth in FIP, 12th in strikeouts, and 10th among qualified starters in K-BB%.

And he’s only getting hotter. Ryan took a beating from the Mets on April 23, allowing seven runs in five innings. In six starts since, he’s thrown 32 innings with 37 strikeouts, just six walks, and a single home run allowed. His ERA over the past month is 1.97 and his FIP is 2.01. That’s not just ace stuff, that’s Cy Young stuff.

What’s always been good about Ryan remains good now. He has never had massive velocity, but his four-seamer has always been elite or close to it, thanks to excellent command and arm-side movement. In every full season of his career, Ryan has ranked in the 93rd percentile or higher for fastball run value, and this despite tinkering with all manner of other arm-side offerings.

Every year there’s something new. First, he went from a changeup to a splitter, then he added a sinker, then he started throwing the sinker as part of his regular arsenal — especially against righties — instead of holding it as a show-me pitch.

Last year, Ryan’s heater was third in Stuff+ and seventh in Location+ among qualified starters. Or, if you think pitch modeling is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, consider that opponents hit just .208 with an xBA of .195 off his four-seamer last season. That’s good for any pitch and terrific for a starter’s four-seamer with below-average velocity.

In baseball, as in life, I’m a big believer in not making things any harder than they need to be. Life throws you enough challenges on its own. One way to make your life easy, as a pitcher, is to limit walks. This actually might be the best way to make your life easy. And Ryan does this, as well. He has one of the 10 best career walk rates among active pitchers with at least 500 innings, and he hasn’t walked more than 6% of opponents since his first full season in the big leagues.

Ryan also has a career 27.6% strikeout rate — like everything else, this is consistent across his career — which puts him 17th among qualified pitchers in the 2020s. That’s one spot below Zack Wheeler and one spot above Shane Bieber.

So Ryan has a great career FIP, too, right?

Wrong!

Ryan’s big weakness has always been the home run. To some degree, that’s the cost of pitching the way he does. He throws from a low three-quarters arm angle, and five of his six pitches — his gyro slider is the only exception — have above-average horizontal movement. He’s a side-to-side guy, and he gives up a lot contact, even hard contact, in the air.

Last year, Ryan had the eighth-highest fly ball rate out of 127 pitchers who threw at least 100 innings. This year, even as he lays waste to all and sundry, he’s 11th out of 76 qualified starters. Lots of guys pitch effectively without getting many groundballs, and it helps that Ryan is consistently in the top quartile for strikeouts.

This year, he has cut his home run rate by more than half.

That’s probably not sustainable. Which is not to say that Ryan’s gotten away with a million fly outs to the warning track; he’s allowed four home runs this year, while Statcast has him at 3.9 expected home runs. Rather, Ryan’s HR/FB ratio is down to just 5.3%. He hasn’t posted a single-digit HR/FB since 2022. In 2023, when the rest of his numbers were among the best of his career, he allowed home runs on 14.9% of his fly balls. He’s still allowing a lot of balls in the air, and to the pull side; I expect this ratio to regress noticeably by the end of the season.

But he is doing a few things differently.

The first is a new pitch, or a new-ish pitch: a curveball, which Ryan debuted in the middle of last year. It’s only marginally slower than his sweeper, and like the sweeper it has above-average glove-side movement. But with similar velocity and glove-side movement, it drops almost an extra foot compared to his sweeper.

Nobody can hit it. Ryan’s getting an opponent batting average of .079 and a .105 slugging percentage when he throws his curveball. And he’s already thrown it 31 more times this year than he did in all of 2025; it’s his second-most used pitch. Last year, Ryan’s fastballs were great, but his breaking balls were average. This year, he’s in the 91st percentile for breaking ball run value.

But the big change is in where Ryan’s throwing his six pitches. This is the in-zone rate for every pitch in his arsenal throughout his career.

It’s a bit hard to appreciate the difference in Zone% with the chart scaled like this, so I’ll risk being a little redundant. Last year, Ryan threw both his fastballs in the zone at least 60% of the time, while none of his secondaries hit the zone more than 45% of the time. His splitter spent the least time in the zone, clocking in at an even 30%. And it didn’t work as a chase pitch; opponents chased just 23% of Ryan’s splitters outside the zone.

This year, Ryan’s throwing all six of his pitches in the zone between 40% and 60% of the time. He’s throwing the slider and sweeper for strikes half the time, and his Zone% on the splitter has gone up by half. Despite throwing more splitters in the zone, his whiff rate on his offspeed pitch has actually increased slightly.

Ryan’s big chase pitch is now his curveball, and guess what: His opponent chase rate on that pitch has gone up from 32.9% to 44.6%. And while he’s throwing the sweeper in the zone more, he’s gained almost 17 percentage points of chase rate there, as well.

Ryan is also throwing his four-seamer in more advantageous areas. Last year, it looked like he just aimed for the middle of the strike zone and let it fly.

In 2026, he’s pitching more precisely to the top edge of the strike zone, which is where you want to be if you’ve got a fastball with ride, two slow breakers, and a splitter you can throw for strikes.

Taking all of Ryan’s pitches together, his overall chase rate has gone up from 25.3% last year to 31.7% this year, while his in-zone swing rate has dropped 2.4 percentage points. He’s throwing about as many meatballs, by Baseball Savant’s definition, as he has his entire career, but opponents are swinging at just 73.3% of those pitches this year, down from 83.1% in 2025.

The ability to throw fastballs for strikes is low-hanging fruit. The willingness to throw five or six pitches for strikes, apparently, has unlocked a new level of performance in Ryan. Don’t make things any harder than they have to be.