Is This the Start of Something Big for Logan Henderson?

×

Expand

Photo via Milwaukee Brewers - Facebook

Logan Henderson

Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Logan Henderson on the mound (July 17, 2026)

If many Brewers fans (and perhaps the Brewers themselves) had gotten their way Sunday’s game would have featured former Tigers ace Tarik Skubal starting for Milwaukee instead of against them, even if it meant Logan Henderson had to be traded to the Tigers to make it happen. After Sunday’s game a few of them are likely glad they didn’t get what they were hoping for.

Skubal was good on Sunday, of course, laboring a bit but working around nine baserunners to get through six innings with two runs allowed. Henderson, however, won the matchup with just four baserunners across seven innings and a solo home run as the only blemish on his line for the day. The outing lowered Henderson’s ERA to 2.70 across 12 starts on the season and was the third in a row where he’s pitched at least six innings.

More interesting than what Henderson is doing, however, might be how he is doing it. Henderson throws a 93 mph, four seam fastball. In previous generations this would have been fast enough to be at or above league average but in modern context it stands out. Baseball Savant ranks him in the 26th percentile among MLB pitchers in fastball velocity, and even that number is somewhat deceptive. Many of the pitchers Henderson is being compared to throw sinkers or two-seamers and trade some velocity for more vertical movement. That’s not the case for him.

Success from Deception

Successful pitchers with Henderson’s arsenal sometimes succeed based on deception and getting hitters to chase pitches outside the zone. While the former may be happening in this case, the latter is not: On Sunday Henderson threw 66 of his 93 pitches for strikes, about 71%. That roughly matches his season numbers, as he’s just under 70% across his 12 outings this season. That may not sound unusual, but it is.

Sam Miller (formerly of ESPN, now of the Pebble Hunting Substack) has written multiple times this season about the leaguewide strike rate, one of baseball’s unlikely constants. Miller notes that, despite countless changes across the game the leaguewide strike rate has been between 62.6% and 64.4% in every season since 2021.

“For some reason, despite all the changes catalogued above, and dozens of other changes that I could name—universal DH, the rise and the banning of the infield shift, the spread and the banning of performance-enhancing drugs, sabermetrics, two expansions and then a long expansion drought, Coors Field, Statcast, the decline of small ball, ABS—that number barely moves,” Miller writes.

That range doesn’t just apply to the league as a whole, however. It also seems to apply to individuals. In another piece, this one on Jacob Misiorowski, Miller also notes that 109 of the 110 pitchers who qualified for the ERA title last season threw strikes between 61 and 68 percent of the time. “That’s pretty insane to me,” Miller writes. “Some guys are super wild and some are super commandy, and yet across 100 pitches all of them (except one) fall within a seven-strike range.”

Pounding the Strike Zone

It makes sense that a pitcher with Misiorowski’s arsenal can succeed by pounding the strike zone and the numbers suggest that’s what he’s doing: He’s just outside the upper limit of Miller’s range at 68.6% strikes this season. It makes less sense, however, for Henderson and his fastball that lags behind Misiorowski’s by almost ten miles per hour. Yet Henderson is throwing even more strikes than Misiorowski and the results are rewarding him for it.

Deception, as noted above, could be a factor. Henderson is able to work deep into games despite relying heavily on two pitches, the fastball he throws almost 46% of the time and the changeup he throws for about a third of all pitches (he mixes in a cutter against righties). The fact that he’s having success doing that implies that hitters are having a hard time telling the two pitches apart.

It’s also possible that Henderson’s approach is just different enough from the typical MLB pitcher as to experience success by defying hitter expectations. Henderson still records a lot of strikeouts (10.7 per nine innings) but if he doesn’t chase them in the way other pitchers do then he could be catching opposing hitters by surprise with his tendencies, especially against lineups that haven’t faced him before. Henderson’s 12 starts this season have come against eleven opponents, with Sunday’s game against the Dodgers being the first time a team has seen him more than once.

It’s also worth noting that Henderson’s full MLB sample size is less than 100 innings, as he threw 25 ⅓ in 2025 and has 63 ⅓ this season. This could be a trend that doesn’t hold, and some of the pitchers Baseball Savant lists as similar to Henderson haven’t experienced anything like his success: They have Reds starter Chris Paddack as having the arsenal most similar to Henderson based on velocity and movement, and he has a 6.79 ERA on the season. They also cite Rays starter/reliever Ian Seymour as being a similar pitcher, and he’s been good but not great with a 4.11 ERA across 39 appearances. Peripheral numbers differ on the question of whether luck or defense have played a role in Henderson’s success: Savant’s xERA has Henderson at 2.70, one of the best marks in baseball. Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), however, has him at 3.38 to suggest he’s outperforming his inputs by about half a run per start.

Either way, Henderson’s strong run in the majors has been a big part of the Brewers’ success this season and he’s gotten there in an unusual way. Only time will tell, however, if this current stretch is an outlier or the start of something big.