By Mark Simon

Many years ago SIS developed its own batted ball classifications, creating three categories, soft-hit, medium-hit, and hard-hit. These utilized the combination of batted ball type, where the ball was hit and overall velocity to place the balls into the different buckets.

These have since been publicly supplanted by Statcast's exit velocity as the defining characteristic for whether a ball is hard-hit, but for the purposes of this article, I thought I'd put these older classifications to use, particularly when I came up with the headline for this piece. You can still find them at FanGraphs for both pitchers and hitters.

I was most curious to see last year's leaderboard for which pitchers generated the highest percentage of contact that was classified as weak.

Here's the list.

Highest Soft-Contact Percentage, Minimum 100 Innings Pitched

Some of the best pitchers in baseball made the Top 10 (Max Fried, Tarik Skubal, Hunter Brown), yet so did Kyle Hendricks and Ryan Gusto. Hendricks, who has since retired, was done in by an abundance of contact against him (he struck out 6.2 per 9 innings). When Gusto gave up hard contact, it was damaging (he allowed 1.5 home runs per 9 innings).

I do want to call attention to the pitcher at the top of the list, Royals lefty Kris Bubic was a 3-bWAR pitcher with a 2.55 ERA in 20 starts and on the way to contending for a Cy Young Award before he was sidelined by a season-ending shoulder injury in late July.

Bubic's four-seam fastball averages only 92 MPH but its whiff rate is in the 84th percentile. Last season, his four-seam, changeup, sweeper, and slider all had positive run values, with the sweeper and slider the ones that were the most valuable on a per-pitch basis.

Bubic has a long extension and the sweeper and slider both drop a good amount more than others thrown at similar velocities. He's hard to hit against for power (6 home runs allowed in 116 1/3 innings last season) and hard to run against (2 steals in 5 attempts), and he strikes out about a batter per inning .

The various projection systems don't think he will replicate what he did in 2025, probably because of some of the issues he had before that season. FanGraphs ERA projections range from 3.57 to 4.08. Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA has him at 3.73 for a 50th percentile projection and 3.34 for the 80th percentile projection. He's made more than 20 starts in a season only once.

Regardless, he'll be an interesting one to watch if he can stay healthy in 2026.

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