The sweeper — a horizontal slider — had long been lumped in with other breaking balls. Thanks to a change in the Statcast system, it is suddenly its own thing. Clarke Schmidt is one of several ...

The new pitch — which is not really a new pitch — has officially made its way into the major league lexicon and has gone mainstream as a sweeper. This season, MLB’s Statcast has taken a cult ...

There may not be an individual pitch that has garnered as much attention this year as Shohei Ohtani’s sweeper. Of course, the sweeper is generally trendy, now that pitch classification systems ...