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Emboldened by my success in predicting breakout seasons for Liam Hicks and Xavier Edwards, I’ve decided to rebrand myself as the world’s greatest booster of short Marlins guys.

I’ve been a Max Meyer fan since long before he became a Marlin. I love undersized hard-throwing college right-handers. I love plus athletes from unfashionable Midwestern schools. I love guys with a breaking ball and an edge. Meyer was a freshman on the 2018 Minnesota team that gave the eventual national champion, a totally loaded Oregon State club, everything it could handle. (I’ve mentioned the 2018 Corvallis Super Regional previously, as the center fielder on that Minnesota team grew up to be Sketchy Ben from Love Is Blind.)

By 2020, Meyer was the no. 3 overall pick and top college pitcher in his draft class. Not that I expect any of you to remember my thoughts on draft prospects from six years ago, but here’s what I wrote on draft night: “Meyer isn’t the best player in this draft, but he’s my favorite.”

The road from then to now has been bumpy. Meyer got to the majors in about two years, then tore his UCL six innings into his rookie season. That cost him the back half of 2022 and all of 2023, and after three terrific starts at the beginning of the 2024 season, the Marlins controversially demoted him to Triple-A.

“The Miami Marlins’ surprising demotion of right-hander Max Meyer on Monday is not an example of service-time manipulation, at least not at this point,” Ken Rosenthal wrote at the time. “The only way he will miss getting to two years of service, pushing his free agency back one year, will be if he stays in the minors for more than half the remaining major-league schedule. Considering his talent, that outcome doesn’t seem likely either — or, at least, it shouldn’t be.”

Meyer was demoted in mid-April and returned to the majors in the last week of July. He finished the season with one year and 166 days of service time. Probably just a coincidence.

Nevertheless, Meyer was ineffective on his return to Miami, and missed the last month of the season with shoulder bursitis. He broke camp with the big league team in 2025, pitched… not great, with a 4.73 ERA and 4.47 FIP, and suffered a season-ending hip injury in early June.

Heading into this season, the prospect shine was basically off Meyer. He’d just turned 27 and had thrown only 127 2/3 major league innings while accruing almost three years of service time. And those innings had not been encouraging: a 5.29 ERA and 28 home runs allowed in just 25 starts.

The Marlins, ever a fountain of young pitching talent, were bringing up the next wave; Meyer was arguably only the second-most exciting young Marlins right-hander named Meyer, after 2023 first-rounder Noble Meyer.

But now Max Meyer, who takes the ball for the Fish against Washington on Wednesday night, is at the top of his game. He is 5-0 in 12 starts with a 2.97 ERA. He, not Sandy Alcantara or Eury Pérez, leads all Marlins starters in ERA and WAR. It took a while, but that scouting report finally came good.

Well, kind of.

When Meyer was coming out of Minnesota, the highlight of his profile was a slider. In his first appearance on our prospect lists, Eric Longenhagen put a future value of 70 on Meyer’s breaker, which was so hard it barely qualified as such. Early in his career, Meyer’s slider sat in the 86-to-90 mph range, with gyro spin that left it with neutral movement horizontally but a few more inches of break than comparable breaking pitches.

It’s a weird pitch, and even though it looked good, it still got hit fairly hard up until this year. That had more to do with Meyer’s fastball than the slider itself; after Tommy John surgery and working on a five-day schedule instead of seven, his velocity dropped from sitting at 97 mph and touching 101 to sitting in the 94-to-95 range. His fastball also had a bit of cutter action early in his career; that opened the opportunity for him to start sprinkling in a sinker, but it also ran the fastball into the velocity and movement pattern of his out pitch, the slider.

The real breakthrough for Meyer came last year, when he introduced a second slider-type breaking pitch, this one a sweeper.

This pitch is, in a word, nuts.

Meyer’s sweeper has 4.6 inches more vertical drop than comparable sweepers, which is 15th out of 189 so far this season. The thing is, Baseball Savant’s total movement bucket includes all pitches plus or minus two miles an hour; Meyer’s sweeper is the second-fastest in the game, trailing only that of Will Klein. “Comparable” is a bit of a fuzzy term.

Taking just induced movement, Meyer’s sweeper has the second-most downward movement in the league, behind only Cade Cavalli’s sweeper, which averages three miles per hour less velo. Here again we get into the vexing ontological debate on the taxonomy of breaking balls. In movement profile, Meyer’s downward-stabbing sweeper is almost more like a curveball. But in velocity and spin rate, it’s a hard sweeper. What a puzzle.

And, like, who cares what it’s called. You’re more interested in how it’s used. Here’s a first-inning confrontation between Meyer and Jordan Walker from a few weeks back. Meyer shows Walker a 91.5-mph pitch right on the outside corner. With that kind of velocity, it ought to be a fastball of some sort. Presumably Walker thought this, and if he’d guessed right, the ball would’ve carried right into his barrel.

Instead, it was a slider, which ducked out of Walker’s bat path at the last second. That was the first pitch he saw from Meyer in that game, and Meyer came right back at him with three sweepers. Here’s the last one of those.

Same location to start, but with some frisbee movement that pulls the rug out from under Walker for a swinging strike three. I guess that’s pretty clear evidence that it’s a sweeper; it might not move like a sweeper compared to other breaking balls, but it absolutely fills that role compared to Meyer’s slider and the rest of his repertoire.

Speaking of which: Meyer is throwing the highest percentage of breaking balls (53.2%) of any starting pitcher in baseball this year, and it’s not especially close. Of the 152 other starters who have thrown at least 400 total pitches, according to Baseball Savant, only Kyle Bradish is throwing 50% breaking balls. Only 25 pitchers throw 40% or more breaking balls.

The sweeper and slider are Meyer’s two most-used pitches, and he throws them in roughly equal proportion to both left- and right-handed hitters. All hitters get a four-seamer percentage in the low 20s; only after that does Meyer’s approach diverge. He throws 17% changeups and 7% sinkers to lefties, with roughly the inverse ratio to righties. And even then, the distinction isn’t that big. The changeup and sinker have similar induced movement, though they vary in velocity by six miles an hour.

As Meyer has honed his two-breaker approach, he’s also changed the spin axis on his four-seamer. That cutter-action heater that used to run into the slider is gone, replaced by spin that comes in a couple ticks clockwise, resulting in a fastball that rises and runs arm side. Here’s Meyer’s repertoire from 2024.

And here it is this year.

There’s still plenty of separation between the four-seamer and the sinker, and even if there weren’t, who cares? That’s not where Meyer has to make his living anymore. Now he can set up three distinct pitch shapes in the high 80s and low-to-mid-90s, and no hitter can cover them all.

You can tell Meyer is pitching off his sweeper and slider because of where he’s throwing his fastball. Yeah he’s a short guy, but he gets above-average rise on his heater from a three-quarters arm angle — he should be using that to climb the ladder. Instead, he’s throwing it down the middle.

That’s not going to induce many whiffs above the strike zone, but it does set hitters up perfectly for breaking balls down in the zone or below it. When Meyer throws breaking balls outside the zone but below its vertical midpoint, opponents swing 43.1% of the time, which is one of the 15 highest ratios in the league.

And when hitters chase low, Meyer profits. His whiff rate on breaking balls outside the strike zone is a staggering 69.2%, the sixth-highest rate among starting pitchers. According to Baseball Savant, only Shohei Ohtani has derived more value from his breaking pitches this season than Meyer.

Meyer has, in short, been terrific this season, which is why I’m declaring now that I was right all along. Because there are one or two question marks about how likely this is to continue. Not least among them: Meyer just set a new single-season career high for innings pitched with a start on May 29. He’s two starts from his highest innings total since he was in high school, and he hasn’t been healthy for a full season since his first year in the pros, which is also the only time he’s ever broken the 100-inning threshold at any level.

I think it’s fair to hold space for skepticism about the long-term health of such a pitcher, when he’s throwing more sliders and sweepers than any other starter in the league.

I’m not going to concern troll about Meyer’s BABIP being 74 points lower than it was last year; he’s changed the way he pitches to such an extent that I’m happy to believe he’s giving up a different flavor of contact than in previous years. I would, however, keep an eye on his home run rate; Meyer has allowed just five this year, on a HR/FB ratio of 7.5%. His career HR/FB coming into this season was 20.9%, which is simply astronomical. If the home run rate stays closer to where it is, he’ll be golden, but there’s reason to worry that that won’t be the case.

Still, Meyer has been one of the best pitchers in the league so far this season, and he’s done it with an exciting, unusual, no-holds-barred approach. I knew that would happen, even if I didn’t think it’d look quite like this.