Baseball Savant, MLB’s stat cast tracking website, released a new feature, which tracks by how many inches batters miss pitches.
MLB.com’s David Adler selected eight pitches from pitches across the league as examples of the nastiest pitch of its type thrown, and included Blake Treinen’s sweeper. Treinen’s sweeper is his most utilized pitch, as he throws it 43% of the time.
This season, Treinen’s go-to offering has landed him 10 strikeouts—twice as many as any of his other pitches. He has a 35.6% whiff rate on that pitch. Baseball Savant ranks Treinen fourth among sweeper users in average miss distance with an 8.3-inch average, but he has induced the biggest miss among any player in the top five at 31.8 inches.
“Treinen’s Wiffle ball movement has made his sweeper famous, and he’s still got it, even at age 37,” Adler wrote. “To this day, very few pitchers can induce as extreme whiffs as Treinen’s sweeper, which in 2026 still misses bats by over eight inches on average.
“Treinen’s sweeper generated similarly large miss distances last year, and the year before that. And we’re guessing that, in the years before Statcast’s bat tracking came online, he was doing the same thing.”
Has Blake Treinen Been Reliable in 2026?
Following a disappointing season in 2025, Treinen has bounced back but is yet to show the same quality he brought after signing with the Dodgers after the 2019 season.
Treinen posted an ERA below 2.00 from 2021-24, but saw a decline in 2025. He posted a 5.40 ERA through 32 appearances in 2025, allowing 16 earned runs in 26.2 innings pitched.
This season, he has made 26 appearances and has a 3.54 ERA. He had a strong month of May, allowing just two earned runs through 11 appearances, but has allowed two runs in four appearances so far in June.
Treinen is still yet to show his best stuff this year, but if the Dodgers can pull that version of him out, they’ll have a shutdown reliever for high-leverage spots in the bullpen.
Do you think Blake Treinen can return to his 2021-24 form this season?
