Payton Tolle's Next Step Forward Will Require A Few Less Fastballs

[Alex Mayes]

In less than one season, Payton Tolle has become a folk hero in Boston. His huge laugh, inviting personality, and transparency have aided in making him arguably the team’s fastest rising star, and he hasn’t even reached his ceiling yet. While he’s taken a significant step forward this season, there’s still room for improvement before he can officially carry the ‘ace’ title that seems to be waiting for him down the road.

Let’s dive under the hood just a bit so we can paint a picture of just how great Tolle has been to begin this season. He’s currently sitting on a 2.61 ERA with a 28.6% strikeout rate, a 6.8% walk rate, 2.66 FIP, and 1.4 fWAR. We can also see that Tolle’s expected metrics paint an even better picture. His Baseball Savant page is on fire. His xERA (expected ERA) is lower than his actual ERA at 2.19, good for the 97th percentile. His xBA (expected batting average) is .183, slightly higher than his actual average against at .174, but it shows you just how dominant he has been through 41.1 innings this season. The major knock against him is his groundball rate sits at 34%, but Tolle isn’t a pitch-to-contact style of pitcher. He’s going to throw gas and, hopefully, mess with your timing with a breaking ball that has you swinging out of your shoes for strike three.

We already know that Tolle features what the pitching lab is calling a ‘three-headed monster of hard’ that allows him to dominate with his fastball mix. He features a four-seam fastball, sinker, and cutter that all play incredibly well in the zone. His four-seamer brings the heat while he can nibble around the edges of the zone with his sinker and cutter. What is keeping him from the absolute dominance he’s capable of is the back end of his pitch mix. His three fastballs are lethal and work to get him through the lineup the first and second time, but he’s missing something with more bite.

Last season, Tolle threw a slider that he’s scrapped this season, along with his change-up and curveball (but neither of them had much success). This season, though, his curveball has become the pitch he’s going to when he’s trying to mess with the hitter’s timing. He’s throwing it slower than he did in 2025, 82.4 mph instead of 83 mph, but he’s getting an inch and a half more glove-side break with it this season. from 5.4” to 6.9”. If we want to see how dominant a southpaw with a breaking put-away pitch can be, just look at the man that pitched opposite Tolle in his last start, old friend Chris Sale. Sale is one of the most dominant pitchers in professional baseball, even at the age of 37. While the pitch mix is drastically different. Sale features a wipeout slider that he employs against both left and right-handed hitters at a 41% clip. That slider is Sale’s main pitch, but it helps to set the stage for what Tolle’s curveball could become. If Tolle can feature it against hitters from both sides of the plate comfortably — he’s currently throwing it 11% against righties and just 5% against lefties — then it becomes his go-to strikeout pitch when he needs to keep hitters off-balance. The biggest knock with Tolle’s curveball is that when he misses with it, he typically leaves it middle-middle, so it can be hit hard. Batters are only hitting .222 against it with an xBA of .177 this year, but it’s going to take real game usage to be able to feature it as prominently as it should be.

If we look at the pitch mix from his start against the Braves, we see that he threw 94 pitches but obviously wasn’t trusting anything outside of his fastballs. He threw 54 four-seamers, 26 sinkers, 11 cutters, two curveballs, and one changeup. Those four-seamers play up so well in the zone, but limit his effectiveness when he doesn't have either a breaking or off-speed pitch for them to play off of. The Braves, who Tolle threw against just a week before (it was the first time he saw the same team twice in the same season), were obviously sitting on that fastball. Against Tolle alone, the Braves hit 40 foul balls and every single one of them was on some version of the fastball. It’s a dominant pitch, but when Tolle isn’t trusting his curveball, then the offense can wear him down as they time up his best pitch(es). 

Payton Tolle arguably has the highest ceiling of any young pitcher not named Garrett Crochet on the Red Sox’s roster; he just has to fully develop a true put-away pitch as he tightens up his major-league arsenal. Tolle is going to be a fan favorite in Boston for a long time, and may even be in the conversation for an extension if President of Baseball Operations Craig Breslow wants to attempt to rebuild some goodwill with the fanbase. He just needs to expand his selection of offerings to keep his opponents guessing a little more frequently.

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