Tyler Mahle's cutter and splitter are getting hammered by right-handed hitters in 2025

What happened

Tyler Mahle's two most important weapons against right-handed hitters — his cutter and his splitter — are being hit significantly harder in 2025 than they were a year ago, per Mark Bowman. The result is a .849 OPS allowed to right-handed batters this season, a number that sits in uncomfortable contrast to the pitcher Texas watched neutralize that same matchup not long ago.

Why it matters

Right-handed hitters are a structural feature of a major-league rotation, not a scheduling quirk. A starter who can suppress them has a functional weapon across a large share of the plate appearances he will face. A starter who cannot is, at minimum, a puzzle that opposing managers are already working through.

What makes the 2025 numbers worth examining closely is the context Bowman provides: Mahle has historically struggled against right-handed hitters across much of his career, yet he managed to limit them to a .658 OPS across 16 starts for Texas last year while posting a 2.18 ERA in that same stretch. That arc — career-long vulnerability, one strong corrective season, and now a reversal — is the shape of a story that pitching coaches and front offices tend to watch with some urgency.

The cutter and the splitter are the specific instruments under scrutiny, and the numbers on each tell a similar story.

The numbers

On the cutter, right-handed hitters managed a .216 batting average with a .216 slugging percentage against Mahle in 2025, when the pitch was being used at a 15.8% rate. This year, per Bowman, that same group is hitting .316 with a .421 slugging percentage, with usage climbing to 19%.

The splitter offers an almost identical portrait. Against that pitch in 2025, right-handed hitters hit .194 with a .306 slugging percentage, at an 18.8% usage rate. This year they are hitting .316 with a .421 slugging percentage, while Mahle is deploying it slightly less often, at a 16.8% rate.

Two pitches, two nearly identical lines of deterioration, moving in the same direction at the same time. The aggregate result — a .849 OPS allowed to right-handed batters — is what happens when both arrows point the same way simultaneously.

It is worth noting what the numbers do not tell us on their own. Bowman's reporting establishes the what with precision; the why — whether this reflects mechanical drift, tipping, sequencing, or something else entirely — is not addressed in the material. The numbers describe the outcome. The cause remains open.

One detail in the usage figures is worth holding: the cutter is being thrown more often this year (19% versus 15.8%) even as it is being hit harder. The splitter is being thrown slightly less often (16.8% versus 18.8%). Whether those shifts represent deliberate strategic choices or natural in-season variation is not established in Bowman's reporting.

Where the club stands

The Rangers sit at 80-82 (.494), second in the AL West and 1 game back in the division. They are eliminated from both the division race and the Wild Card race, with a Wild Card rank of 4 and sitting 4.0 games relative to the cut line. Texas has dropped its last game heading into this week.

The schedule ahead brings the San Francisco Giants to Globe Life Field for three games. Cal Quantrill is the probable starter Monday against Logan Webb. MacKenzie Gore is lined up Tuesday opposite Blade Tidwell. Cody Bradford is slated for Wednesday against Carson Whisenhunt.

Mahle's name does not appear in those probable-pitcher lines, which means the immediate operational question — when does he pitch next, and against whom — is not answered by the available material.

The broader context of a team eliminated from postseason contention changes the stakes of any individual start without making the underlying question less interesting. A pitcher who solved a career-long problem for one season and is now watching that solution erode is a story worth following regardless of the standings, because it speaks to craft rather than October arithmetic.

What we don't know yet

Bowman's reporting establishes the performance gap clearly but does not address what, if anything, the Rangers are doing about it. There is no mention of a mechanical adjustment, a pitch-mix change under consideration, or any organizational response to the numbers he has laid out.

The .658 OPS Mahle allowed to right-handed hitters last year came across 16 starts. The sample context for this year's .849 figure is not specified in Bowman's reporting, which means the relative weight of the two numbers — and how much of the current line reflects a genuine shift versus a smaller sample behaving noisily — is a question the available material does not resolve.

What to watch

The most direct follow-up question is whether Mahle's cutter and splitter can return to the effectiveness they showed against right-handed hitters last year, or whether something has changed in how opponents are reading and attacking them.

The usage data offers one thread worth tracking. The cutter is being thrown more often this year even as it is being hit harder. If the Rangers or Mahle respond by pulling back on the pitch — or by adjusting its shape or location — that would show up in future usage figures. The same logic applies to the splitter, which is already being used slightly less frequently than it was in 2025.

More broadly, the gap between last year's 2.18 ERA across 16 starts and the current right-handed-hitter numbers is the kind of divergence that tends to generate answers eventually, whether through a pitching staff adjustment, a scouting report that surfaces publicly, or simply the numbers stabilizing one way or the other as the season continues. The Rangers may be out of the postseason picture, but the question of what happened to those two pitches is very much still in play.