Gavin Williams just recorded one of the most dominant five-game stretches by a starting pitcher in MLB history.
The Guardians right-hander struck out 55 hitters in a five-start span from July 9 through Aug. 2. Only six pitchers have matched Williams’ feat this decade: Jacob deGrom, Shane Bieber, Shohei Ohtani, Zack Wheeler, Robbie Ray and Blake Snell, who had been the last to do it, back in 2024.
There’s more to this, though. In addition to racking up the K’s, Williams hardly walked anyone. In that same stretch, he issued just three free passes.
And if that sounds rare, well, it is. Since at least 1901, only six pitchers have put together a five-start span in which they’ve recorded at least 55 strikeouts and issued three or fewer walks. Clayton Kershaw, of note, did so three separate times in 2016 (the numbers below reflect his most-dominant five-game stretch that season).
Five-start stretches with 55+ Ks and 3 BBs or fewer
Williams saw his historic stretch come to an end last Saturday when he struck out seven and walked two in five solid innings against the White Sox. He’ll look to begin anew Friday at 7:10 p.m. ET against the Padres when he climbs the mound at Progressive Field, opening a critical series rife with postseason implications.
That Williams — the one who has dominated for the better part of the last six weeks — is not the same pitcher from earlier this season.
The biggest change here is pitch usage. Williams is back to relying on his bread and butter — a four-seam fastball and a sweeper — as his top two weapons against hitters from both sides of the plate.
When we last spoke to Williams at the beginning of June, he was throwing his sinker more and more frequently. It had supplanted his four-seamer as his No. 1 pitch to right-handed hitters: He was using his two-seamer 28% of the time in these situations, compared to a 17% usage rate on his four-seamer.
The decision largely boiled down to command. As Williams explained, he had a tendency to yank his four-seamer and miss glove-side, resulting in a cluster of fastballs up and away. While he still yanked his sinker, seam-shifted wake helped steer the pitch back across the outer edge of the plate.
The numbers backed Williams up. As we wrote in June, Williams had the fourth-lowest zone rate on his four-seamer (among pitchers to throw at least 250 four-seamers) and the second-highest zone rate on his sinker (min. 100 sinkers). He couldn’t land his four-seamer in the zone, so hitters stopped swinging at it. For the time being, he decided to stop throwing it.
Fast forward two months, though, and everything has changed.
The four-seamer is back, and in a big way.
Since July 1, Williams is holding the opposition to a .080 batting average (4-for-50) in at-bats ending on his four-seam fastball. That’s the lowest average against 95 qualified four-seamers in that span. It’s also the second lowest BA against any pitch in that span (min. 50 PA), behind only Dylan Cease’s signature slider.
This is a truly elite weapon. It makes sense that Williams would throw it more often, especially because he can now throw it for strikes: After landing the four-seamer in the zone just 34% of the time in June, his zone rate spiked to 49.4% in July.
And it’s not just about landing in the zone. He knows where he wants it — right at the top — and is hitting his spot consistently.
How did this happen? Williams credits a few tweaks that he made to his delivery.
“I was being more rotational than what I wanted,” Williams said earlier this week in Detroit. “I call it a more north-south delivery approach. So it helps out with the angle of the heater and helps move the ride on the heater.”
A few months ago, Cleveland’s coaching staff informed Williams that the metrics on his four-seamer were not where they wanted them to be. In June, for example, Williams averaged 13 inches of induced vertical break — IVB — on his heater, his lowest average in a single month in his career. The pitch wasn’t carrying through the zone like it usually does.
“That’s one way to identify [a problem] in the delivery a little bit,” Williams said.
Williams still doesn’t generate a ton of ride on his four-seamer, hovering around 14 inches of IVB. But he’s cleaned some things up. For example, Williams has added nearly two full ticks of velocity to his four-seamer, which is averaging 98.3 mph in August after sitting at 96.5 mph in April. Among starting pitchers, only Jacob Misiorowski and Cam Schlittler are throwing faster this month.
“I think it’s moving more efficiently down the mound,” Williams said. “Knowing how to use my body in the right way and getting in the good positions that I know how to.”
Now, Williams can land his four-seamer at the top rail, which makes his sweeper play up, too. These pitches work in harmony. Since July 1, the opposition is hitting .153 against his sweeper. For a reference point, in that same span, Tarik Skubal’s wicked changeup is holding batters to a .152 average.
It’s no wonder that Williams is recording tons of strikeouts. Right now, he has two of the top strikeout pitches in baseball, with his sweeper (33 Ks since July 1) and four-seamer (26 Ks) both capable of putting hitters away. Since July 1, Williams is throwing them a combined 81% of the time in two-strike counts; that’s up from 56% across the first three months of the season.
“It’s three different speed differences, really,” Williams said. “You’ve got 100 at the top of the zone, and then you’ve got a curveball at the bottom, and then a sweeper working off of that. It’s just different speeds that they have to worry about.”
For Williams, the lack of walks may be more impressive than the strikeouts. Misiorowski and Schlittler are the only other starting pitchers to decrease their walk rate by at least 4.0% from 2025 to 2026. Williams’ walk rate is in the 69th percentile of MLB, compared to the seventh percentile last year.
That improvement has come in two parts — first with a two-seamer that was easier to command, and now with a revitalized four-seamer that is taking him to new heights.
MLB.com Guardians reporter Tim Stebbins contributed to the reporting of this story.
