Wainwright isn’t ranked because he missed most of the season with his Achilles’ tendon injury. But Leake fit all of the qualifiers. In his 192 innings last season, Leake threw 2,754 pitches. According to BrooksBaseball.net , Leake had the minimum 100 thrown for five different pitches: sinker, changeup, slider, curve, and the aforementioned cutter. FanGraphs does offer a weighted value for each of those pitches thrown by Leake, and as Wainwright described the cutter has become a more effective dart for him. According FanGraphs, Leake had the following pitch values for effectiveness:

I know it’s hard to get a handle on what these numbers mean. Negative is bad as far as effectiveness, but how positive does a number need to be to be average, above average, elite, etc.? A good way to understand that is to look at comparisons, especially for pitches that you know. That brings us back to John Lackey. By many measures, Lackey was the Cardinals’ most important starter this past season, an immensely valuable provider of quality innings who the team didn’t pursue this past winter as a free agent and watched him sign with the Chicago Cubs. Lackey did so by relying on his fastball. No surprise there. His fastball had a 20.8 value, per FanGraphs. The more a pitch is used the better chance it has of getting that kind of score, of course. He has had past seasons with similar success on the one pitch, but usually seen a correction in the following years. His fastball value averages 12.6. Still good. And not a bad comp for Leake overall. Baseball-Reference.com looks for mirror matches and says that the pitcher, at age 27, that Leake most resembles is the pitcher he’ll effectively be replacing on the Cardinals’ roster … Lackey.