Patrick Forbes spent the early part of his college career straddling two jobs. At Louisville, he played both ways as a freshman and even got one plate appearance as a sophomore before a broken hand pushed him to the mound for good. That turn has already changed his career path: the D-backs took him with the 29th pick in 2025, and he’s climbed to No. 11 in Arizona’s system.
Now in the Arizona Fall League, the 22-year-old right-hander is using the desert to sharpen what he’s got and add a pitch that could make the rest of his arsenal play up. The biggest change is a sweeper, a new wrinkle that came after an early right flexor injury and later elbow inflammation limited him to 29 2/3 innings between High-A Hillsboro and the Arizona Complex League this summer.
D-backs pitching coaches and coordinators worked with Forbes on giving his slider more length, and the adjustment has already shown up. In a Saturday start for Salt River, he struck out four over 2 2/3 scoreless innings while averaging 14 inches of horizontal movement on the pitch and getting as much as 21 inches of gloveside break. He generated whiffs on three of eight swings against it and leaned on the sweeper as his main weapon against right-handers, throwing it 12 times to same-side batters while using his four-seamer eight times.
“I’m pretty much the same amount of comfortable with it as I was with my other one,” Forbes said.
The reason for adding it is simple enough from his point of view. He already has a cutter, and he wants something distinct enough to keep hitters guessing.
“I have the cutter,” he said, “so just [having] something to separate from the cutter can help a lot with just keeping hitters off balance.”
That cutter has become an important piece of the puzzle, especially against left-handers. It gives him a tighter look than the sweeper, and on Saturday it showed only two inches of average horizontal break.
Forbes used it mostly versus lefties, with seven of his eight cutters going to opposite-side hitters. The same pattern showed up in his AFL debut on Oct.
His changeup has barely entered the picture so far - he threw it just once on Saturday - but the cutter has helped him attack lefties well enough to produce a small sample of success. Through his first two Fall League starts, left-handed hitters are 2-for-10 against him.
“I think it just plays well to lefties,” said the D-backs farmhand. “Just something with the depth procession and just getting it in on the barrel has been good to lefties.”
Forbes has also shown that the arm strength is still there. He worked in the mid-90s in both of his first two outings with Salt River, and Saturday’s two hardest pitches came on his final two offerings of the day, both 96.1 mph to Red Sox switch-hitter Antonio Anderson. One of those pitches produced a whiff to end the third inning and finish his outing.
“You learn ways to hold the velo, just things you do in between innings to stay fresh,” said Forbes, who touched triple-digits for Louisville in 2025. “I think breathing is a big thing that can help with that, and keeping the legs fresh because usually when your velo drops, it's from your legs, not really from your arm.”
The work on staying fresh is a direct response to what happened during the season. Forbes opened ‘26 on the injured list with the flexor issue and didn’t make his debut until a rehab start in the Rookie-level Arizona Complex League on May 27. More elbow inflammation knocked him out for most of July in the Northwest League, and despite striking out 34.5 percent of the hitters he faced at High-A, he never pitched past four innings in any of his 10 starts for Hillsboro.
That forced him to rethink how he prepared between outings.
“I don't think I was throwing enough throughout the week,” he said. “I'd try to keep it light throughout the week, and then my start day would be really heavy and a lot of throwing. I don't think that's a good way to stay healthy through a long season, I think you have to build your system up to throw a lot.”
Forbes is still a pitcher learning how to be a pitcher-only, and the Fall League has become part of that education. The old two-way version of him still lingers in the background, but with every adjustment to his mix and his routine, that side of the story moves a little farther away.