Jose Leclerc, Evan Marshall, and Tony Watson Discuss Their Atypical Changeups

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Jose Leclerc, Evan Marshall, and Tony Watson — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Jose Leclerc, Texas Rangers

“I was around 10 years old when I started throwing it — 10 or 12 — and I thought it was a regular changeup. When I was playing Little League, nobody told me that it wasn’t really a changeup. I just kept throwing it, kept throwing it, and when I signed my contract with the Rangers, the pitching coach told me, ‘That’s not a changeup.’ I said, ‘That’s how I hold my changeup.’ He said, ‘No, that’s a slider.’ But I kept throwing it, kept throwing it, and it was good.

“It’s a changeup grip, but I throw it like a football and it moves kind of like a slider. I don’t know why. I’ve tried to show it to my compañeros — to my teammates — and they can’t do it. Sam Dyson; he asked me to show it to him. A few others did, as well. Some of them could kind of throw it, but they couldn’t command it like I do.

“I throw it the same now as when I was a kid. Everything is the same. It is better, though. I throw harder now, so there’s more movement. But what it is … I call it a cut-change. It’s just something natural that I have. I don’t how I do it. For real.”

Evan Marshall, Chicago White Sox

“Throwing changeups isn’t really fun when you’re a kid — it’s all about throwing a nasty breaking ball — and that kind of stayed with me all the way through college, and even the minor leagues. I was fastball and breaking ball. I had a changeup, but I never threw it.

“When I made my major league debut, the first breaking ball I threw was flat. It was terrible. Miguel Montero was the catcher, and he started putting down changeups. While the pitch was foreign to me, I just started throwing them, and it was swing and miss, swing and miss. From that moment on, I’ve been a changeup guy. Probably one out of every three pitches I throw is a changeup.

“Montero hadn’t caught me before. He knew I didn’t throw many of them, but the coaching staff had told him I had a pretty good one, even though I didn’t use it. So after that first breaking ball hung up there above the zone — it was a take — he started putting down changeups, and they had depth to them.

“It’s a modified version of a circle. I kind of have a smaller hand, and the way I make the circle I get splitter action on it. Traditionally, you wouldn’t throw many right-on-right changeups, but because of the action is more like a splitter, it plays to both sides. It’s spinning at like a 230 axis — it’s almost spinning sideways — so there’s really no action on the ball to keep it from dropping; gravity does a lot of the work. It comes out spinning a lot like my two-seamer, so I try to tunnel them off each other.

“It’s a firm changeup. This year, I’m averaging 94 [mph] on my fastball, and my changeup is anywhere from 87 to 89. It’s not traditional in the sense of being notably slower. I mean, Lucas Giolito has something like 18 mph of difference between his fastball and his changeup. Mine probably just looks like a slower two-seamer, but because I get a lot movement, I’m able to generate swings and misses.

“I lost it for a little while. My mechanics changed a little bit, without me knowing, and I started to get a little bit of cut to it, because I was pulling left. Once I got that ship righted, the changeup was back.”

Tony Watson, San Francisco Giants

“I was a fastball/breaking-ball guy in high school. Then I had shoulder surgery my freshman year of college, and my breaking ball didn’t come back the way I hoped it would. As a result, I had to resort to a changeup. I started doing the fastball-changeup combo as a starter in college.

“Somebody basically gave me a ball and showed me a circle-change grip — ‘put the circle on the logo’ — and from there I fiddled around with finger positioning, and how deep to hold it. Over time, it developed into a good pitch for me.

“The grip has always stayed the same — how I feel it in the glove and what I’m going for initially — but depending on what I want to do with it, there will be little differences. I’ll try to get it off the weakest fingers — the ring finger and the pinky — and I’ll pronate, and roll it over more. I’ll bury the thumb, I guess you could say. But the biggest thing is to just get it out front, because if it’s elevated it’s going to be a damage pitch.

“I’m never suffocating it deep. I’ve got long fingers, so I’m able to hold it in my fingertips. I feel that’s a benefit for me, because I can throw it with the same arm speed and still get that whippy finish. All you’re doing is trying to deceive the hitter’s eyes by making it look like a fastball.

“My spin-rate is high for a changeup, which is rare. It’s weird. But again, what I’m looking for is to make that thing look as much like my fastball as I can. I run the fastball away, and the separation of velo gets me some swings-and-misses and weak contact. That’s the goal.

“In Pittsburgh, I was 75-80% fastballs and sinkers. Over there it was, ‘We want the ball on the ground.’ Here, I’m obviously throwing a lot more [changeups]. I think if you look league wide, people are going away from that more and more. This is just my version of adjusting, and switching my pitch usage.”

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The 2018 installments of this series can be found here.