Brian Bannister on Changeups
As a FanGraphs reader, you’re probably familiar with Brian Bannister. The former big-league right-hander — and current director of pitching analysis and development for the Boston Red Sox — has been featured here numerous times. Bannister has previously expounded on back-up sliders, spin rate, spin axis and more. Today, the subject is changeups.
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Bannister on changeups: “The term changeup is actually somewhat deceiving. It’s traditionally been taught to be a pitch that is simply slower than your fastball. If you look at the pitchers who have the best changeups, and who have had the most success at the big-league level — the Felix Hernandezes and Zack Greinkes of the world — one, they’re hard, and two, they have a lot of movement. Pitchers who simply try to take speed off the changeup ultimtely fail with the pitch. That helps make the name a contradiction.
“The manipulation of the pitch is a very personalized process. There isn’t any right or wrong way to develop depth on a changeup. You can remove spin. You can flatten out a spin axis. You can have a lower arm slot than on your fastball. You can have a different finish, after the fact, like a Tyler Clippard. There are multiple variables you can mix in to create a deceptive pitch, and to add depth to the pitch.
“Every pitcher is going to be unique. There are multiple tools, as a pitching coach or as a pitcher, that you can adjust in order to create more depth. It’s going to be unique to the pitcher’s body type, to his athleticism, to his finger and hand size.
“There are two variables. It’s a lack of spin or it’s a flatter spin axis. Both contribute to gravity having a greater pull on the pitch, which ultimately leads to depth. It’s similar to a two-seam [fastball] that way. When you can reduce the amount of backspin on the ball, you’re reducing its perceived rise.
“Pedro Martinez used to squeeze his index finger really hard, because it naturally curls the other fingers. When the fingers are shorter, it creates less spin. That helps create more depth, because with less spin, gravity pulls on the ball more. Tom Glavine used to take his index finger and squeeze the outside of his thumb, which did the same thing. It tightened up his fingers, so he was able to spin the ball less.
“When you see Greinke or Clippard… even Pedro used to do it. He’d finish on the first-base side of the mound on his fastball. He’d finish on the third-base side on his changeup. A hitter doesn’t have time, once the ball is released, to see what side of the mound the pitcher is going to finish on. What he was doing was adding more depth to his changeup when he did that.
“With splitters, you’re reducing spin, but I think the good ones also have more of a horizontal element. They have more of a tail. Whether that’s hooking a seam with your index finger… look at Koji Uehara, for example. He’s got excellent horizontal movement on the pitch. It’s beneficial to have that as well as vertical depth.”
“There are just so many ways to go about it. That’s why it’s such a fun pitch. There are so many elements you can play with, and there’s not one right or wrong. You’re just trying to get to a productive final result.”
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
He is referring to one of the strangest myths about pitching I’ve seen. Everyone is always so insistent that the key for a changeup is that it is slower than the fastball, and that the slower it is, the better. Related is the idea that a changeup gets its effectiveness from looking like a fastball and thereby disrupting a hitter’s timing. This is also quite a strange idea. So this is not the case with a slider? Unlike a changeup, a hitter recognizes a slider right away, he just can’t hit it?
It’s kind of like the idea of “late movement.” Don’t we all realize at this point there is no such thing?
All this makes much more sense if you just consider that the hitter never really knows what is coming, and just has to react to any number of speeds and movements.
The difference in velocity bw the fastball and the changeup has a lot to do with the pitch’s effectiveness. That’s not just some pitching myth. It’s vertical movement matters a lot, too, of course, but pitchers who throw a hard but effective change either (1) have a fastball that’s hard enough to still create adequate velocity separation bw the fastball and the change or (2) have a lot of downward movement on the change (or both). Harry Pavlidis has done some good research on this: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=21675
Felix has, what, 3 MPH of separation? Greinke had about 4 mph last year.
I think the important thing to remember is that velocity gap is one way to have an effective changeup, not the way.
A changeups main function is to look like a fastball and be slower. This messes with the hitters timing as most sit fastball and then adjust. Too slow and the hitter adjusts recognizing it earlier, too fast and it just becomes a more hittable fastball. They say optimal differential is about 10 mph
The slower speed allows gravity to increase the vertical drop. If there is slower spin as well the drop is greater, and if the ball has movement away, the pitch is enhanced.
So really nothing earth shattering here. To read his words as saying the change of speed is not important, well, thats just wrong. Its just that the pitch can’t be too slow (the harder your FB the harder your changeup must be to attain the optimum differential)and is better when you can get more depth (drop) and movement (tail). Thats not new.
Left unsaid was that with some of those grips you actually can increase the risk of TJS. A tighter grip is not good for the UCL
This is definitely false. The additional time gravity has to work on the ball due to speed difference is negligible. It is, like Bannister says, either less rotation on the ball, or a sideways spin axis that causes air to push the ball to the side, rather than up.
Felix’s and Greinke’s pitch effectiveness is not a fluke. It can’t be, the markers of the effectiveness of those pitches are extremely stable given the sample size. It’s not that velocity difference doesn’t matter, what is important is that it is not the only way to have a good change.
It’s not looking like I’ll publish the following findings any time soon, so I can’t think of a better place to put them than as an addendum to Bannister’s take on the pitch.
The short version is that the conventional wisdom about changeup velocity, as expressed by Paul22 above, is absolutely, completely backwards.
I did a heavy-duty regression of changeup effectiveness (based on average results over a season); the least effective where those 11 mph slower than the FB, which was also the average velocity differential. In fact, they matched to the first decimal point. Faster changeups were more effective; slower changeups were the most effective of all, but rarer. And the overall impact of relative velocity was small enough that a pitcher should never worry about it. But all things being equal, throwing one, say, just 6 mph slower than your FB is not only not just a problem, it’s good.
The results suggest that hitters usually do recognize a changeup, which makes sense two ways: first, the spin axis is almost always different, and second, when they don’t recognize it, they swing and miss badly, and that’s actually a rare occurrence. When they recognize the pitch, however, their brain necessarily treats it as an average changeup. Throwing the change faster or slower than average will disrupt their timing a bit and give you somewhat of an edge. But command appears to be much more important; the biggest predictor for effectiveness was frequency, to a much larger degree than could be explained by guys with good changeups simply throwing them more often. I’d bet that movement is very important as well, but I didn’t include it in this study.
Didn’t Bannister just kind of bail on everything related to baseball? After admitting that he threw his pitches with no seems and didn’t know where they were going..
Seems like a realiable source.
Being a great pitcher has not been a great indicator of being am excellent coach.
Not being physically able to do somethingood is different than not knowing what to do.
This has been pretty clear. He WAS good enough to pitch in the major leagues with barely average/fringe stuff. So he clearly had a pretty good idea of how to maximize what he had.
Some of the greatest hitting coaches in history were below average hitters.
Charlie Lau isn’t remembered for his amazing batting career but his insights on hitting helped shape the swing and approach of some of the greatest hitters ever.