Pedro Avila might not strike you as exceptional. He’s mostly on mop-up duty in the Guardians bullpen, hoovering up low-leverage innings. His sinker was deemed the “most normal” in baseball by Leo Morgenstern earlier this year. And his 3.60 ERA and 3.92 FIP is right around average for major league relievers.

But behind this veneer of normalcy lies the weirdest changeup in baseball.

Below is a plot of the average vertical and horizontal moment of every pitcher’s changeup during the 2024 season (minimum 50 changeups, data as of August 15, vertical movement measured without gravity). You have a 50/50 shot of guessing which one is Avila’s:

The brown dot on the left of my beautifully drawn circle is Logan Allen’s changeup, Avila’s erstwhile teammate. Michael Baumann wrote about Allen’s “weird-ass changeup” last July, noting that the pitch had the least horizontal movement of any major league changeup in the 2023 season. (Unfortunately, despite Michael’s request, no “Weird-Ass Changeup World Tour” tag has since been added to the CMS.) The purple dot on the right is Avila’s changeup, which is averaging even less horizontal movement than Allen’s.

But the average movement profile doesn’t fully capture what’s weird about Avila’s changeup. To truly appreciate the weirdness, it is necessary to take a look at why it moves like that.

It starts with his crazy grip. Look at this grip!

He aligns his thumb and pointer finger in a quasi-circle-change grip while pressing on the exact opposite side of the ball with his other three fingers. The funky grip — a circle-change/splitter/forkball/vulcan-change hybrid — informs the way the ball comes out of his hand.

Scott Firth, a former performance coordinator at Tread Athletics, described Avila’s grip in a tweet from January 2023 and the movement profile that results from it.

“Looks like fosh/modified box grip, some guys will cut it hard with 3 fingers on outer part of ball,” Firth wrote. “Low spin low efficiency could catch ssw [seam-shifted wake] either direction depending on cw [clockwise] or ccw gyro.”

The contradictory forces of fade from the pronation and cut from the pressure of his three fingers results in chaos; because of that grip, the ball comes off the pointer finger and middle finger simultaneously, sending the pitch downward:

Avila’s changeup almost imitates a knuckleball in the randomness of its spin axis. A helpful way to understand this is by looking at Avila’s spin-based movement and observed movement. The spin-based movement is the orientation directly after release; the observed movement is the implied axis based on the movement of the pitch. (When the spin-based orientation does not match the observed orientation, it is generally assumed that “seam-shifted wake” is responsible. More on that later.)

The observed spin axis on Avila’s changeup nearly goes around the entire clock. Check out the green bars on the graphic below:

Avila’s changeup might ultimately move similarly to Allen’s from a “shape” perspective, but the aesthetic experience from the hitter’s vantage point is distinct. It’s a complete outlier from the perspective of spin efficiency, defined as the percentage of spin that is either sidespin or backspin/topspin. The median changeup is 95% spin efficient. Allen’s changeup has 72% spin efficiency, one of the lowest marks in baseball. Avila’s changeup checks in at 24% (!!) spin efficiency, which is more like a typical gyro slider than any changeup.

The Guardians broadcast picked up on this following a slow-motion replay of an Avila changeup. After watching the replay, Guardians color commentator Rick Manning remarked that “It’s almost like a forkball but he spins it like a slider.”

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this is not the traditional way to throw a changeup. Driveline, for instance, published an article showing five different grips for aspiring changeup-throwers to try; none of them resemble Avila’s.

The classic changeup is thrown with heavy pronation. Think Logan Webb’s changeup fading down and away from a left-handed hitter:

Logan Webb, Nasty 87mph Changeup. ?

7th K pic.twitter.com/TGSkcD98Pu

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 15, 2024

Some pitchers struggle to throw a changeup with heavy pronation. One key reason, as Noah Woodward pointed out in a March 2023 post, is that the act of “turning over” the ball is awkward for pitchers who don’t throw another pitch that requires turning over their wrist in the manner required of a Webb-esque changeup.

For pitchers like Tarik Skubal or Matthew Boyd with more of an inherent supination bias, the seam-shifted wake changeup is a way to throw an offspeed pitch without contorting their arms in uncomfortable directions.

“I throw a changeup just like a slider now, but using essentially the smooth part of the baseball to create no drag on one side, but seam is on the other side,” Boyd told MLB.com’s Jason Beck in March 2023. “And because of that, I get more movement than I did before, but the pattern of how my wrist is moving is like the other pitches. So it allows for the other pitches to be more consistent.”

Avila’s changeup does not fit neatly in either of these categories. It is, somehow, a pronated seam-shifted wake changeup. That explains why Avila leads the league in the gap between his changeup’s spin-based axis and his observed axis.

But that gap doesn’t tell the whole story. Most other pitchers have a similar pattern when their actual spin orientation deviates significantly from the “spin-based” orientation: It shifts to the left (or right) in a predictable pattern. Take Skubal’s seam-shifted wake changeup, for example. The “observed spin” is shifted to the left of the spin-based movement.

Avila’s changeup is not like that. Because of the heavy gyro spin that his grip produces, the pitch leaves the hand at somewhat random orientations and can either fade or cut, as the movement map of all his changeups in 2024 shows. Notice how the green dots (his changeups) can end up on either side of the pitch plot:

So Avila’s changeup is definitely weird, but is it good? It certainly produces some bizarre swings, even when it’s poorly located. Heliot Ramos, for one, looked flummoxed after whiffing on one middle-middle Avila changeup:

Avila’s changeup gets a lot of whiffs — among changeups thrown at least 100 times, his ranks in the 85th percentile in swinging strike percentage and the 78th percentile in whiffs per swing. On the other hand, he throws one out of every six changeups in the “waste” zone, which sort of makes sense to me — that grip feels prone to misfires. (Shout out to Alex Chamberlain’s pitch leaderboard for these stats.)

While Avila’s changeup has graded out as basically average from a run value perspective, I’m not always sure that run value is the best way to evaluate the quality of a given pitch. There are interaction effects between pitches — in other words, the thought of the changeup in the batter’s mind might improve the quality of his fastball — and Avila is using the changeup as his primary out-pitch and getting pretty good results.

Given that the Padres DFA’d Avila in April, this season looks like a success for him, and the changeup is without question a big part of all that. As always with pitching, weird is where you want to be.

On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on.

At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.

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Every spectator sport has its own tradeoffs between watching on TV and going to a game in person. And while there are some that can only be truly appreciated live, I personally think television does a pretty good job of portraying baseball at its best. This is a game of inches, and inches can be hard to perceive from the cheap seats.

One exception is exceptional center field defense. By the time the camera angle turns around on a fly ball, the outfielders have already covered dozens of feet in their pursuit of the baseball. To appreciate the speed and timing required to play this position well, you really have to see it live.

There aren’t many guys who can really go out and get it. There definitely aren’t 30 who can hit well enough to stick in a major league lineup every day. Most center fielders, therefore, fall into two camps: Good hitters who can kind of hang but should probably be in a corner, and the genuine article. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Michael Baumann wrote about how Kirby Yates has a chance to join Craig Kimbrel and Wade Davis as only relievers in MLB history with multiple seasons of 40 or more appearances and an ERA south of 1.25. Five years after logging a 1.19 ERA over 60 outings with the San Diego Padres, the 37-year-old right-hander has come out of the Texas Rangers bullpen 44 times and has a 1.19 ERA.

I procured subject-specific quotes from Yates for my colleague’s article, but there were a few other perspectives I wanted to glean from him as well. That he has quietly put up better numbers than many people realize was one of them. For instance, since he began throwing his signature splitter in 2017, the underrated righty has a 36.0% strikeout rate that ranks sixth-best among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.

“It’s almost like a tale of two of two careers,” Yates said upon hearing that. “It’s before the split and then after the split. Now I’m getting into a situation where you could call it three careers in a sense — since [March 2021 Tommy John] surgery and how I’ve been coming back from that. Last year was good, but also kind of shaky. The two-and-a-half to three years off, I felt that. This year I feel more comfortable. I’ve felt like I could attack some things I needed to attack.”

Yates doesn’t feel that his splitter is quite as good as it was pre-surgery, although he does believe it is getting back to what it was. His fastball is another story. He told me that it’s never been better. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re speaking with someone from Toronto who doesn’t follow baseball, they can probably tell you two things about the Blue Jays. The first is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the best player on the team. The second is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. sucks.

The first point is pretty accurate, and it’s absolutely true this season — more on that in a moment. The second point is categorically false, but alas, such is the curse of superstardom. The player who has his face on posters all around the city is going to get plenty of credit when things go right, but he’s also going to shoulder an excessive amount of criticism when things go wrong. When you’re the guy starring in the Uncrustables ads, fans expect a crust-free performance on the field, too.

Guerrero made a name for himself in 2021, which was no easy task considering the man with whom he shares his name. Yet, with 48 home runs, 111 RBI, and a runner-up finish for AL MVP, Guerrero gave the average Torontonian a reason to talk about baseball for the first time since José Bautista was punched in the face. Then, Guerrero spent the next two years corroding his golden reputation. To be clear, no one who knows what they’re talking about ever thought he was a bad ballplayer — heck, he set a new record for the highest salary ever awarded in an arbitration hearing this past offseason — but his performance certainly went downhill. If all you were comparing him to was the best version of himself (like that motivational poster in your gym always tells you to do), he really was pretty disappointing last year: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. It’s an incredible time to be a baseball fan, particularly one who isn’t tied to a single team or division. There are three tight division races, and both wild cards hold some intrigue. Some of the brightest stars of the game are playing incredibly well right now. The A’s are on a kelly-green-clad respectability streak that is both improbable and delightful. The White Sox are fun to watch for their ever-evolving pursuit of futility (more on that below). There’s no time for August doldrums when the games are this exciting. So no more talking vaguely about what a great week this was; let’s get right to it. And thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format I’m borrowing here.

1. Barry Would Never

Perhaps the least likely story of the season, on an individual level, is Tyler Fitzgerald, who has turned into one of the great offensive forces in the game overnight. After putting up average offensive numbers as he climbed through the minors across four seasons plus the lost COVID year, he has established an everyday role on the Giants and unexpectedly caught fire this season. He’s now hitting home runs faster than I can count and getting his name in Giants history next to Barry Bonds for his power feats. (As an aside, this clip of Bonds and Greg Maddux discussing an old at-bat is amazing, and I highly recommend it.)
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Bryce Miller has improved on his 2023 rookie season with the Seattle Mariners. Especially notable are his ERA (3.46 versus last year’s 4.32), FIP (3.70 versus 3.98), and OPS against opposite-handed hitters (.685 OPS versus .917). At the same time, many of his numbers have been strikingly similar. When I spoke to the 25-year-old right-hander at the end of July — he’s since made two starts — his win-loss record and average fastball velocity were identical to last year’s marks, as were his FB% and HR/FB%. His strikeout rate differed by just a few percentage points.

I cited those similarities to the righty, then proceeded to ask him what differentiates this season’s version of Bryce Miller from last year’s.

———

Bryce Miller: “I think that type of stuff is very similar, but the lefty-righty splits are quite a bit different. Last year, lefties batted over .300 against me. This year, it’s around .215. I think the addition of the splitter has been big, and I’ve also been locating better. If you look at the heat maps from last year, a lot of the fastballs were in the middle of the plate. This year, I’ve gotten them [elevated] a little better for the most part. So getting the heaters up and the splitters down has helped me out a lot with the lefties. That’s really been the main thing.”

David Laurila: Why is the splitter so much better than the changeup you were throwing? Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I wrote about Jake McCarthy’s BABIP, and touched on an assumption about which kinds of hitters are going to put up outlier numbers in that stat. McCarthy hits a lot of grounders, which generally produce a higher BABIP than fly balls (though they’re less productive by other metrics). He’s also left-handed and very fast, which means he ought to be able to beat out grounders for infield singles.

So let’s take a little gander at the infield hit rate leaderboard for qualified hitters. This is the percentage of groundballs a batter produces that turn into infield hits. Simple enough:

So yeah, Bellinger is primarily known for grinding hanging curveballs to make his bread, but in spite of his size, he is a left-handed fast guy. That tracks. Peña is a righty, but he’s very fast. His average home-to-first time is actually in the top 20 among all hitters — lefties and righties alike — this season. And because Peña hits so many grounders, he leads all batters in total infield hits with 24.

And then there’s Rhys Hoskins. Wait, what? Read the rest of this entry »

Despite notching two wins over their last six games, the White Sox are flirting with history, and not the good kind. As of this morning, Chicago stands 63 games below .500, 42.5 games back in the AL Central, and on pace to finish 39-123. Out of compassion, I will refrain from reciting the record of the 1962 Mets, but the players from that team who are still with us are likely taking this time to get the champagne good and chilled. Hard as it may be to believe, the goal of this article is not to dunk on the White Sox. Instead, as we enter the home stretch of the season, I’d like to consider how they’ve affected the playoff picture.

The White Sox have played 25 of the other 29 teams in the league, and they have distributed to those fortunate franchises a net total of 63 victories in the same way that an elderly man on a park bench distributes bread to the legion of ravenous pigeons jockeying for position at his feet: indiscriminately. For a few weeks now, I’ve been wondering whether the landscape would look different if those 25 teams never had the good fortune of playing the White Sox. Whom have the White Sox helped or hurt the most? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I cracked the PitchingBot black box open a tiny bit and asked it to show me the worst pitches of the year. It was for fun, mostly; I think there are some interesting data in there, but the main thing I learned was that the worst pitches are non-competitive balls. That’s always a tough concept to grasp, because the ones that stick with us are the hanging sliders and no-ride fastballs right down the pipe, the kind of pitch that we see and go, “Oh I could hit a home run on that.” Like this one:

That’s the worst pitch in baseball this year by one specific metric: the likelihood that PitchingBot assigns it of turning into a home run. I’ll show you some more of them in a moment, but first I thought I’d lay out how I did this so you can get a sense of how the model is reaching its conclusions.

Cameron Grove, the creator of PitchingBot, wrote about this idea back before he started working for the Guardians, and he was kind enough to nudge me in the right direction when it came to looking at pitches not just for the “worst,” but the ones that are the most crushable.
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