In early April, Davy Andrews penned an article that ran here at FanGraphs and began with the following: “You may have noticed that this is the Year of the Kick-Change.” My colleague went on to explain the pitch, which by now most people reading this are well familiar with. Our own coverage of the popular offering also includes an interview with Davis Martin and Matt Bowman from last September, and a feature from this spring on Hayden Birdsong, who throws a kick-change, and his teammate Landen Roupp, who does not. The pitch is thrown exclusively (at least to my knowledge) by supinators such as Martin, who explained that spiking his middle finger on a seam allows him to “kick the axis of the ball into that three o’clock axis [and] get that saucer-type spin to get the depth that a guy who could pronate a changeup would get to.”

Thinking about the pitch recently, a question came to mind: What would happen if a natural pronator tried to throw a kick-change?

In search of an answer, I queried three major league pitching coaches, as well as Tread Athletics’ Leif Strom, who in addition to having hands-on knowledge of the kick-change is credited with coining the term. Their responses varied. Moreover, they meandered a bit — but in a good way — as they offered insight into the science of throwing a baseball from a mound.

Here is what they had to say.

The following answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

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Desi Druschel, New York Mets

“There are a couple of ways to look at the kick-change. Most people interpret it as, ‘the spike kicks the axis,’ but I’m not necessarily convinced. Another thought is that [the middle finger] is just out of the way, and the ring finger kind of swipes below it. You’re kicking the axis, for sure, but I don’t know if it’s always kicking it how people might think. That would be on the one where there is more supination. Read the rest of this entry »

If Tarik Skubal locates his fastball up in the zone, opposing hitters are probably cooked. Nearly half the time they swing, they come up empty. If they manage to put it in play, they’re unlikely to do much damage — of the six hits he’s allowed on elevated heaters, five have been singles. That lone extra-base hit? An absolute tank! A 429-foot home run, off a perfectly executed 98-mph heater on the first pitch of the game, courtesy of one Zach Neto, who is currently making a case for low-level stardom.

After a rough rookie campaign in 2023, Neto broke out in his sophomore effort, posting 3.5 WAR by playing a competent shortshop and clubbing enough home runs (23) to cover up his mediocre on-base ability. Even after missing the first few weeks of this season with a bum shoulder, the 24-year-old has managed to take another step forward in 2025: His 139 wRC+ ranks second among all shortstops with at least 150 plate appearances.

That improved line is fueled by a power surge. In just 37 games, he’s homered nine times and hit 10 doubles. The barrel rate has literally doubled, jumping from an 8.4% rate last year to 16.8%. As a result, his .589 expected slugging (xSLG) ranks eighth in baseball, just below big-time sluggers like Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Kyle Schwarber.

Those three guys are hard swingers, perennially topping the bat speed leaderboards. But Neto doesn’t fit that profile. He stands at a slender 5-foot-11; even with a slight uptick in bat speed year-over-year, his 71.7-mph average swing speed falls below the big league average. The Angels shortstop isn’t posting elite power numbers because he’s swinging the bat hard. It’s because he’s maxing out the aggression in his approach, selling out for power and mostly succeeding. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first five weeks of the 2025 season, the best you could say about Mike Trout was that he was at least healthy enough to play every day and was hitting a lot of home runs. However, the 33-year-old slugger departed Wednesday’s game against the Mariners with soreness in his surgically repaired left knee following a sprint to first base, and while he remained on the active roster for Thursday’s game, afterwards, the Angels placed him on the injured list with a bone bruise in the knee. That’s not a worst-case scenario, but it’s frustrating news on top of what’s already been a slow start.

Trout entered this season with more question marks hanging over his head than at any point in his 15-year career. After playing just 82 games in 2023 due to a fractured hamate bone — including just one after July 3 — he was limited to 29 games last year due to a torn meniscus in his left knee. He underwent surgery, but instead of the typical four-to-six week timetable, he needed nearly three months before beginning a rehab stint, and then played just two innings for Triple-A Salt Lake City before exiting due to discomfort in the same knee. After he flew back to Anaheim for further evaluation, he was diagnosed with another meniscus tear, requiring season-ending surgery.

Upon reporting to the Angels’ spring training facility in Tempe, Arizona in February, Trout met with general manager Perry Minasian and manager Ron Washington, and together they decided that the best course of action would be to move the 11-time All-Star center fielder to right field in order to save his body some wear and tear. Up until Wednesday, the plan seemed to be working; he’d played all 29 of the Angels’ games (matching last year’s total) with seven starts at DH interspersed with his appearances in right field. His .179/.264/.462 batting line, 96 wRC+, and 0.1 WAR aren’t anything to write home about, but he’s been hitting the ball hard on contact. His nine homers are enough to tie him for third in the American League alongside Tyler Soderstrom, Spencer Torkelson, and teammate Logan O’Hoppe, behind only Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh. Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Newcomb has thus far fallen short of the high expectations he’d set coming out of college and during his first years of pro ball. Drafted 15th overall by the Los Angeles Angels in 2014 out of the University of Hartford, the 31-year-old left-hander has a record of 28-28 to go with a 4.50 ERA and a 4.38 FIP over 454 1/3 career big league innings. He’s currently trying to revive his career. Now with his fifth organization after signing with the Boston Red Sox as a minor league free agent over the winter, Newcomb made the team out of spring training — injuries to multiple Red Sox hurlers played a role in his doing so — and he’s since taken the hill six times. Over five starts and one relief appearance, the Massachusetts native has a 4.24 ERA, a 2.61 FIP, and a 27.5% strikeout rate in 23 1/3 frames. All three of his decisions have been losses.

His second major league season suggested stardom was in his future. Traded from the Angels to the Atlanta Braves as part of the Andrelton Simmons deal in November 2015, Newcomb went on to make 30 starts in 2018 and log a 3.90 ERA over 164 innings. In June of that year he was featured here at FanGraphs, with yours truly writing that the hard-throwing southpaw was “rapidly establishing himself as one of the best pitchers in the National League.” A month later, he came within one strike of notching a no-hitter. Then things started going in the wrong direction. Newcomb not only landed in the Braves bullpen in 2019, he had a stint in Triple-A. From 2020-2024, he tossed just 98 2/3 big league innings while toiling for three different teams. His ERA over that span was 6.66 ERA.

Turn the clock back to March 2015, and Newcomb was ranked no. 2 on our Angels Top Prospects list, behind only Andrew Heaney. What did Newcomb’s FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what our then prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel wrote, and asked Newcomb to respond to it.

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“Newcomb was the Hunter Dozier of the 2014 draft, a player that clubs liked higher than the media consensus had them, partly because teams weren’t sure if they were the only team that had him so high, so they kept it pretty quiet.”

“I think a big part of it was my coming out of the Northeast,” Newcomb replied. “That made me a little more of an unknown, but I did kind of have an idea that I was going to be a first-rounder. I talked to all 30 clubs. I actually thought there was a chance that I was going with the fifth pick to Minnesota.”

“Sources have indicated that the Mariners probably would’ve taken Newcomb with the sixth pick if Alex Jackson wasn’t there.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Normally, this column is a celebration of the extreme athleticism and talent on display across the majors. This week, though, I found myself drawn to the oddities instead. Unhittable 98-mph splinkers? Boring. Let’s talk about a pitcher who can’t strike anyone out and yet still gets results. Some of the fastest human beings on the planet stealing bases? I’d prefer some slower, larger guys getting in on the act. Brilliant, unbelievable outfield catches? I was more fascinated by a play that didn’t get made. The only thing that hasn’t changed? Mike Trout still isn’t to be trifled with. So thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for his incredible idea for a sports column, and let’s get down to business.

1. In-Game Adjustments
In the 15th year of his career, Mike Trout doesn’t stand out the way he did early on. He’s no longer the fastest and strongest player every time he takes the field; he’s more “slugging corner guy” than “perennial MVP frontrunner” these days. But one thing hasn’t changed: Trout’s wonderful ability to adapt.

Landen Roupp faced the Angels last Saturday, and he leaned on his curveball. He always does, to be fair. It’s one of the best curveballs in baseball, with enormous two-plane break, and he throws it 40% of the time, more than any of his other pitches. In fact, he throws his curveball more often than any other starting pitcher. Trout had never faced Roupp before, and so he struggled to deal with the signature offering.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hello there, FanGraphs readers. Today I’d like to tell you about a reliever on the Los Angeles Angels. Now sure, just last week, I wrote about how much help the Angels needed on the pitching front, and in the bullpen in particular. And sure, the guy we’ll be discussing today has a 4.05 ERA and a 4.08 FIP so far this year, not exactly stud closer numbers. Was he a trade throw-in last summer, one of four lottery tickets the Angels landed in exchange for a reliever in a contract year? He sure was. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s interesting. So I’d like to introduce you to Ryan Zeferjahn, the best reliever you’ve probably never heard of.

The first thing you should know about Zeferjahn is that his primary pitch is weird. Everyone calls it a cutter, and in many ways, that makes sense. Let me show it to you in action:

Yep, that’s a cutter. It’s 90-ish mph, with less rise and arm-side fade than a four-seam fastball, and it makes batters look uncomfortable because they can’t quite classify whether it’s a fastball or a breaking ball. Miguel Vargas read that pitch as inside, and then it held the plate thanks to unexpected cut. But Zeferjahn’s cutter has, for lack of a better way of saying it, a lot of cut even for a cutter. This isn’t something you would pick up from watching a GIF or two, but that pitch has about six inches of glove-side break. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, I sat down to watch the Red Sox-Rays game, hoping to find the answer to a question that’s been bugging me for weeks: Who does Shane Baz look like?

I didn’t come close to an answer, because while watching Baz pitch, I was struck by the sparseness of the young right-hander’s uniform. Only three letters in his name; two digits in his uniform number, but represented by skinny numerals. It stood out on the Rays’ classy blue-on-white uniforms. (Some say it’s boring and/or derivative, but I disagree — it’s a color scheme that’ll never steer you wrong in baseball.)

Then I lost the plot a little. The Rays don’t have a jersey sponsor, and their sleeve patch doesn’t contain any script. Their team name is only four letters long. How close does Baz come to having the fewest characters on his uniform of any major league player? Read the rest of this entry »

This spring, the Angels banned the use of cell phones in their clubhouse. I read that news with great interest, since like so many people these days, I have a love/hate relationship with the little screen in my pocket. I really do feel like looking at it less often could help me out. What better laboratory to test the wholesome effects of less screen time than a high stakes sport?

Then I thought a bit more about the situation and laughed. Could cell phone usage bring the Angels to the playoffs? Signing Shohei Ohtani for a pittance couldn’t bring the Angels to the playoffs. Drafting Mike Trout, one of the greatest players in the 21st century, and then twice signing him to contract extensions has only taken the team to October once in Trout’s career. Maybe this was the wrong team to pin my hopes to. But fast forward three weeks, and who sits atop the AL West but the Los Angeles Angels, in the first year where they banned cell phones. Coincidence?

I mean, yeah. Thanks for bearing with me for that extended introduction, but this isn’t an article about the evils of technology. Instead, it’s about what’s gone right in Anaheim so far this year, and whether that should change our view of the team going forward. Read the rest of this entry »

Hitting a baseball is an unthinkable accomplishment of timing. In order to strike a ball traveling from the pitcher’s hand to the plate in less than half a second with a slab of wood, a hitter must execute an elaborate sequence of movements on time. When do you lift your front foot? When do you load your hands? When do you fire your hips? It’s a sophisticated choreography; a beat late at any point can doom the swing.

Picture Fernando Tatis Jr. When Tatis is at the plate, he shifts around like a predator stalking its prey, eyes peeled for the exact moment when the pitcher lifts his front foot so that he, too, can get his toe down at the right time, and then his hands up, and then finally the barrel through the zone:

If hitting is such a delicate sequence, conditional on the pitcher’s own timing, it follows that pitchers who mess with that timing can improve their performance; by extension, pitchers who groove their deliveries will underperform their stuff. In an interview with David Laurila in 2017, Jason Hammel described changing his delivery for these precise reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Early enough in the season, you’ll find some weird stats. This is a well-established fact of baseball in April. There’s even a song about it. As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Kyle Tucker leads the league in position player WAR, with Aaron Judge third and Corbin Carroll fifth; if the leaderboard looked like that at the end of September, it’d probably be a mild surprise — a highly, highly lucrative one for Tucker — but nobody would write a book about how weird the 2025 season was or anything.

But Wilyer Abreu is second in WAR and Tyler Soderstrom is fourth. Both of them are promising young players, but nobody worth listening to had either one in the preseason MVP discussion.

In short, these things will shake out soon enough. There was an old saying to that effect: Baseball season hasn’t really started until Mike Trout leads the league in WAR. Read the rest of this entry »