Logan Allen Is Back in the Majors, and I’m a Little Freaked Out

If you remember my writing earlier this season about Brent Honeywell Jr.’s changeup-screwball combo or Hurston Waldrep’s splitter, you can probably imagine how much I love a weird-ass changeup-like thing. So much so I’m starting to wonder if it might be worth it to ask Meg for a “Weird-Ass Changeup World Tour” tag in the CMS.

Until then, consider Logan Allen. No, the other Logan Allen. The one who came back up from the minors to replace Shane Bieber in Cleveland’s rotation and completely barbecued the Pirates on Tuesday night. Seriously: Five innings, no runs, one hit, one walk, eight strikeouts. That’s some heavy stuff.

The key to Allen’s whole shtick is his changeup, which is unlike any other pitch in baseball. It’s slow, even by the standards of a pitch that’s defined by its slowness: just 82.9 mph on average, though since he doesn’t throw very hard by modern standards, that’s not as extreme a number as it seems on first glance. What is extreme is the way the pitch moves.

Baseball Savant likes to compare pitch movement to offerings within a certain velocity band. A pitch with the same name might have different characteristics based on how hard it’s thrown, and a pitch that’s thrown at a higher velocity is in the air longer than a slower pitch. That means it will drop more, as gravity has more time to act on it. But let’s just look at movement in absolute terms: How many inches does Allen’s changeup drop, and how much does it move laterally?

See, that’s the other thing that defines a changeup, or makes it distinct from a breaking ball at any rate. Breaking balls move across from the pitcher’s arm side to the glove side, and changeups fade to the arm side. This makes the changeup an invaluable weapon against opposite-handed hitters; by extension, it’s a must-have for a left-handed starting pitcher like Allen.

The pitcher with the most arm-side movement on his changeup is Devin Williams, author of the airbender, which is basically a screwball. The airbender gets 20.3 inches of arm-side movement, or 30% more break than average. After Williams comes a cohort of 259 other pitchers, every single one of whom throws a changeup with at least 6.7 inches of arm-side movement.

Then there’s Allen. When I pulled up the plot of every pitcher’s changeup movement, Allen was so far off to the side that I put my cursor over his dot and said, “this one goes wee, wee, wee, all the way home.” He gets an average of 1.8 inches of horizontal movement on his changeup, which is 12.4 inches — a full foot — less than is to be expected. His changeup is so weird it defies the very meaning of what a changeup is. And that figure, 1.8 inches of arm-side movement, is just an average. About a quarter of Allen’s changeups this season have either had neutral movement or broken toward the glove side. Stop! You’re going the wrong way!

So far this season, Statcast has recorded 101 changeups with either neutral or glove-side movement. Allen is responsible for 79 of those. No other pitcher has more than four. The weird movement pattern (or lack thereof) to his changeup has led to some confusion over what the pitch actually is — a changeup or a splitter? But if it were a splitter, the low velocity would be even more of an outlier, and the lack of arm-side movement just as mystifying.

You know what doesn’t help with the confusion? When you google “Logan Allen changeup grip,” one of the top results is an article from our own David Laurila, with a close-up photo of Logan Allen demonstrating a Vulcan change grip. The only problem: It’s the wrong Logan Allen. Our Logan Allen denies throwing a splitter of any kind and holds his changeup with a more common circle grip. (How did these guys not come up with nicknames to avoid this kind of confusion? They were in the same organization for a while, for God’s sake!)

That makes even less sense; hundreds of pitchers throw a circle change, and it runs to the arm side like it’s supposed to. The airbender, which is probably the changeup that resembles Allen’s least in the entire world, is basically thrown off a circle change grip. So what makes Allen’s so weird?

Here’s Williams. Notice him pronating his wrist as he releases the ball, almost yanking the ball down with his fingers as he lets it go. The ball spins counterclockwise and moves from left to right, from Williams’ perspective.

Devin Williams, Outlandish 85mph Changeup (slow). pic.twitter.com/2MP235CUu0

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 12, 2020

Allen pronates his wrist too, but later in the delivery. At the point of his release, it almost looks like he’s putting backspin on the ball. A different spin axis means a different direction of movement — or in this case, a trip straight down.

Logan Allen, Nasty 84mph Changeup. ?

4th K pic.twitter.com/CVFEGHbTJR

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) June 22, 2023

The other major difference is that Williams is one of three pitchers to average more than 2,500 rpm on his changeup, but Allen is one of four pitchers to average less than 1,000 rpm. As I mentioned in the Waldrep article, extreme low spin on a changeup leads to an unstable, almost knuckleball-like flight pattern.

So why does Allen’s work? Well, in the context of the rest of his repertoire, it’s almost like the changeup is fading back to his arm side after all. Allen is a comparatively short (6-foot) pitcher who throws from a low arm slot, a little shy of three-quarters. (Let’s call it a seven-twelfths arm slot.) He pulls everything across his body. His other three pitches are a four-seamer that’s also near the bottom of the league in terms of arm-side movement, a cutter with above-average glove-side horizontal movement, and a big, slow sweeper with huge horizontal break. Our man just does not like the left side of the X-axis. So in comparison to the cutter and the sweeper, maybe the changeup does look like it’s fading after all.

My other theory is that it’s so weird hitters don’t know what to do with it. We’ve all seen pitchers get away with backup breaking balls before. These are sliders, usually, that come out of the oven completely underspun. And often as not, the hitter reacts to such a pitch with complete mental vapor lock, as if he expected to encounter a baseball but partway through his load, the ball changed to a paper airplane. Sometimes the hitter is unperturbed, reads the ball correctly, and hits it 400 feet. In that case, the backup breaking ball is called a “cement mixer,” and it’s a bad thing.

ESPN color analyst Kyle Peterson, who covers mostly college baseball and therefore has seen more crappy breaking pitches than you or I will witness in 10 lifetimes, goes on now and again about how if a pitcher were somehow able to systematize the backup breaking ball — to throw it consistently rather than encounter it as a random error — he’d be unhittable, because batters would have no clue what to do with it. I’m wondering if that’s what Allen has done here. He’s consistently throwing this unique, slow-rotating turducken of a pitch, and it’s freaking opposing hitters out. Of his four pitches, the changeup has the highest whiff rate and lowest opponent wOBA and xwOBA. It might be a weird-ass changeup, but it’s working.