Sunday Notes: Mason Miller Threw a Changeup; Make That Three Changeups

Going into yesterday, Mason Miller had thrown 37 pitches on the season, 19 of them fastballs averaging 101 mph, while another 17 were sliders that elicited a 60.0% whiff rate. There was also one changeup. Delivered to Luis Arraez on a 1-1 count, the ninth-inning offering was wide outside and taken for a ball.

Why did the San Diego Padres closer throw his seldom-used changeup to the three-time batting champ on Wednesday night? Low leverage was certainly a factor; the Friars had scored four times in the bottom of the eighth to turn a 3-1 lead into a far safer 7-1 advantage. It nonetheless represented an outlier for the 27-year-old flamethrower. Over the previous two seasons, only 2.3% of his pitches were changeups.

I asked him about it when the Padres visited Fenway Park on Friday,

“A changeup is a good pitch, but I’m not going to feel comfortable with it if I’m not throwing it,” Miller told me. “I’m picking my spots. There are certain guys it matches up well against. [Arraez] is a guy who isn’t going to swing and miss, so I’m not going to be hunting a strikeout. If I can get softer contact on it… any time you have a guy who isn’t fast and he puts it on the ground, that’s an opportunity for an out.”

Arraez didn’t kill any worms in his matchup with Miller, instead lining a 2-1 fastball to right field for a single. Not that it mattered. The righty proceeded to fan the next three batters, one on a 101.5-mph heater, and two on nasty sliders. While those pitches were pristine, the execution on his lone changeup was another story.

“Terrible,” Miller said of the pitch, which was 93.8 mph and had a 19.1-inch arm-side horizontal break. “It was up and away and just not competitive. It has to be a strike, or close enough to the zone to that it gets engagement and not a take. So, it was basically a waste pitch. I might as well have thrown a fastball to the screen.

“I think the movement profile is great,” continued Miller, referring to his well-executed changeups. “In a vacuum, it’s a good pitch. But I’m trying to kill the horizontal on it, so I can keep it on the plate and down, as opposed to one that runs way arm-side off the plate. The horizontal on the one I threw [to Arraez] was around 20.”

Miller recalls “pushing” the errant pitch — his lower-than-usual 6.3 feet extension suggests as much — and he thinks that his arm slot also dropped on that one delivery. He also mentioned that he has tweaked the grip of his changeup, prompting me to ask for specifics.

“I changed the seam orientation a little bit,” explained Miller. “I don’t pronate very well, so I’m trying to get the ball to move down without turning it over. It’s not a kick-change; I just moved my [middle and ring] fingers closer together. It’s similar, I guess, to Skubal’s changeup, how he splits the seams. I don’t have the same feel he does, nor the movement he generates with how he finishes it, but I am trying to emulate what he does by rotating the ball a little bit.”

He has now thrown three on the season. In closing out yesterday’s 3-2 win over the Red Sox in dominant fashion, Miller threw back-to-back changeups to Masataka Yoshida while fanning the side on just 11 pitches. The first was fouled off, while the second was a swing-and-miss for a K. After the game, I went down to the clubhouse to ask the same question I’d posed to him the previous day: Why the changeups?

“It’s a good pitch and I liked the matchup,” said Miller, more or less echoing what he’d told me on Friday. “[The execution] was better, too; they were lower, which was good. I’m not trying to run it as much I did [17 inches], but if you get it in a good spot, that movement doesn’t matter as much. Like I said yesterday, I’m going to throw more of them.”

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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS

Ken Griffey Sr. went 11 for 20 against Jamie Easterly.

J.T. Snow went 12 for 21 against Jamie Moyer.

Javier Báez is 12 for 21 against Jameson Taillon.

Charlie Jamieson went 11 for 24 against Ernie Shore.

Jamie Quirk went 6 for 11 against Moose Haas.

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Sticking with the Padres, I asked Fernando Tatis Jr. how much he has changed as a hitter since we first spoke in his 2019 rookie season. According to the still-just-27-year-old San Diego outfielder, he hasn’t changed much at all.

“As far as knowing my strengths, and my business, I’m about the same,” Tatis told me. “I go out there, be an athlete, and perform. I’ve learned things here and there, and made some tweaks, but nothing really special or different. You trust your tools.”

When players mention tweaks or adjustments, I typically feel obligated to ask them to elaborate. I did so with the three-time All-Star, but again, acknowledged changes have been few at best.

“It depends on how your body is feeling,” replied Tatis, who has 136 wRC+ over 2,973 big-league plate appearances. “You start growing into your body and feeling different stuff, so it depends on where you’re at, at the moment. You try to stay consistent, but you also try to improve.”

By and large, he is the same hitter, just a little older and smarter.

“Yes,” Tatis replied with a laugh. “That’s a good way of putting it.”

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One more quick Padres note:

Prior to Friday night’s game in Boston, San Diego manager Craig Stammen told reporters that while his team’s offensive output has been less than stellar in the early going, the “expected numbers have been good.” I asked him if he could elaborate.

“I think just overall,” Stammen replied. “We’re hitting the ball hard and we’re making good decisions at the plate. That bodes well for our future. If we keep doing that, things are going to turn our way. Sooner or later, the expected numbers aren’t going to be expected, they’re going to be real.”

The Padres went into yesterday with the fewest runs scored and lowest wOBA of any team. Their BABIP was third from the bottom, while their xwOBA was better than that of 12 other teams.

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A quiz:

Ten players have grounded into 300 or more double plays, and all but three are in the Hall of Fame. Two, Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols, aren’t yet eligible (and will almost certainly be voted in once they are). Who is the lone non-Hall of Famer who has previously appeared on a ballot and had over 300 GIDPs? (A hint: he logged 2,586 MLB hits and garnered just 1.1% of support in his lone year on the ballot.)

The answer can be found below.

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NEWS NOTES

Early registration is now open for SABR’s 2026 Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference, which will be held in Memphis from June 18-21. More information can be found here.

The independent Atlantic League’s Long Island Ducks announced on Thursday that they have signed Trevor Bauer. The controversial former MLB hurler went 4-10 with a 4.51 ERA with NPB’s Yokohama DeNA BayStars last season.

Ken Clay, a right-hander who made 111 appearances while pitching for three teams across the 1977-1981 seasons, died on March 26 at age 71.A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, Clay toed the rubber for the New York Yankees, Texas Rangers, and Seattle Mariners, going 10-14 with a 4.08 ERA over 353-and-two-thirds innings.

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The answer to the quiz is Julio Franco, who hit into 310 double plays over the course of his lengthy career. If you guessed Rusty Staub, you get credit for a close call. “Le Grand Orange” had 297 GIDPs, as well as 2,716 hits.

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Justin Steele missed all but the early weeks of last season due to an elbow injury — the Chicago Cubs southpaw had an internal brace procedure a year ago this month — resulting in his viewing games from a vantage point other than to which he is accustomed. I asked him about that experience when I visited the club’s spring training facility in Mesa.

“I watched a lot of baseball on TV throughout the [rehab] process,” Steele told me. “It was different. You see sequences a lot better. You see swings a lot better. You’re able to honestly see the strike zone, whereas when you’re watching from the dugout it’s hard to see where the pitches are ending up. It might look like a strike, but it’s five inches off the plate. You may also be having a casual conversation with a teammate, or you’re grabbing Gatorade or gum. I actually find myself more locked in when I’m watching from home. I’m able to pay more attention pitch-to-pitch, the details of the game.”

That being the case, did the left-hander find himself watching less like a fan, and more like a pitcher, from the comfort of his couch?

“It was a mixture of both,” replied Steele, whom the Cubs hope to have back on the mound at some point next month. “My wife watches the games too. We’ll be watching together and I’ll be acting like she does, as a fan, reacting like a fan. I’d say the baseball player side of me is able to almost predict stuff, like what should happen here, or I’m thinking about what the pitcher should do. Say Matthew Boyd is pitching. I’m watching how he’s competing, how he’s getting outs. Maybe his changeup is really good that day, or his cutter is good. I’m watching that as a pitcher, but also as a fan.”

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Danny Coulombe had fans in mind when I recently asked for his thoughts on the rule changes that have taken place since he first reached the majors in 2014.

“The pitch clock, I think we can all agree, has been good for baseball,” said the veteran reliever, who, as I related in a September 2021 Sunday Notes column, had delved into length-of-game particulars while taking a project management class in college. “A lot of that comes from living in a neighborhood with a lot of dads who love the game of baseball. They’ve all said that for their viewing purposes it’s a lot better to have a game that’s shorter. And for us [as players], we like to be home sooner. We don’t want games to last four hours.”

Colulombe went on to say he also likes the extra-innings rule, and pretty much all of the others that MLB has enacted in the past several seasons. He didn’t offer a specific yea or nay on the new ABS system, but he did address the newest change.

“It’s been an adjustment, for sure,” said Coulombe, who is now with the Boston Red Sox, his sixth big-league team. “It’s been interesting. We had the game in Cincinnati with six calls being overturned, four in one inning. It was pretty crazy.”

The 36-year-old southpaw was on the mound for one of the successful challenges to home plate umpire CB Bucknor’s ball-strike calls. The overturn came as little surprise.

“It was a fastball to Elly De La Cruz that was about an inch inside,” recalled Coulombe. “I knew it was a ball. I have a lot of late movement on my stuff, so I’ve got a lot of calls in the past. When he challenged, I was like, “Aaugh.” It’s part of the game now.”

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Hoikkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters left-hander Haruki Hosono threw a no-hitter against the Chiba Lotte Marines on Tuesday. The 24-year-old, who had a 2.00 ERA over 45 career NPB innings coming into the game, fanned 12 batters and issued one walk in his 128-pitch effort.

Fighters outfielder Franmil Reyes has started the season 7-for-17 with three doubles and two home runs. The erstwhile MLB slugger went deep 32 times for the NPB club a year ago.

Forrest Whitley made his NPB debut with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows earlier this week and allowed six hits and two runs over five innings in an 8-3 win over the Hiroshima Carp. The 28-year-old former first-rounder made 10 MLB appearances last season, five each with the Houston Astros and Tampa Bay Rays.

Caleb Boushley threw five scoreless innings with seven strikeouts in his KBO debut earlier this week. The 32-year-old right-hander from Hortonville, Wisconsin joined the KT Wiz over the offseason after appearing in 25 games for the Texas Rangers last year.

Hyun Bin Moon is 11-for-30 with four doubles and two home runs for the KBO’s Hanwha Eagles. A 21-year-old outfielder/second baseman who represented South Korea in the WBC, Moon slashed .320/.370/.453 with a dozen steals and 17 homers in 2025.

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Speaking to reporters in mid-March, Yankees manager Aaron Boone brought up the possibility of one or more of the club’s promising young arms initially pitching out of the bullpen upon reaching the majors. Whether that happens or not, allowing flamethrowers like Carlos Lagrange and Elmer Rodríguez to get their feet wet in a less-demanding role makes a certain amount of sense. Some years ago — at least anecdotally, as I don’t have numbers to back this up — easing pitchers in was a more common practice than it is today.

I asked Boone why he thinks that is.

“I don’t know that it doesn’t happen,” he replied. “I just cited two examples for us where it does. What are the examples of a guy not? It’s hard to answer that question.”

Boone went on to give reasons for why it maybe isn’t as common as it once was.

“Some guys probably aren’t equipped to do it,” Boone said. “Some guys may not present as coming up and impacting in way that makes sense to pull them out of a starting role. In a perfect world, you want guys to get some real innings, a baseline of innings. And you always want to dream on a starter if they can stay in that role.”

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FARM NOTES

James Tibbs III went deep three times last night for the Triple-A Oklahoma Comets is now 18-for-35 with four doubles, a triple, seven home runs and an 1.850 OPS on the season. The 23-year-old outfielder was acquired by the Los Angeles Dodgers from the Boston Red Sox last summer in exchange for Dustin May.

Alika Williams is 12-for-19 with three doubles, a triple, and a 1.562 OPS for the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians. The 27-year-old middle infielder in the Pittsburgh Pirates system has a 45 wRC+ in 208 plate appearances over parts of two MLB seasons.

Rece Hinds is 12-for-30 with four home runs and a 1.400 OPS for the Triple-A Louisville Bats. The 25-year-old outfielder in the Cincinnati Reds organization went 16-for-43 with five home runs and a 1.414 OPS in spring training.

The Myrtle Beach Pelicans pulverized the Charleston RiverDogs 15-0 on opening night of the the Low-A South Atlantic League season on Thursday. Cole Mathis, a 22-year-old corner infielder who was featured here at FanGraphs back in February, went 2-for-3 with a home run and three walks for the Chicago Cubs affiliate.

Four West Michigan Whitecaps pitchers combined to strike out 16 batters and surrender just a pair of hits as the Detroit Tigers affiliate blanked the Lake County Captains 1-0 on opening night of the Midwest League season. The Whitecaps had the best record in the minors last year, 92-39.

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A random obscure former player snapshot:

Marv Foley had one of his most memorable at-bats on today’s date in 1980. The left-handed-hitting catcher took southpaw reliever Tippy Martinez deep in the 12th inning to give the Chicago White Sox a 5-4 win over the Baltimore Orioles. It was one of just 12 home runs Foley hit over parts of five big-league seasons, the first four of his campaigns coming with the South Siders.

Another memorable at-bat came with the Texas Rangers against the California Angels on September 30, 1984. Playing in the last of his 203 big-league contests, Foley was retired as a pinch-hitter for the final out of Mike Witt’s perfect game. His professional career didn’t finish with the 4-3 grounder. The University of Kentucky product toiled in Triple-A for two more seasons, then went on to become a longtime minor-league manager (and for two seasons, a major-league coach). Foley is the only manager to lead teams to championships in all of the American Association, International League, and Pacific Coast League.

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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE

Seattle Mariners broadcast analysts Angie Mentick is back in the booth after suffering a stroke less than two months ago. Aspen Anderson has the story at Seattle Met.

Who are the most stacked minor-league affiliates? Our friends at MLB Pipeline gave us one for each organization.

Major League Baseball dates back to 1876, with the first game having taken place on April 22nd of that year. John Thorn — MLB’s official historian — wrote about the long-ago contest between the Boston Red Stockings and Philadelphia Athletics, at Our Game.

Kia Tigers manager Lee Bum-ho breathed a sigh of relief after third baseman Do Yeong Kim — one of the best young players in Korea — avoided injury. Jee-ho Yoo wrote about it for Yonhap News Agency.

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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS

Mookie Betts had a 135 wRC+, 464 strikeouts, and 371 walks with the Red Sox. Since joining the Dodgers, Betts has a 137 wRC+, 464 strikeouts, and 368 walks.

Rickey Henderson hit 297 home runs and stole 1,406 bases.
Salvador Perez has hit 305 home runs and stolen six bases.

Fergie Jenkins surrendered home runs to all three of the Alou brothers (Felipe, Jesus, and Matty). He is the only pitcher to have done so.

On today’s date in 1983, the San Diego Padres outscored the San Francisco Giants 16-13 to win a wild Opening Day affair at Candlestick Park. Garry Templeton hit the Friars only home run, while Bob Brenly, Chili Davis, Darrell Evans, and Max Venable all went deep for the losing side.

Boog Powell signed a free agent deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers on today’s date in 1977. The longtime Baltimore Orioles slugger went to record just 10 hits, none of which of the yard, in what was to be his final big-league season. Powell retired with 339 home runs and a 134 wRC+, as well as four All-Star berths and a 1970 AL MVP award, on his ledger.

The San Francisco Giants purchased the contract of Dale Long from the Chicago Cubs on today’s date in 1960. Primarily a first baseman over his 10 big-league seasons, Long is one of baseball’s few left-handed-throwing catchers, having twice gone behind the plate for the Cubs in 1958. Two years earlier he set an MLB record (since tied by Don Mattingly and Ken Griffey Jr.) by homering in eight consecutive games for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Players born on today’s date include Rennie Stennett, a second baseman who saw action with the Pirates from 1971-1979, and with the Giants in 1980 and 1981. One of 81 native Panamanians in MLB history, Stennett tied a major league record on September 16, 1975 when he went 7-for-7 in a 22-0 Pittsburgh pasting of the Cubs. Four years earlier, he was part of the first all-Black and Latino starting lineup in MLB history.

Also born on today’s date was Gene Crumling, a catcher whose big-league career comprised six games and one hit in 12 at-bats for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1945. Per his SABR BioProject entry, Crumling’s lone safety came off of Hall of Fame slugger Jimmie Foxx, who was making the last of his 10 MLB pitching appearances.