What the Frig Is Brent Honeywell Jr. Throwing?

There’s a lot to love about how the Padres built their roster, and I’m not talking about the obvious stuff like trading for Juan Soto or building a lineup entirely of shortstops or sneaking Xander Bogaerts out of Boston under the fuel tank of an Isetta bubble car. I’m talking about how they built their pitching depth. It’s a smorgasbord of guy-remembering, a combination of starters from the 2010s who are just hanging on and top prospects from the 2010s who are still trying to break through.

Look at the pitching staff of the 2023 El Paso Chihuahuas: Cole Hamels, Jay Groome, Julio Teheran, Anderson Espinoza, Aaron Brooks, and (pounds table) Wilmer (pounds table) Jetpacking (pounds table) Font! In a ranking of expensive San Diego-based nostalgia trips, I did not think anyone would beat Top Gun: Maverick so soon, but here we are.

One of those 2010s late bloomer prospects broke camp with the big league club. Brent Honeywell Jr., who not so long ago was one of the most interesting pitchers in the high minors, has now made two appearances in the majors for the Padres.

Baseball fans love oddities, baseball writers probably even more so. So when an outspoken teenaged right-hander showed up in the Rays’ system and started mowing down hitters with a screwball, the baseball world took notice. Honeywell was a consensus top-100 prospect through most of the late 2010s, even after he underwent Tommy John surgery before the 2018 season. That surgery forced him to miss all of 2018 and 2019, and then something else happened that kept the minor leagues out of action in 2020, I can’t quite remember what it was.

Honeywell finally broke in with the Rays for three appearances in late 2021, but was sold to the A’s in the offseason and could not find a spot on Oakland’s big league pitching staff in 2022. Last November, he caught on with the Padres, and at age 28 looks set to enjoy his first extended action in the major leagues. (Brent Honeywell Jr. is 28 now? Just put me in the ground already.)

As you might expect, Honeywell’s repertoire has changed from his early days to now. The slow spike curveball he threw in the mid-2010s did not appear in his two-inning relief appearance, and the low-90s pitch he called a cutter back then bore no resemblance to the “cutter” Baseball Savant credited him with throwing on Monday.

On Monday, that pitch came in at an average of 82.7 mph with 12.1 inches of horizontal break. That would’ve been slower than 187 of 189 cutters registered in 2022 (minimum 250 pitches); of those cutters, none averaged more than 8.4 inches of horizontal movement. I know I complain all the time about how nobody knows what a slider is anymore, but if ever there were a slider, that’s what Honeywell was throwing against the Diamondbacks. Indeed, that’s how PITCHf/x labeled it.

Honeywell’s first five pitches of 2023 looked a little tentative. He missed outside with a couple fastballs and a slider, and frankly got bailed out on a 3-1 fastball to Lourdes Gurriel Jr. that looked low but was called a strike. Then Honeywell came inside for the first time and turned Gurriel — one of the few players who’s actually faced him in the majors before this week — into a pretzel:

Judging by Gurriel’s swing — reminiscent of a handcuffed cricket player being attacked by a hornet — this pitch came as a surprise. Indeed, Honeywell had never thrown anything quite like it before in the major leagues. But what, exactly, was it?

Given the pitch’s movement profile, coming from any other right-handed pitcher this would obviously be a changeup. And that’s what it was classified as. But not only does Honeywell throw a screwball, the difference between a screwball and a circle change can be subtle. Both pitches use similar grips and move from left to right from the perspective of a right-handed hitter. In fact, when Honeywell was a teenager in his second pro season, he took exception to a New York Times feature that credited then-Angels pitcher Héctor Santiago with throwing a screwball.

“That looks like my changeup,” he told Jake Seiner, then writing for MiLB.com. “It’s a good pitch. It’s a great pitch. I’m not cutting him down or nothing. It’s a great changeup. But it’s not a screwball.”

So what was the pitch he threw to Gurriel? It was much harder than the changeups he threw during his Rays call-up in 2021. In fact, since Honeywell’s major league career has been so short, let’s take a look at every single changeup and screwball he’s thrown, 40 all. Changeups from 2023 are marked in red, changeups in 2021 are blue, and the two screwballs in the system, one each from 2021 and 2023, are in yellow:

Honeywell threw eight classified changeups on Monday, and it’s immediately obvious that these are two distinct pitches. On the chart, those are the six dots farthest to the right, and the two red ones up at the top. One “changeup” comes in at 88 mph with a spin rate between 1,500 and 1,800 rpm, the other at 82 with a spin rate of close to 2,200. And these two classes are themselves distinct from what Honeywell was throwing in 2021. Honeywell’s 2021 changeups are similar to the 2023 changeups in spin rate, but slower. Honeywell wasn’t throwing his change as hard in his second appearance on Tuesday afternoon, which could be the result of being on his second multi-inning relief appearance in about 19 hours, or the result of first-day-of-school adrenaline wearing off. But even taking Tuesday’s changeups into account, Honeywell is still throwing that pitch harder, on average, than he did in 2021.

The lone blemish on Honeywell’s line on Monday was a home run off the bat of Corbin Carroll, off a pitch that was classified as a changeup:

The first pitch Honeywell threw to Carroll was the changeup he got Gurriel on — hard, flat, veering away from a left-handed hitter. The pitch Carroll hit out was something completely different.

Padres color commentator Mark Grant picked up on this immediately: “We’re told that Honeywell does throw a screwball,” he said. “That actually looked like a screwball. The way he pronated on that ball — really came inside that baseball as he threw it.” Pronating meaning how Honeywell twisted his wrist counterclockwise as he released the pitch. You’d need a high-speed camera and a magnifying glass to tell the difference between a screwball grip and a circle change grip, but the big difference between the release of those two pitches is pronation.

Consider also something a young Honeywell told Eno Sarris, who interviewed him for FanGraphs in 2016.

Honeywell hopes not to tug on the pitch too much for good reason. Tug on the pitch too much to get more drop, and you get a “hump” up top like a curveball. “I don’t want them to see that hump,” he said, so he’s found his happy medium.

Look at the pitch to Gurriel, then the one to Carroll, and notice the hump on the latter. Now, see the one registered screwball he threw in 2021. The difference in camera angle from Petco to the Trop makes a visual comparison a bit wonky, but you can still see the difference in vertical movement:

That doesn’t mean Honeywell’s vaunted screwball is useless. He just made a mistake, leaving it up and over the plate to a player basically everyone at FanGraphs thinks is going to win NL Rookie of the Year. And giving up that home run on Monday didn’t deter Honeywell from dropping another screwball on Carroll for a called third strike the next day. When Honeywell gets the screwball down in the zone, he can use it to induce groundballs, as he did both to Hicks in 2021 and Evan Longoria on Monday. And even leaving the screwball aside, he still has that monster slider and a spectacular-looking changeup. The latter he not only used to strike out Gurriel, but ended his appearance by getting the left-handed Jake McCarthy swinging an inning later.

Honeywell might owe his notoriety to his former prospect status — if he were just some dude who’d pitched in middle relief I would absolutely not be writing about him. But the repertoire he showed against Arizona makes him more than a fun guy-remembering exercise. He could be a real weapon out of the ‘pen for San Diego if he can finally stay healthy.