#8: (Kick) change for the sake of change
Why every pitcher seems to have a new pitch. Plus: An update on Francisco Lindor's fashion choices
Hey, Hannah here and I have to issue a correction. I was in the Mets clubhouse on Monday and noticed Francisco Lindor was … wearing the same pants that he had sported for the home opener1! The ones I was so enamored with that I led last newsletter with them! I wrote then that I wasn’t confident I had come up with the right brand and I was right to hedge because I had not. The jacket was Bottega Veneta but the pants — which were more denim-y than I realized — are Jacquemus. I know because I saw the tag itself. So there you have it. This is, apparently, the content people crave and I am happy to oblige.
I also talked to Lindor about research from Baseball Prospectus that showed he was the best at improving against a pitcher within a game last year. We all know about the “times through the order” penalty for pitchers2 — and if they’re getting worse, it stands to reason, the hitters are getting better. But not all hitters improve equally. Lindor, at least last year, improved the most.
For SNY.tv, I told Lindor about this research and asked him how he goes about adjusting within a game. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out!
I also asked Mets general manager David Stearns about this phenomenon and specifically whether he had ever thought about evaluating hitters for their ability to generate a “times through the order” boost. He hadn’t, but he seemed tickled by the thought and said he would read the article (you’re welcome for the page views, BP). I caveated that it’s not a particularly actionable bit of information on the batter side of things. You can’t just plop a hitter who is particularly good at this into a key spot in the seventh inning just because the opposing starter is still in the game.
“Not yet,” Stearns quipped.
Ah, golden at-bat humor. And touché, sir.
You just can’t beat that new pitch smell
by Zach Crizer
“New car smell” wafted into the world organically, in the figurative sense. A gleaming, freshly purchased automobile inspires positive feelings — pride, accomplishment, status — and the memory preserves the olfactory imprint of a brighter future unsealed. Our brains do the rest. Never mind that the original aroma was the result of off-putting materials (adhesives, plastics, etc.) released by an unappealing process (“off-gassing”). The senses can’t be reasoned with.
The same sort of ineffable, split-second recognition animates major-league hitters trying to connect bat to baseball. They see a slider, they swing or don’t swing at a slider. Why they see a slider is both impossibly complicated and incredibly simple: They’ve seen a lot of sliders.
And so, in turn, pitchers try to throw them off the scent.
***
I’ve been thinking a lot about the new pitch. As rites of spring go, this one went from a disparate, nerdy collection of subplots to a guaranteed annual storyline in a matter of five years. If you’ve turned on a baseball game for more than five minutes this year, you’ve almost certainly heard about someone’s new pitch. Each season’s trendy grip, fueled by performance labs and word-of-mouth and literally Instagram, coalesces more quickly than the last. It’s not one guy’s new pitch. It’s a nationwide phenomenon.
This year’s varietal is the kick-change. There are plenty of strong technical and strategic explanations for why this particular offering, an alternative version of the changeup, is a good idea for so many pitchers. But the vision in my mind’s eye whenever I hear about the kick-change isn’t the spiked knuckle on top of the ball or the hard downward break. It’s the little tree-shaped air freshener dangling from a well-worn rearview mirror, “New car smell.”
This spring, rookie Tigers starter and top prospect Jackson Jobe told the Detroit Free Press about what had to be a jarring spin through the contemporary baseball machine.
I was throwing the sweeper before the sweeper was called the sweeper. It was just the big slider. That was my pitch in high school, the high rpms (rotations per minute), everyone loved it. Spin rate just came out. No one understood it. But it was cool. So everyone loved it. And then I got into pro ball, and my first year (in 2022) was really good, and then in 2023, it slowly started to lose effectiveness. When I say effectiveness, I mean the swing-and-miss factor. I wasn't getting as many swings and misses. I was getting more takes. It seems like everyone in the baseball world fell in love with the sweeper. There are like eight pitchers on every team that throw a sweeper, so guys are seeing sweepers all over the place, so that pitch has definitely lost effectiveness as far as swing-and-miss goes.
The antidote to his sweeper’s diminishing returns? I swear I did not make this up: “I need something that's going to put guys away,” Jobe said. “That comes with me experimenting with the curveball to have that north and south approach playing off my four-seam while still having the east and west approach with the cutter that's really a slider and the changeup, as well as working on a two-seam.”
Rabbit holes form at the intersection of science and capitalism. Someone came to understand that humans recognized and enjoyed the new car smell. Someone realized that the scent wears off pretty quickly (otherwise it would be called “car smell”). And some combination of someones saw the opportunity to essentially bottle it. Now, major multinational corporations that sell automotive transportation machines employ Smellmasters.
Pitch design emerged from similar circumstances. Technology allowed the industry to track and break down what a pitch does and why, answering the question: What works? Teams and pitchers took the next logical step of reverse engineering the process of throwing something that should work. More pitches with less obvious labels followed. What was recently FanGraphs fodder is now a required nightly broadcast topic in an era-defining sort of way. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say Paul Skenes’ proclivity for adding pitches might soon be more well-known than any single ace’s signature pitch.
That’s especially likely because, by the laws that generally govern innovation, business and cats chasing mice, this whole operation is going to keep speeding up.
Like the Eau de Cadillac, fancy new pitches lose their luster with familiarity. One crucial way analysts chart the movement of a pitch is in relation to the average pitch of that type. Batters absorb norms and learn how to react effectively. They generally struggle — in the milliseconds between pitch and swing — to adjust when pitches break the patterns their eyes are trained to expect. But as Jobe alluded to, they can learn quickly.
Baseball Prospectus writer and researcher Stephen Sutton-Brown, whose arsenal metrics and visuals are a fantastic window into the art of pitching right now, was kind enough to provide a striking illustration of how a new pitch can become just another pitch.
We’re going to be looking at the sweeper, a horizontally oriented slider variation that took flight in 2021 and 2022. The plots in the gif below display the expected movement of pitches for hurlers whose arsenal includes a sweeper. That expected movement is represented by the blue shaded sections. On top in the red dots, you see an individual pitcher’s actual movement (in this case, Lance McCullers Jr.’s sweepers from 2022).
Look at the blue sea of expectation spread from 2021 to 2024. That corresponds to the flood of sweepers batters are seeing. If McCullers throws the same version of that pitch upon returning from injury this year, it won’t look nearly as weird as the last time hitters saw it.
There are always exceptions — success can spring from deception or velocity or location or extreme angles — but the more a pitcher’s version of an offering matches its league-wide movement patterns, the less effective we would generally expect it to be.
In 2016, Statcast tells us that Yu Darvish was throwing what we now know as a sweeper. That season, Darvish and a handful of relief pitchers combined to chuck a total of 1,663 pitches now designated sweepers. No single batter saw more than 22 of them all year. Last season, the league hurled 45,400 sweepers. Aaron Judge got a look at 288. More than twice the 2016 tally have already been thrown in 2025.
Maybe you saw this coming: On a per-pitch basis, the sweeper’s most effective year on record was 2016, when it didn’t really exist.
***
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it might also be mutually assured destruction. At least for pitchers.
“I don’t love it,” Mariners star pitcher Logan Gilbert recently told The Athletic’s Eno Sarris about the kick-change. “I don’t love that they’re all getting splitter drop at 89, 90. Hitters are going to see that. Want fewer people throwing anything that looks like my splitter.”
The kick-change is both an acknowledgment of the law of not-so-new pitches and an attempt to defy it. Where the sweeper perhaps broke off into its own classification too clearly for pitchers’ liking, the kick-change mostly mirrors the velocity and drop of a good splitter. What’s new is how the pitcher achieves the effect — via a grip that doesn’t require particularly flexible fingers or an uncommon natural arm action.
It’s hard to say exactly how much potential lies in that classification quandary. Arsenals aren’t getting wider just to chase new movement territory. If the hitter has to think about eight possibilities instead of three when the man on the mound reaches back, that’s a positive for the pitcher — something Sutton-Brown’s work quantifies as Surprise Factor. If a cutter and a slider look similar enough for long enough that it boosts the performance of both, mediocre stuff can become a winning formula.
The designation is not as important as the state of play in the cat vs. mouse of pitchers and hitters, but every move begs the question of whether it will simply necessitate a new move next spring. Will muddy variations on the changeup create more confusion than the tilt of a sweeper? Will everyone start throwing a trio of offspeed pitches to go with a trio of fastballs?
How long can any good feeling last when you are painfully, precisely aware of how much better it used to be?
What we’re chatting about
Tuesday morning it was 669 days since the last time Kyle Schwarber hit a triple. Today it is one day since the last time Kyle Schwarber hit a triple. He also singled, and homered off Chris Sale3. Alas, just a double shy of the Schwycle. —HK (except that I stole that last bit from Jake.)
The Phillies put up a five spot against the reigning Cy Young award winner. The Phillies also did this:
Good tweeting by Astros beat writer Chandler Rome. —HK
In college baseball news, Yeshiva University, which entered with a 99-game losing streak, played Lehman College, which entered with a 42-game losing streak, on Tuesday. And in the matchup of losers, both won. (And both lost.) They split a doubleheader and snapped both streaks. Cute! —HK
We love an outfit repeater. Very environmentally conscious.
If you don’t: the more times pitchers face a lineup in a game, the less effective their stuff becomes. This is a big part of why modern starters rarely get the chance to face hitters a third time. Even the aces suffer a penalty from overexposure.
According to Jayson Stark: the hardest hit ball ever by a lefty off Chris Sale.
Don’t worry we have almost reached the limit of new pitch types.
Given that new car smell is composed of volatile organic compounds, you could probably also say that it wafted organically into the world in the literal sense as well.