No Country for Old Kyle Hendricks

Can the two changeup profile survive the pitch design era?

On Sunday, Bobby Miller threw a pitch that made me rethink the entire concept of a changeup. Starting out of the strike zone, the pitch takes off at 87 mph, teleporting across the entire width of the plate to his arm side for a swing and miss. In the Pitching Ninja replies, some suggested it had the movement profile of a slider from a left-handed pitcher, which is roughly accurate: Miller’s changeup stayed higher than a standard slider might, but the average horizontal break matched some of the nastiest sweepers in the game. Check out the dots in green in the right of the plot below:

While Bobby Miller is out here in 2024 throwing 87 mph changeups, Kyle Hendricks is lucky to hit 87 mph on his four-seam fastball. The contrast between these two guys can tell us a little bit about the changeup’s past — and where it might be going in the future.

Miller is, of course, the pure stuff guy, what happens when modern pitch design meets high-level talent. Hendricks, meanwhile, is hanging around the majors with an older line of thinking: Locate the ball. Induce weak contact. Deceive hitters. There might be no better example than the fact that Hendricks throws two distinct changeups, made intentionally to have the exact same shape as his two fastballs.

While most modern pitch design is centered around creating clean gaps between the movement profiles of different pitches, such as Grayson Rodriguez’s pitch profile —

— Hendricks breaks the norm, overlapping shapes so cleanly that the green changeup dots end up buried beneath the four-seam and sinker dots, respectively.

Here’s a clearer look at the two changeup shapes, with the four seamer and the sinker removed for clarity:

The fact that Hendricks throws two changeups is not news. Eno Sarris wrote about it back in 2015, his first full season. In June of last year, Matthew Trueblood pointed out that the two changeup shapes were as distinct as any point in his career; as Trueblood put it, the divorce by 2023 was completely finalized. And watching Hendricks talk about these two changeups in a 2022 video made me think about the difference between old-school pitch philosophy and new-school stuff maximization.

As Hendricks explains in the video, he throws two different changeups: one with the circle-change grip over the traditional four-seam orientation, and one over the two-seam orientation. Here’s the four-seam grip changeup…

…and here it is in action. As you can see, it appears to almost have a cut action to it:

He also has a two-seam changeup…

which you can see in the video below has more of an arm-side fade:

Let’s look at the pitch plot again to remember where it lands on the movement profile:

The four-seam changeup is on the left of the pitch plot, averaging roughly 10 inches of induced vertical break (IVB) and five inches of horizontal. The two-seamer, as you might expect, mimics the sinker, averaging less IVB while fading further arm-side.

Hendricks talks in this video about the importance of making his changeup look exactly like his fastball, only 8-to-10 miles an hour slower. Maybe it’s fair to say that Hendricks is most concerned with timing, attempting to get hitters to swing in front of the slower changeup.

Interestingly, in a video of his own that came out just two weeks before the Hendricks video, Tyler Zombro of Tread Athletics advised “How To Grip & Rip Your Change-Up,” arguing that the most important factor for a changeup is not how much it resembles your fastball’s shape, but about how much separation you can create between the two offerings. Here, we could say that Zombro is less concerned with timing and more with getting below the barrel — making a hitter swing over a pitch rather than in front of it. Put another way, Hendricks wants the batter to swing along the same plane as the fastball, only out in front, while Tread is teaching its pitchers to throw a changeup that will make hitters swing on a more elevated plane than where the changeup finishes its flight.

At one point, Zombro explicitly dismisses the strategy of matching changeup spin to fastball spin as outdated conventional wisdom, saying that a hitter who claims they can spot that fine of spin orientation out of the hand is “full of shit.”

"We know a little bit more today that hitters don't see all spin details,” Zombro says.

Tread isn’t some random YouTube channel — it’s one of the most influential pitch design labs in the country. They’ve helped pitchers like Jordan Montgomery and Mitch Keller take significant leaps in their careers. This isn’t to say what Tread or Driveline or, increasingly, every MLB pitching development program are emphasizing doesn’t work. But as the “Stuff+” philosophy of pitch design takes control of the game, it’s fun to recognize the outliers like Kyle Hendricks, getting outs like nobody else.