Can Tobias Myers's Unique Changeup Survive (or Even Thrive) Inside the Strike Zone?

[Jake McKibbin]

The 2024 Brewers rookie's changeup is unique, which is always a scary and exciting word. Can he begin to adjust its usage to reach even greater heights in 2025?

Image courtesy of © Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images

Tobias Myers was incredible for the 2024 iteration of the Milwaukee Brewers. A depth piece to start the year, shuttled back and forth from Nashville on one occasion, Myers stamped his mark on the season with improving results as the campaign went on. He led the Brewers' rotation (min 100 IP) with a 3.11 ERA as a starter, but his underlying metrics weren't so fluffy. Myers succeeded in missing barrels consistently, but to repeat the success he found, he'll need to create more swings and misses. Without them, it's likely we see more home-run problems (similar to how he struggled when he first came up from Triple A) and a more generic line. Happily, it's not terribly hard to see where more whiffs might come from.

Myers's changeup is a true outlier pitch, albeit completely different from that of Devin Williams and Craig Yoho. While they try and create as much drop and side spin on the pitch as possible, Myers' version actually creates "rise". With strong horizontal movement to boot, it's more like an incredibly slow two-seam fastball, and it tunnels fantastically with his four-seamer because of that ride.

The solid green dot is the movement Myers generates, while the shadowy area is what a hitter would expect from a changeup. Myers generates almost 6" of rise more than the average offering; it's a completely counterintuitive form of the changeup. Usually, pitchers want as much depth and dip as possible, but the induced vertical break created by pitchers like Drew Thorpe and Tobias Myers allows their changeups to hover in the strike zone longer, closer resemble their four-seam fastballs, and thus appear to fade later than your regular changeup. Late break and "not much break" turn out not to be contradictory ideas, but commingled ones, as baseball's most famous physicist once pointed out. When you factor in that Myers's changeup is roughly the same speed as a curveball, the velocity separation for a pitch that tunnels so well with his fastball is a nightmare to square up. This deception has created a highly effective offering:

Hitters hit just .083 off Myers's changeup in 2025, while swinging and missing 44.4% of the time—and they didn't collect an extra-base hit. Those are absurd results for any pitch. The problem for Myers was that he had a problem locating the offering effectively, with some non-competitive misses and poor locations preventing it from being as impactful as possible. The spray of pitches below should highlight the struggles in command:

Myers's changeup was barely in the zone for most of the year. Some might say that it's his "chase" pitch, and he should keep it out of the strike zone, but actually, it's the kind of offering he can survive and thrive with inside the strike zone with more regularity. The struggles of every hitter to square up his changeup show just how difficult the pitch is to handle on its own, and we have a month of data where he did find the strike zone more often:

In July, Myers's changeup rose from an in-zone rate of 25.5% to one of 43.5%. You would think this created easier looks for hitters, but they registered a 40% whiff rate and not a single hit against it out of the 46 changeups he threw. For the whole season, Myers had a 41.7% whiff rate on all his changeups in the strike zone. It doesn't matter where Myers throws it; it’s going to be effective if he can elicit a swing. If he doesn't get a swing, then why not attack the strike zone to get ahead in the count on a pitch hitters find borderline unhittable?

The more offerings a hitter has to cover that can live in the strike zone, the more issues a hitter will have in deciphering the pitches and making a swing decision. Allowing the changeup to eat inside the strike zone will complement the fastball and cutter that he already likes to locate over 50% of the time to get ahead in counts. The cutter doesn't get a lot of swing-and-miss, so adding the changeup in there would allow Myers to make a massive step forward in his underlying metrics, and should raise confidence in a repeat performance in 2025.

Garnering control of his changeup, given it's relatively new to him, will be difficult, but in its second year of development, it's very possible that Myers can take strides forward with his command. Pulling it into the zone more often will enhance his entire arsenal markedly, and is something to watch as spring training begins.

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[jesusoftheapes]

I am more interested in his sweeper getting better.  Changeup is a stupid pitch unless your name is Devin Williams or Craig Yoho.       

I so love the Tobias Myers love .    Remember it was changing him or attempting to make him have new things that held him in Farmball this long.       I say just ride out what was 2024 and keep what he mastered together .    I think Tobias can strike people out at a very high clip with his pitch mixes and it all plays off his 4 seam.  His 4 seam sets up every pitch by getting at least one whiff each AB on that pitch and getting the batter to think he can correct for it later in the AB. 

His Changeup is nice too make no mistake.    I just think Changeup is a pitch so they have more than a pitch.   It is when they start adding a sweeper or curve to the mix that they are really feeling it .