Craig Yoho on His Other Big Breaker and Getting His Unique Stuff in the Strike Zone

[Jack Stern]

The Brewers' 2024 Co-Minor League Pitcher of the Year knows he has a unique ability to generate elite movement to both sides of the plate. His next objective is to find the best way to keep that break within or near the strike zone more consistently.

Image courtesy of © Curt Hogg / USA TODAY NETWORK

Craig Yoho's screwball-like changeup has been the talk of Brewers camp, but one of his other pitches drew the spotlight in the Brewers' Spring Breakout Game on Sunday night. With his final pitch of a perfect inning, Yoho landed a back-door breaking ball to strike out Cincinnati Reds prospect Carlos Jorge.

Yoho only threw the pitch 16% of the time in Triple A last year and has thrown it even less in most of his spring training outings. However, its break is arguably as impressive as his changeup's. In last year's sample, Yoho's Statcast-tracked breaking balls averaged 20.2 inches of horizontal movement.

There's no pitch quite like it at the MLB level. In 2024, only one qualified pitch—Boston Red Sox reliever Greg Weissert's sweeper—averaged at least that much glove-side break. Most sweeper-like offerings have minimal depth, but Yoho's breaker averaged -7.8 inches of induced vertical movement.

That unorthodox shape has left evaluators and pitch-tracking systems divided on how to label it. Some within the Brewers organization view it as a curveball. Statcast tags it as a sweeper. Yoho prefers to call it a slider, because it reinforces his mental cue of ripping the pitch as hard as possible.

 

"That's what I've called it since I started throwing it in college," he recalled on Monday morning. "If I try and think curveball, I probably slow up a little bit, so I call it a slider. So that's what I like to think it is. But it's just more for my own thought process."

Yoho tries to keep that thought process as simple as possible, setting him apart in an era when many pitchers fixate on spin and release data to achieve their desired direction and degree of movement.

"I don't think necessarily about spin direction or anything on that," he said. "I'm already kind of on the side of the baseball. It's kind of almost like a cutter grip on it, and then I'm just kind of supinated on it when I come through, and I'm just thinking about ripping the seams down the side of the baseball."

That's a luxury Yoho enjoys as a rare breed on the mound. Most pitchers are biased toward pronating or supinating the baseball, but he excels at both, allowing him to generate elite movement in both directions. That creates the daunting matchup that terrorized hitters across three levels last year.

"It just forces the hitters to stay on everything for so long and make those swing decisions hard," Yoho said of the interplay between his two big breakers. "I might throw a changeup in there and it might run away, and then, all of a sudden, you see a swing at a slider in the other batter's box. It's like, 'Why do they do that?' And it's because everything starts at different spots and finishes somewhere else."

The drawback to all that movement is that, at times, it's proven difficult to land in the strike zone. If there was a nit to pick with Yoho's dazzling first full professional season, it was the frequency of free bases he conceded. He issued progressively more walks as he faced increasingly disciplined hitters, culminating in a 14.5% walk rate at Triple-A Nashville.

Cutting down those free passes has been an area of focus this spring. On that front, Yoho debuted a minor adjustment in his appearance on Sunday. He has long pitched from the extreme third base end of the rubber to maximize the perceived break of his stuff. As recently as the beginning of this month, Matt Trueblood talked to Yoho and wrote about his theory for working from that spot. In the short time since, though, the Brewers' pitching development brass nudged him slightly toward the middle to keep his pitches over the plate longer.

"I've been so far to the third base side, my toes are kind of hanging off (the rubber)," he said. "And they were like, 'Hey, I think it might help your stuff, just to keep it more on-plane with the plate longer, to kind of move back towards the middle.' So (Sunday night), I kind of tinkered with it where I moved back a little bit. So now my toes are in line with the edge of the rubber."

Yoho is correct in believing that pitching from the third-base side makes right-handed movement look more extreme to a right-handed batter. But the Brewers led him to a more important realization: he needs no such illusions to make his stuff more challenging to hit.

"A lot of times, guys do that because they don't have good stuff," he explained. "I already have good stuff. Now it's like, how much can I get that in the zone and competitive? And so that might actually take away from how good my stuff is if I'm that far, where it's hard to get my changeup back over the plate with having to get so much to my glove side."

Yoho is positioned to become the latest in a long line of dominant Milwaukee relievers. He has the stuff and the poise. All that's missing is more consistent control, which could fall into place with his new starting point.

"It's just kind of like, 'Hey, you've got good stuff, it's just got to be in the zone. So just keep throwing it and find those sight lines of where you got to start the pitches.'"

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[IndyCrew5]

Great stuff as always @Jack Stern. I've really enjoyed getting more familiar with this site's content dating back to last season.

Curious to hear your thoughts about how relatively pessimistic Keith Law is about Yoho from his Spring Breakout writeup? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6209069/2025/03/17/scouting-rockies-white-sox-brewers-reds-spring-breakout/

[Joseph Zarr]

Very cool article. Really interesting to get a deeper discussion of where he and the Brewers are thinking as he positions himself on the rubber. 

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The drawback to all that movement is that, at times, it's proven difficult to land in the strike zone. If there was a nit to pick with Yoho's dazzling first full professional season, it was the frequency of free bases he conceded. He issued progressively more walks as he faced increasingly disciplined hitters, culminating in a 14.5% walk rate at Triple-A Nashville.

I think it's fair to point out he didn't really see any type of regression whatsoever in his jump from High-A to Double-A - a level jump historically seen as the most challenging across all levels of the Minor Leagues. And, it's no secret, the jump to the Southern League can be brutal for many a player. As a matter of fact, Yoho was striking out more batters per inning out of Biloxi's Pen than he was in Wisconsin. What he (and KC Hunt) did in their leap to Biloxi was what really made the season so dang remarkable. The jump in free passes did indeed happen at the tail end of the season in the International League. He pitched a mere 14 1/3 frames in Nashville over 14 appearances. Personally, having watched every one of those outings more than once (re-watching them this off-season), I saw it just as much from a fatigue and fluke perspective than anything else - 5 of those 9 free passes came in 2 of 14 appearances. We can nitpick, sure. But, as always, context helps. None the less, the main takeaway from my vantage point is he understands he can't get away with too many of those types of outings at the MLB level and the Brewers and Yoho himself recognize how good his stuff is.