For Their Next Trick, Watch the Brewers Become a Changeup Team, After All

Last season, only the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates threw fewer offspeed pitches (as a percentage of all their pitches thrown) than did the Brewers, who went to the change or splitter just 10.0% of the time. Our own Jack Stern wrote about this trend as early as the beginning of May, and it kept up all year. The league zigged hard toward an array of offspeed stuff in 2024; the Brewers zagged.

That wasn't some push to take advantage of a so-called market inefficiency, though. Nor was it a dogmatic denial of the utility of those pitches. It just happened that the pitchers they had collected last year (and especially, the ones who were healthy in the first half, before they got back the services of guys like Devin Williams and Aaron Ashby) didn't have great changeups, and instead of trying to push forward an offering with which most of Chris Hook's pupils were unskilled or inexperienced, the longtime Milwaukee pitching coach and his colleagues guided them toward offerings they could throw more confidently and with greater versatility.

If you needed confirmation of that, it's everywhere you turn in camp this spring. The buzziest offering on the team, of course, is Craig Yoho's changeup. Arguably, it's more of a screwball, akin to the pitch Williams threw, but he applies a bit less extreme spin (and is clearly more prone to pronation, anyway, given the shape of his fastball), so we'll call it a changeup. Bryan Hudson brought a new changeup to camp, as we've already discussed. Hudson has always been more comfortable throwing his sweeper and cutter, but the changeup has the potential to force opposing hitters to cover the whole plate much more defensively. Grant Anderson's "marching orders," as Pat Murphy implied when he was optioned Monday, include working hard on the changeup the team has encouraged him to reemphasize this spring, to better neutralize left-handed batters.

Suddenly, the Brewers are a changeup-forward group—and Yoho believes it was never really anything else. He believes that Williams blazed a trail that made it easier for him to thrive with his version of a similar offering.

"There’s a confidence in a guy like that, who’s changeup-heavy, it works. You’ve seen it before, and the Brewers have seen it before. So there’s a little faith that goes into that, before I even touch the mound, like ‘Hey, a guy can be an elite-level reliever throwing primarily changeups’," Yoho said Friday.

Ashby is excited about getting to deploy his own changeup this year, as he tries to move back into a starting role—or at least a multi-inning relief one. He called the changeup his "favorite pitch" earlier in camp.

Hudson is an example of a player and the team conspiring to re-engineer and reintroduce the change, and he's working with a circle change (needing the arm-side action that generally comes with that grip). Anderson is an instance of the team encouraging a player to revive that pitch as part of his mix. Meanwhile, incoming lefties Tyler Alexander and Connor Thomas are testaments to the club's eagerness to support changeup development and address unexpected things with it—in two very different ways. Thomas, the team's Rule 5 pick from December, said his change has been a bit firmer and harder to manipulate in the new environment of an Arizona spring camp, and that he and coaches are striving to smooth it out.

"Initially, I was having trouble—just putting in the dirt every time I threw it," Thomas said Monday. "So we made some tweaks, I moved it farther back in my hand, and I’m now in the strike zone with it, but it’s a little harder. So maybe switching back to the original now that I’ve got my sights right, can bring it back to the 82, 81 range where I had it last year. We’re tweaking it. Arizona atmosphere’s a little bit harder than Florida."

What Thomas meant is that the elevation, heat, and dearth of humidity can affect the shape of pitches in ways we can now measure and grasp. As compared to Florida, the air in the desert highlands of the Phoenix area is much thinner, which makes fastballs carry less well and curveballs bite less sharply. Most of the problems pitchers have there are on pitches that depend on spin (and the resulting Magnus force of the air on the ball), but he's also had an issue with finding the proper grip under these conditions.

"Yeah, everybody has grip down [in Florida]," Thomas said. "Humidity helps you with grip on the ball. Down here, everything’s dusty-dry. So just trying to figure out different atmospheres, different ways to hold the ball, to do the same things with it."

The feel of that grip (and the back-and-forth adjustments he's trying with it, even as he strives to win a job) means is tricky to maintain, in part, because Thomas doesn't have one privilege that helps other pitchers succeed with the changeup: huge hands.

"It’s pretty much the baby changeup they teach 10-year-olds," Thomas said of his grip on the change. "The basic two-seam changeup grip. It’s for small hands. I have small hands, and I’ve kind of just morphed it to do what I want it to do when I throw it."

Pitching development is all an exercise in creative problem-solving, and the trick to being a good creative problem-solver is being flexible. Rigid plans and principles tend to make it harder to come up with good solutions, rather than easier. The Brewers' sharp swerve back from not relying on changeups much at all to having a bevy of pitchers in camp who will use theirs frequently demonstrates the flexibility. Even with Thomas, who's experiencing a new kind of difficulty with a pitch for which he doesn't have the optimal physiology, they're being patient, thoughtful, and experimentative. 

On the other hand (though he throws with the same one), Alexander is a reminder that sometimes, pitching development problems practically solve themselves. Quite the opposite of Thomas, he has much more depth on his changeup this spring, which should help his arsenal immensely. Did he set out to find a new way to create that movement over the winter? Did he change his grip? Did the Brewers do something fancy with pitch design?

"No," Alexander said, sounding surprised, himself. "No. I just came into camp, and it was real depth-y. I haven’t really changed anything with it. Grip is the same, the way I throw it’s the same. It’s a variation of the circle change, across the two seams. Maybe, mechanically, I’ve changed some things where it’s affected the changeup in a positive way? I don’t know. I guess we’re just gonna ride with it."

If you stay open to the whims and nudges of the pitching gods, sometimes, they smile on you. Alexander did talk about some mechanical changes the team recommended to help him find more vertical movement on his four-seam fastball, which could have had a knock-on effect on his changeup action. He said they even went so far as to schedule a meeting to dig into why the change in the change has taken place, because better understanding it will help them weaponize it.

"Correct," Alexander said, when asked whether command was a concern in light of so much newfound movement. "Yeah, I threw it in the game at Cincinnati, over there, and I bounced pretty much all of them, but I’m just not used to the depth that it has. So it’ll be an adjustment on where my sights are set when I throw it and my usage on it when I throw it, if it’s gonna move like that."

Pat Murphy has one idea already, though, as to how this might have happened.

"We give them this Brewers magic dust thing," the skipper said with a chuckle. "Yeah, I mean, that’s kinda cool."

New ideas. Resurrecting old ones. Refining and adjusting, and reacting to organic changes. The Brewers are adding changeups to their roster in all kinds of ways—including one last, perhaps most straightforward one: acquiring guys who lean heavily on that pitch. Jose Quintana has steadily increased his changeup usage almost every year of his career, reaching a career-high rate just under 20% last season. Freddy Peralta went to his change 17.6% of the time last year, the highest rate of his career, too. While the team found different, fastball-forward ways to solve the problem of getting out opposite-handed batters last season, they seem to be leaning toward more changeups this year.

Organizational preferences are important. If you don't have them, you don't have direction and vision. Teams need to be discerning and analytical enough to know what they do and don't like, in a general sense. For some teams, though, those preferences and tendencies become traps. They make too few exceptions to their own rules, and believe too strongly in the predilections they develop. The Brewers strike a better balance. While they like pitchers to do certain things well, they think flexibly and change their approach when the situation demands it. There might be no better example of that flexibility this spring than their newfound dedication to the changeup.