Logan Henderson Only Needs Two Pitches, and is Back to Pitching Like It

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A day will come when Logan Henderson needs a third pitch, and perhaps a fourth. A day will come, if he wants to mature into an ace who can be as good as he's been this year over 30 starts instead of 20, when he'll need more ways to keep hitters guessing and put them on the defensive. That day hasn't come yet, though, and it doesn't look like it'll come before the end of 2026—even if the Brewers' 2026 lasts all the way to Halloween. This month, he's begun to bend his pitch mix back toward his comfort zone, to reflect that reality.

As he sought to establish himself as part of the Brewers rotation this spring, Henderson started going to his cutter more. His cutter isn't much of a pitch, really. It's not a pitch that gets torched, most of the time, but it doesn't have much utility at all against lefties, and it works mostly as a setup pitch to righties. No matter. The idea, with that pitch, was to force hitters to cover the whole zone, and to give them something that moves to the glove side. For the same reasons, he also introduced a sweeper.

Lately, though, Henderson has stopped playing games. He's no longer trying to be someone he's not. Since the beginning of August (and especially in his handful of starts in September, culminating with five dazzling innings against the Phillies Wednesday night), Henderson is throwing his four-seam fastball or his changeup roughly 90% of the time, leaving virtually no pitch-mix share for his two lesser offerings.

Few pitchers can get away with that, but Henderson is special. We don't have (public) data on this yet, but I suspect that whenever we do gain insight on pitchers' arm speed, we'll find that Henderson matches his on the changeup and fastball better than any other pitcher in the game. He doesn't have pinpoint control of the change, but the way he throws it deceives hitters so much that it hardly matters. He can throw that thing right down the middle and get a swing that misses by over a foot and a half. In fact, he literally did so Wednesday night, against Kyle Schwarber.

It's the arm speed, and the 10-MPH velocity differential he somehow sustains despite that arm speed, that sets Henderson apart. Other pitchers get a lot of the value on their changeups from the movement on the pitch. Its depth produces whiffs by inducing hitters to swing over the top. That does happen for Henderson, of course, but it's not the main driver of the pitch's effectiveness. Instead, he gets almost all the value on that pitch from how consistently he gets hitters to swing way too soon. Even compared to other changeups, his does that extremely frequently.

As you can see, though, Henderson's fastball is pretty average, in terms of how hitters' swings match up with it. They're thrown off a hair by having to respect the changeup, and the low release height gives the pitch a flat vertical approach angle as it enters the zone, so they're often underneath it a bit. But the exceptionally high value Henderson gets from his heater isn't really about messing with timing. That's why he doesn't need a deeper arsenal to win, right now. No, his fastball beats hitters because of how well he locates it, as Bryce Harper can attest after Wednesday night.

Given Henderson's mechanics and that changeup, if he can hit that spot consistently against a lefty batter, Henderson will remain dominant for at least the balance of this year. That's much easier said than done, of course, but Henderson's command and control have been strengths since he was an amateur. It's no surprise that he can locate; it's just been a pleasant surprise that he can have so much success against the best hitters on Earth by doing so.

Again, for one reason or another, Henderson will someday need the cutter and sweeper (or some other offering he cooks up later on). He can't blaze a trail to the Hall of Fame with these two pitches. He can burn right through the league for one more month this way, though. That arm speed is magic. Pitchers talk about throwing the changeup just like the fastball all the time. Henderson is as close to the ideal of actually doing it as any hurler in recent memory, and it's producing eye-popping numbers for the league's best No. 2 starter.