The birth of a new pitch: Why MLB players are rushing to try the ‘kick-change’

When is a pitch a pitch? When is a new pitch type born? Who gets credit?

At some point, the slider was not a thing. Then Charles Bender threw his “nickel-curve” so often in the early part of the 20th century that it caught on and became what we know as the slider today. At least, that’s how some stories go. Other pitchers tell different stories where they were the main character.

But the story of the slider tells us that, before the age of pitch tracking, there was this new pitch that one pitcher was throwing, then a few more threw it, then it had a name (and shape? grip? mechanics?) that everyone agreed on, and it was officially a part of the lexicon. That means something today in the era of pitch tracking and constant innovation and iteration, too, especially now that we may be witnessing the birth of a new pitch.

The “kick-change” is hot, and it’s so new we can actually track its progress through the league. And maybe tracking that progress will tell us a little more about what it means to be a Pitch Type in today’s game.

If pitches are born in the hands of one pitcher, then Shaun Anderson is why we have the kick-change.

Anderson, a veteran who has bounced around from MLB to KBO, is a supinator, meaning he’s more comfortable with the mechanics behind throwing a slider, and isn’t great at pulling down on the ball toward his thumb (pronation). He’d been looking for a changeup for a while, and then in his tinkering, found a way to get the movement he sought.

“Instead of keeping my middle finger on top and spiking it, I turn it over to the side and I almost spike the right side of the seam,” Anderson told Jack Janes at The Sporting Tribune in a piece about his pitch. “It’s just really about kicking the axis upside down rather than getting really on top of it. So, just being able to kick it with your middle finger is really the purpose of the kick-change.”

But that’s just one pitcher, and one without the legacy of Hall of Famer Bender. The grip didn’t even have a name until Anderson got to Tread Athletics and met up with Leif Strom to refine the pitch.

“Leif coined the term,” said Ben Brewster, founder of Tread Athletics, “although it’s one of those things that’s tough to say who ‘invented’ the pitch. More like he identified and applied an understanding, name and framework to the pitch.”

In early 2023, they did just that, using high-speed video to figure out what was happening as Anderson released the ball. As you can see from this video captured by Strom, the ball comes out of the hand with an unexpected axis, tumbling quickly because of the unique grip.

Once it was at Tread Athletics, an independent pitching development lab, it started to spread. Daniel Blair, a minor leaguer who trained there, took it to spring training. San Francisco Giants pitcher Hayden Birdsong saw it there and picked it up because he was “pretty square with the ball” and “not great at pronating” in mid-2024. Brewster estimates Birdsong was the first major leaguer to break it out in games. Brian Bannister was the director of pitching for the Giants, then went to Chicago in a new role and taught the pitch to Davis Martin because the White Sox pitcher shared the proclivity for supination.

Then it got on social media. Birdsong’s changeup was posted there, and Bannister posted a thread about his work with Martin. It gets a little muddy once a pitch gets on the socials, though, because Andrés Muñoz with the Seattle Mariners picked it up that way, but couldn’t tell who he got it from.

“I saw it on Instagram,” Muñoz said this spring. “It wasn’t a professional baseball player, I don’t know the guy, I was just scrolling down. I saw it, I thought, ‘I can try that,’ I threw it during my throwing program, and said, ‘huh, that’s good.'”

For this pitch to kick into sweeper or splinker territory, though, it needs a champion. It needs a Bender, it needs a Paul Skenes, it needs a pitcher everyone wants to emulate. There are certainly some candidates in play this year. There’s Seattle closer Muñoz and his kick-change, which looks terrifying.

Clay Holmes, who picked it up at Tread this offseason in preparation for starting with the New York Mets this year, has a nice one.

Holmes has always been fascinated with the minutiae of pitch movement. Assistant pitching coach Desi Druschel talked a little about the mechanics of the kick-change.

“Where the kick comes is when you see it on Edgertronic, and you release it, the fingers come off, and then this middle finger that spiked actually, like, kicks the axis, the spin axis,” Druschel said after Holmes’ first start. “So it changes, it changes how the ball is spinning. And that’s where the idea of kick comes, just altering the axis. It’s the same thing that happens on the sweeper.

“This finger will kick the axis, too, but it’s just, it’s more traditional there. So it’s just describing what’s happening. A regular changeup will roll off and kind of slide off the fingers — or swipe off the fingers, is a better way to describe it — as opposed to this spin axis altering kick.”

Because we have an epicenter at Tread and demand from a group of pitchers who have struggled to throw good changeups, the kick-change is becoming popular rapidly. We’ve already seen Birdsong, Davis, Muñoz and Holmes throw it, but there are more we didn’t know were throwing it. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Landon Knack threw some in Japan. Texas Rangers right-hander Jack Leiter told me he learned it from righty Matt Festa, who worked at Tread. Baltimore Orioles left-hander Cade Povich is throwing one. Randy Dobnak, on the comeback trail, now has a kick-change.

This is different than some of the knuckle changes we’ve seen before, like Mat Latos’ Critter, but it does fit into the history of unique changeup grips. And because of our current technology, we can more readily differentiate this new changeup from others that have come before.

“I would say that it’s more new,” said Druschel of the kick-change. “I’m sure somebody has (thrown it before) somewhere at some point. But this one seems more new. But to say it’s something that someone has never done it, I don’t believe that, because all the things that we’re doing today, we just can better describe them or see them. They’re really not new, right?

“The best pitchers have done all of these, like seam-shifted wake. The best pitchers, I’m sure, were taking advantage of seam-shifted wake. We just couldn’t measure and identify. Now we can better measure and identify.”

If we throw all the known kick-changes into the database, we can start to identify if it has its own shape.

“Right now, it’s playing like a splitter to where it’s not cut, it doesn’t have an arm-side movement, but it’s just dropping down,” said Leiter of the pitch.

“More drop than sideways,” said Muñoz.

But it’s not the same for everyone, as Cubs pitcher Jameson Taillon gets more horizontal on his best kick-changes.

Then again, not every sweeper is the same either. Nor are the mechanics of each sweeper the same.

“With this pitch, everyone is just so different,” Taillon said.

Still, from the sweeper, we know that shape, difference and popularity matter when it comes to declaring a new pitch type.

“We added the sweeper as a distinct classification over the 2022-23 offseason as the use of the pitch began to emerge more widely throughout the game and pitchers (as well as their pitching coaches) began to use that term to describe it,” said an MLB official about that process that produced the sweeper designation in 2023. “Lumping sweepers into the ‘traditional’ slider classification didn’t properly describe the movement of the pitch, and it became particularly problematic as pitchers like Clay Holmes started to throw both. The resulting averages didn’t properly describe either pitch, so adding sweeper as a distinct pitch type addressed that problem.”

This might be what makes the kick-change a sub-class of pitch and not its own pitch type in the end. It makes total sense to go through the considerable effort of classifying a sweeper as separate from a slider if a pitcher throws both of them. The analyst wants to know what each separate pitch does, the pitcher wants to know what he’s working on, and the catcher wants to know which pitch is coming down the pipe. If the kick-change is the pitcher’s only changeup, they can put down one sign and know what’s coming.

But many of the same ground conditions are here that existed before the slider, before the sweeper and maybe before the splinker. There’s already an origin story and, at Tread Athletics, a nexus for the spread. In today’s data-rich environment, we can separate its shape from other shapes more readily. Pitchers who can throw breaking balls but haven’t yet found a changeup grip are looking for the right one and finding that the kick-change fits their needs. If one of these pitchers breaks out this year and attributes their success to this grip, it’ll spread even further and maybe someday it’ll be listed on Statcast pages as its own pitch type, and mentioned on the broadcast often.

Maybe the kick-change needs another hero like Charles Bender to lodge it into our collective pitch grip lexicon.

— The Athletic’s Will Sammon contributed to this story.

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