Breaking down a "kick-changeup"

Over the last few seasons, you may have heard of a relatively new pitch: a “sweeper."

Popularized by pitchers like Yu Darvish and Adam Ottavino, a sweeper features more horizontal movement than a traditional slider. “Sweeping” action, to be exact. According to Major League Baseball's glossary, a slider typically has about six inches of horizontal movement, while a sweeper averages closer to 15.

While the sweeper is a variant of the slider, pitchers can throw both. The two offerings, with their drastic difference in movement, attack hitters in very different ways. The sweeper has been used around the league enough to earn a spot in MLB’s pitch type glossary, and its popularity will most likely continue to grow across the game.

There’s a new popular pitch in town that may earn its way there soon enough, too: the “kick-changeup.”

Perhaps you’ve seen highlights of this relatively new offering from pitchers like Clay Holmes and Andrés Muñoz. So what the heck is it?

Holmes used the devastating offering against the Nationals on MASN on Sunday, and Nats analyst and former big leaguer Kevin Frandsen outlined what the pitch does.

“He’s a supinator, so think outside part of the ball,” Frandsen noted of Holmes. “That’s why he has big sweep on that.”

Let’s start there. A supinator on the outside part of the ball, as Frandsen referenced, means that the pitcher’s knuckles are turned away from the body. As an example, for a right-handed pitcher, your knuckles being further to the outside of the ball may push a pitch from your arm-side (your right-side in this case) to the glove-side (left-side in this case). This usually means that you are able to get better horizontal movement on your breaking pitches moving from right to left, and a fastball may have some cutting action.

On the flip side, a supinator may have trouble throwing a changeup, which aims to have vertical drop with some fade to the arm-side. In our righty example, if your grip is moving pitches from right to left, it’s hard to throw a pitch with left to right movement. That’s where a “kick” comes in, as Frandsen explains.

“He (Holmes) spikes a finger, his middle finger, on that one. It changes the axis, kicks the axis. That’s why they call it the kick-change. It creates that side spin to get that fade.”

“Spiking” a finger means that you are not laying your finger across the baseball, but instead raising it up. In the case of the kick-change, the knuckle of the middle-finger is raised off the baseball.

As explained by Tread Athletics, a popular performance complex utilized by many professional pitchers, the spiked middle-finger becomes the last to touch the baseball, puts more pressure on the ring-finger and allows the pitcher to “kick” the axis.

Let’s move onto the “kicking” part. Picture a clock. While a typical changeup is moving along a 12-6 plain, a kick-changeup may be working closer to three o’clock.

These changes in axis and spin allow the pitcher to get more fade on the changeup, and oftentimes, more vertical drop than the offering had before.

Thus, a “kick-changeup” was born.

This variation of the typical changeup is still not incredibly common among major league pitchers. But if pitchers like Holmes and Muñoz find success with gaudy analytical numbers, don’t be surprised if the kick-change becomes much more common around the game.

There are certainly Orioles working on the pitch, too. In fact, Michael Forret, one of the O’s top pitching prospects, was featured in Tread’s video outlining the offering.

It’s only a matter of time before it makes its way to Camden Yards.