Over the past few years in the preseason, I’ve been putting together a series I’ve called my pitch review series where I take a look at the top five pitches of each pitch type.
It’s one of my favorite article series to do each year, because it’s a great way to dive into different pitchers’ repertoires, and it’s especially fun because there are often unexpected pitchers who pop up on each list (like there are on this list you’re about to read).
Before we dive in, some details on how this works: In this article and the ones that will follow, I’ll be taking a look at the five best pitches of each pitch type from last year. And just like I have the past couple years, I’ll be ranking these pitches by our own metric, Pitch Level Value (PLV).
If you’re not familiar with PLV, our very own Nick Pollack wrote a whole primer on it with all the details you need to know. But here’s the short version: PLV is a numerical way to quantify the pure quality of a pitch regardless of the events that occurred around that pitch.
For example, if a pitcher throws a beautiful changeup down and away to a hitter that drops right off the plate and somehow that hitter is able to make contact and turn it into a double, that’s not necessarily the result of a bad pitch but of a good piece of hitting (and a bit of luck), so PLV attempts to account for something like that.
One more note: all the pitches included on these lists were thrown a minimum of 300 times last year. My goal with this series is always to highlight pitches that were thrown fairly frequently and were consistently dominant, and a minimum of 300 pitches is a good place to start.
Anyways, let’s dive into the top five changeups from 2024!
When I’m making these lists, I often come across pitchers who end up in the top five PLV of a pitch but don’t have especially good seasons, and it’s a prime example of the idea that one pitch does not a starting pitcher make.
Austin Gomber here is a prime example. Gomber did not have a good season last year, pitching to a 4.75 ERA with a 1.31 WHIP and a 16.7% strikeout rate. Now, how much of that is to blame on Gomber being in the rotation of the Rockies, and how much is his own fault? Hard to say.
One thing that’s for sure, Gomber had a great changeup last year. He threw the pitch around 20% of the time with great vertical movement, and it worked well. It wasn’t a pitch Gomber typically used as a strikeout pitch, more of an early-in-the-count pitch (oftentimes in 0-0 counts), and it racked up a great 26.3% CSW thanks in large part to its 12.3% called-strike rate (good for 80th percentile among changeups).
The rest of the repertoire is where he got in trouble. His fastball came in around 90 MPH with decent extension and induced vertical break and got beat up to the tune of a .411 wOBA against.
The curveball was better, sporting a solid 30.2% CSW and a 14% swinging-strike rate with a .261 wOBA against, but that fastball (and his slider, which also turned in poor results) ended up being too much to overcome (well, that and again pitching in Coors Field a lot).
4. Logan Webb
Whereas sometimes, you come across pitchers like Austin Gomber above, who may come as a surprise on one of these types of lists, you also come across guys who are no surprise at all, and Logan Webb fits that bill.
Webb has been one of the better pitchers in the game for the past four years now, and last year was no exception, pitching to a solid 3.47 ERA (which is surprisingly the worst ERA he’s had since 2020), a 1.23 WHIP, and a 20.5% strikeout rate.
A large part of that is thanks to this changeup. Webb mainly goes with a sinker/changeup approach, with those two pitches comprising 71% of his pitches.
The changeup is excellent as a swing-and-miss pitch, posting a 52.3% chase rate last year, which is good for 99th percentile in the majors among all changeups. Basically, when it comes to changeups, virtually no one had a pitch that was being chased outside the strike zone more than Logan Webb’s.
That’s the real appeal of the pitch—it did a decent job at getting called strikes, but if the pitch did have a weakness, it was in the quality of contact when it actually did get hit. Last year, opposing hitters had a 46% ICR against the pitch (17th percentile among changeups), which isn’t great and a notable decline from its 31% ICR the year before.
As a result, Webb started leaning more on his sinker, which is still a solid pitch. The problem for Webb to figure out is similar to the problem Gomber needs to figure out—what can he throw aside from his changeup? Webb introduced a sweeper last year that produced solid numbers, which is a good sign, and I’m optimistic that between the volume he’s almost definitely going to get and his awesome changeup, Webb should still be a rock-solid fantasy option this year.
3. Bailey Ober
If you were to just look at Bailey Ober’s 3.94 ERA last year and immediately be worried about his potential as a pitcher for your fantasy team, it’d be understandable, but there’s a lot to like about Ober if you dive a little deeper, chief among them this changeup.
While Ober’s ERA wasn’t great (thanks in large part to some pretty awful blow-up starts), he still posted a 1.00 WHIP and a 26.9% strikeout rate, which are good for the 94th and 85th percentile among starting pitchers, respectively.
Ober mainly employs a fastball/changeup approach, locating his 91.7 MPH fastball up in the zone a lot (to the tune of a 61.6% hiLoc%, which is pretty high) and utilizing the awesome 7.3 feet of extension he gets on the pitch (which helps make up for the lack of velocity some). Unfortunately, that means sometimes that fastball gets located in more hittable areas of the zone if Ober doesn’t nail the location, and if you lob a 92 MPH fastball in the middle-high area of the strike zone for a major league hitter, they’re going to take advantage of it.
Ober then likes to locate his changeup low in the zone, and man, did it work beautifully last year, posting a 33.1% CSW (96th percentile among changeups), a 47.9% chase rate (96th percentile) and a 23.5% swinging-strike rate (95th percentile).
It’s a beauty of a pitch and is well-deserved to be listed as one of the best changeups in the league.
Last year was the most innings we’ve seen from Chris Paddack since 2021, and he threw only 88.1 innings last year. Paddack is another guy who has one incredible pitch, and that’s about it, which really limits his ceiling as we saw last year with his 4.99 ERA and 1.39 WHIP.
Paddack’s vulcan change works pretty great—it posted an excellent 38.8% chase rate and was especially effective against right-handed hitters (though less so against lefties).
But one pitch does not a pitcher make. Paddack’s fastball comes in around 93 MPH, and while it gets an excellent seven feet of extension, his height-adjusted VAA is way too low and limits the pitch’s effectiveness.
On top of that, Paddack just doesn’t have another effective pitch. It’d be great if he had a slider or curve that worked well to complement his excellent changeup, but neither his slider nor his curve is especially good, both getting knocked around a good bit last year.
If Paddack were able to suddenly be able to develop a quality breaking pitch things could be different, but between his middling repertoire and the fact that he hasn’t pitched more than 110 innings since 2019, it’s hard to see Paddack making a big step forward. Great changeup though, so I guess he’s got that going for him.
Michael Wacha has quietly been turning in rock-solid season after season for the past three years, but he’s one of those guys who seems to be way more useful on a real-life team than on a fantasy team.
Don’t get me wrong, Wacha has had three-straight seasons with an ERA under 3.40 and a WHIP under 1.20, and that absolutely has its uses on your fantasy team, but his lack of strikeouts (just a 21.2% strikeout rate last year) is going to limit his ceiling in fantasy.
Wacha’s success hinges almost entirely on this changeup, which is well-deserved to be called the best in the league. The numbers on the pitch are just absurd: a 31.5% CSW (91st percentile among changeups), 41.5% chase rate (81st percentile), 19.1% swinging-strike rate (81st percentile), and a .226 wOBA against (81st percentile).
Sometimes there are players in the fantasy world who aren’t flashy but just put in the work, and at the end of the season you go, “Oh wow, that guy was actually pretty good.” Michael Wacha is that guy—he’s a prime example of a Toby, and in large part, it’s thanks to the best changeup in baseball.