Over the past few years, I’ve put together what I call my pitch review series where I take a look at the best pitches of each pitch type from the previous year.
It’s one of my favorite series to do each year for a couple of reasons. First, pitching is the best. I find diving into a player’s repertoire to be a fun way to spend my spare time (because I am sick in the head). It’s also cool to see some unexpected pitchers to pop up on each list.
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 five best changeups from 2025!
5. Bailey Ober
First off on the list, we’ve got Bailey Ober. Ober utilizes his changeup a lot, throwing it nearly 29% of the time last year, and it’s a critical pitch to his repertoire.
Given that Ober’s changeup doesn’t overwhelm on velocity alone (it sits around 90-91 mph on average), the separation and shape of Ober’s changeup were vital to disrupting timing.
The pitch generates a good combo of horizontal movement and arm-side action that plays well off of his fastball and sweeper, and helps induce weak contact when batters are able to hit the ball. Last year, opposing hitters had a .216/.351/.263 line against Ober’s changeup, alongside a 16.4% swinging-strike rate and a 42.8% chase rate (86th percentile in the league among changeups).
Ober didn’t have a great season last year, though, but that wasn’t the fault of his changeup. That was the fault of him not having any other decent secondary pitches beyond his changeup, and the fault of his fastball, a pitch that’s shape is designed for a north-south approach but frequently flattened out or lived at belt height instead of higher in the zone, leading to a lot of hard-hit balls.
Edward Cabrera had what you might consider a breakout season last year, posting a solid 3.53 ERA and a very good 25.8% strikeout rate, and his changeup was a big driver of that success.
In fact, Cabrera relied on his changeup more than any other pitch, throwing it 26% of the time while he threw his curveball 24% of the time, his sinker 21%, and his slider 17%.
Here’s what’s wild—Cabrera’s changeup averaged 94.2 mph last year, one of the fastest changeups in baseball and one of the hardest non-fastball pitches in the Statcast era. That kind of velocity alone makes it incredibly difficult for hitters to distinguish Cabrera’s changeup early in the zone.
But it wasn’t just a fast changeup—it had a bunch of movement too, with around 17.5 inches of arm-side run, which allowed it to run away from opposite-handed hitters and jam same-sided ones, helping keep hitters off-balance despite its high velocity. It worked beautifully, posting a .225 wOBA against and a very solid 35.4% chase rate.
While Chris Paddack didn’t have the best season with the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins this year, posting a 5-12 record with a 5.35 ERA, that wasn’t the fault of his changeup, which worked beautifully last year.
Paddack throws his changeup around a quarter of the time, making his second-most-thrown pitch (in fact, his changeup and his fastball add up to about two-thirds of all the pitches he throws). Coming in around 84-85 mph with some solid movement, Paddack’s changeup did a solid job of inducing chases with a 42.6% chase rate and getting weak contact, with a 35.5% ICR, both of which are very solid numbers.
Unfortunately, the rest of Paddack’s repertoire didn’t quite work out. His fastball is actually fairly solid; it’s got great shape with seven feet of extension, 17 inches of vert, and 0.7 degree height-adjusted VAA. The velocity at just shy of 94 mph on average could be better (imagine if that pitch was like 96 on average, that’d be sick), but it’s a solid pitch.
It’s the lack of another secondary pitch for Paddack that really hurts him. Yes, the changeup is great, and he’s got a good fastball to work off of, but beyond that, there isn’t much. He’s got a very mediocre curveball, a slider that has potential but doesn’t get thrown enough, and then a cutter that he has a lot of trouble controlling, which led to it getting smacked around a lot last year.
You obviously hope that Paddack is able to figure things out, but given he’s 30 now and when he hasn’t been hurt, he’s basically been around a 5.00 ERA guy, I kind of feel like that’s just who he is now.
If you’ve been following baseball at basically any level for the past few years, then you likely know about Devin Williams and his “Airbender” changeup. He throws it 52% of the time (and throws his fastball the remaining 48%) and for good reason—it’s a filthy pitch.
Coming in around 84 mph with a ridiculous 19.5 inches of induced horizontal break, Williams’s changeup was disgusting last year, posting a 45.1% chase rate (90th percentile among changeups), a 33.4% CSW (93rd percentile), and a 20.2% swinging-strike rate (84th percentile).
While the pitch did generally induce weak contact, with a .261 wOBA against, Williams did make some mistakes with it here and there, as the pitch also had a 37.2% ICR and 27.8% HR/FB rate. These aren’t bad numbers per se, but they do signal that Williams’s changeup was able to get knocked around sometimes.
He led the list of best changeups last year, and here he is again. If there’s one thing that Michael Wacha does well, it’s his changeup. It’s one of the best in the business for a reason.
Last year, Wacha threw his changeup around a quarter of the time, and the results were beautiful. A 40% chase rate (77th percentile among changeups), a 26% CSW (71st percentile), a 31.6% ICR (71st percentile), a 2.4% mistake rate (85th percentile), and a .214 wOBA against (80th percentile).
The pitch comes in around 80 mph on average with a good bit of induced vertical break, and Wacha used it as his main two-strike pitch to righties (surprisingly, his main two-strike pitch to lefties was his sinker).
Wacha had a bit of a step back last season, posting a 3.86 ERA through 172.2 innings with a 1.22 WHIP, but even still, the man is consistent. He hasn’t posted an ERA above 4.00 since 2021, and every year he’s made at least 23 starts. Given his low strikeout rate, he’s more of a useful real-life pitcher than a fantasy pitcher, but year-to-year, you’ve got a pretty good idea what you’re getting from Michael Wacha.
Photo by Cliff Welch/Icon Sportswire | Featured image by Ethan Kaplan (@djfreddie10.bsky.social on Blue Sky and @EthanMKaplanImages on Instagram)
