Tarik Skubal’s changeup made him MLB’s most coveted arm — and helped lead a strikeout revolution

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DETROIT — They called it Changeup School.

It was 2023, and Tarik Skubal was rehabbing from flexor tendon surgery and tucked away in the shadows. Skubal was a long way from becoming the marvel he is ahead of the trade deadline three years later.

Skubal spent the first part of the season in Detroit even though he was injured. The Tigers wanted him to feel like he was still part of the team. But when the Tigers were on the road, Skubal would often drive 60 miles south to Toledo, home of the Tigers’ Triple-A affiliate. There, he worked with Mud Hens pitching coach Doug Bochtler, a former major-league reliever who once helped teach Johan Santana the changeup that would spur him to two Cy Young Awards.

Early in Skubal’s career, he boasted a powerful fastball and a nasty slider. But he was searching for another weapon, particularly one that would put away right-handed hitters. He had thrown a changeup his whole life. It was his best pitch in high school. It was a good pitch in college. But as he rose up the ranks, it became an option he threw less than 15 percent of the time.

He tried a four-seam grip with little success. He once spent an offseason working at Driveline Baseball, where analysts suggested he throw a splitter. He spent the spring of 2021 experimenting with that split-fingered grip. The pitch, mostly, was terrible.

“I face nine righties and I need something that goes to the left and looks like a heater,” Skubal said this spring. “That was the whole intent behind the splitter. It didn’t work, but the intent was right.”

With help from Tigers coaches Chris Fetter and Robin Lund, plus coaches back home in Arizona, Skubal finally found a changeup that worked. He switched to a two-seam circle grip. The aim was to master the effects of seam-shifted wake — the aerodynamic force that describes how a baseball’s seams influence the movement of a pitch.

Skubal stopped trying to pronate, or rotate his wrist to the left, and instead let his arm naturally supinate to the right. Coaches gave him a cue to swipe across the baseball, like he was trying to give it a cut effect. He famously did drills involving a dot written in black marker on the ball. The point was to have the ball’s seams “clip” a wave of air, and ride it to nastier down-and-away movement.

Down at Changeup School, there were fits and starts.

“There were some times I threw bullpens and it was going the wrong way,” Skubal said. “That’s not good, when you’re throwing a changeup that’s going the wrong way.”

For the most part, though, the pitch came naturally. It became the weapon that changed the arc of Skubal’s career, taking him from a promising young pitcher to a two-time Cy Young Award winner and now the talk of the sport, the biggest prize on the market ahead of Monday’s trade deadline.

Skubal’s changeup could be a game-changer for any team that acquires him. The pitch just so happens to reflect a larger trend taking shape in the game.

Changeup usage is up from 10.3 percent of pitches last season to 11.1 percent this year. Since the pitch-tracking era began in 2008, batting average (.224) and slugging percentage (.349) against the pitches have never been lower. The whiff rate is near its highest. These pitches have far nastier movement than they did only a few years ago.

Pitchers such as Skubal and Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez have used changeups to propel them to elite status. Skubal this season is getting whiffs on 50 percent of his changeups, the highest rate of any qualifying pitcher in the league.

When Skubal unleashes a changeup that fades away from a hitter and dives beneath a barrel, one thing is clear: These are not your father’s changeups.

“I think a lot of it has to do with people understanding the technology and having people to teach players how to do it,” Skubal said. “As a player, you want things to be simple. So that’s why, ‘Hey, take this grip, keep your finger up and throw it,’ can be pretty effective.”

Unlocking the effects of seam-shifted wake is perhaps the biggest reason for the transformation of changeups from the change-of-pace pitches players learn in Little League to the ferocious, swing-and-miss pitches we see today.

“I think just the evolution of Magnus effect, seam effect, whatever you want to call it, it’s just understanding what can happen to the baseball and cause it to move differently,” Skubal said.

In 2016, the average MLB changeup got 12.4 inches of horizontal movement. Ten years later, the average changeup moved 14.1 inches side to side. Learning how to generate such movement has never been easier, with the advent of high-speed cameras and HawkEye radars that provide instant feedback on how a pitch is coming off the fingers and how it is traveling through the air.

To hear it from another two-time Cy Young Award winner, the tilt toward changeups also stems from statistical models that better show just how effective these pitches can be.

Jacob deGrom has always thrived with his changeup. His overall usage hardly differs from his 2018-19 peak. But his 43.6 percent whiff rate on changeups so far this year is the highest he’s ever had in a healthy season. In an April start against the Yankees, deGrom threw 22 changeups — the most he had thrown in a single game since 2020.

“When I first came up, all the metric stuff wasn’t as in-depth,” deGrom said. “It was all based on, ‘Hey, let’s see what swings are.’ I would get a lot of swings and misses on my slider. But now here, my changeup grades as one of my best pitches.”

Part of the uptick in changeup usage this season is based on pure results. Those results are largely a function of the way these pitches move.

Imagine the ball as the face of a clock. A pitcher releases the ball with its axis pointed toward 2 o’clock. Then, as the sphere travels toward the hitter, the ball suddenly tilts toward 3 o’clock. That’s seam-shifted wake at work.

In 2021, there were 54 pitchers (minimum 50 innings) who threw changeups where the ball’s observed movement and spin-based movement differed by at least one hour.

Last season, 99 MLB pitchers with at least 50 innings threw changeups that achieved this type of effect.

Some of the recent uptick, too, might be the natural cat-and-mouse game between hitters and pitchers. For much of the past few seasons, sweepers — essentially, bigger sliders with massive horizontal movement — were en vogue. But as more pitchers started throwing them, hitters adjusted.

In 2021, the league averaged 2.3 percent sweepers, and hitters posted a .184 average against them.

Last season, sweeper usage was up to 8.3 percent, and the average was up to .215.

“Over the last decade, hitters have gotten really good at not only hitting spin, but sitting spin,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “It’s become a little bit of a 50-50 proposition on straight or spin. The changeup is still effective because it disrupts timing.”

That’s part of the interesting thing about all this. Changeups today profile as power pitches more than just change-of-pace alternatives. But many pitchers will tell you the difference in speed still matters. Toronto’s Dylan Cease throws a changeup that moves far less than league average, but hitters are whiffing against it an absurd 53.6 percent of the time, something Cease has attributed to the way the pitch plays off his fastball.

“When you talk to a lot of hitters, they always say, what’s the hardest pitch to hit? I feel like a lot of hitters will say changeups just because it’s harder to pick up,” said Cleveland Guardians left-hander Joey Cantillo.

Not all changeups are created equal. Mets closer Devin Williams throws his famed “Airbender” by focusing on the type of pronation Skubal eschewed.

Sánchez’s changeup was mostly self-taught. He throws it with his index finger off the ball, giving it the deadening effect he desires.

More and more pitchers are turning toward so-called “kick” changeups, among the latest fads in pitch design. Throwing a kick change involves spiking the middle finger to “kick” the ball’s spin axis and create a devastating tumbling effect. It’s a pitch that has changed careers, including inspiring Skubal’s Tigers to sign right-hander Drew Anderson out of Korea for $7 million this past offseason.

Five years ago, only 20 qualifying MLB pitchers used their changeup at least 25 percent of the time. In 2026, there are already 28 pitchers who do so. Skubal last season used his changeup at a 31.4 percent rate. Sánchez throws his at a 38.5 percent clip.

Cantillo, the Guardians pitcher who also boasts one of the game’s best swing-and-miss changeups, remembers his catchers encouraging him to throw his changeup as much as possible.

“Like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna throw it a f— ton,'” Cantillo said. “(Austin Hedges) is always like, ‘Just keep throwing it.'”

Some of this is fad. Some of this is science. But a designer changeup lifted Skubal to new heights, and similar pitches are doing the same for others all across the game.

“We’re the best in the world, so we’re going to get good at commanding it eventually,” Skubal said. “Sometimes those things take time, and I think, as a whole, pitchers around the league are understanding how to use it, how to throw it, and then they’re doing it.”

— Zack Meisel contributed to this report.