Is Kyle Hendricks's Cut-Change Unique?

[Matthew Trueblood]

The erstwhile Cubs starter has one of baseball's most interesting pitch mixes. He throws one changeup to left-handed batters, and another to righties. The latter is an especially fascinating, almost unique flavor of the cambio.

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

It's not just that Kyle Hendricks throws two distinct versions of his changeup. It's also extremely unusual that he throws one of them the way he does. Changeups come in all shapes and velocities, and some cut toward the glove side, in an absolute sense, while others have a crazy amount of arm-side run. By and large, it depends on the overall movement profile of the pitcher--how his arm works, what kind of spin he imparts, and which grip he employs for the change.

The harder, faster rule, though, is that you can safely make a directional prediction about changeup movement based on fastball movement. Some pitchers have a high-rise changeup with virtually no vertical separation from the fastball, whereas others have diving, downhill splitter-style pitches. Some have huge run to the arm side, and some stay in the same lane as the fastball, depending on a slight fade and a significant velocity differential. What hardly any of them have is cutting movement, relative to that pitcher's fastball.

The changeup Hendricks throws to right-handed batters is an exception. 

(In this image, I removed Hendricks's curveballs, which are not relevant to this particular study.) As you can see, Hendricks leans heavily on his sinker against righties, and his changeup moves more to the glove side (away from a righty batter) than the sinker does. It also moves more in that direction than his seldom-used four-seamer, on average. It even resists gravity a bit more than the sinker, and thus appears to rise relative to it.

How rare is that? Well, 80 right-handed pitchers have thrown at least 25 changeups to right-handed batters this season, and of them, only four share this characteristic.

No one quite matches Hendricks, but to say just how unusual his cut-change action is, let's dig in a little bit on each of the other three who have a significant amount of cut-change, themselves.

Logan Webb
Like Hendricks, Webb is a sinker-and-changeup star, and throwing a sinker does make it slightly easier to achieve a cut-change effect. If your sinker has considerable run, and your change is more about velocity separation than movement, you can have that pitch stay over the heart of the plate to induce chase below the zone, whereas you want the sinker to run to the inside edge and generate weak contact.

Plainly, though, that's nothing like Hendricks's six-inch difference in average movement, and unlike Hendricks's, his change dips lower than his fastball, the way you'd expect it to. All that heavy action is what makes Webb one of the league's premier ground-ball guys, and it's what's missing from Hendricks's these days, as he becomes more homer-prone.

Pedro Avila
Though a little-know long reliever, Avila (whom the Guardians snatched up from San Diego in April amid a desperate need for healthy arms) has been valuable this season, with a 3.51 ERA in 41 innings of work. He uses both a four-seamer and a two-seamer against righty batters, but the changeup has cut action relative to each--as well as a huge vertical movement disparity.

The combination of offerings flummoxes hitters, and while right-on-right changeups are rarely standout pitches in terms of results, Avila's is an exception. He gets chases on 44 percent of the changeups he throws to righties outside the zone, and the whiff rate on the pitch is just under 33%. The only (understandable) bad news is that he finds the zone with that pitch just 46 percent of the time.

Tayler Scott
In what has been an up-and-down season in Houston, Scott has been a much-needed bullpen stabilizer. He's primarily a sweeper artist, eating right-handed batters up with the breaking ball that runs far away from them. He sets that pitch up with two different fastball looks, though, and when hitters sit on those primary offerings, he drops a vertically-oriented changeup in under their reaching hands.

Yes, then, there are a few pitchers who have a cut-change, so Hendricks isn't totally alone in having one... but in a very real sense, he's alone. Not even the small group of other pitchers who have a pitch that technically fits into the same category do things the same way Hendricks does. His balloon-ball changeup, floating away from a righty against a sinker that seems to veer down and toward them at the last moment, is a whole different thing than the league's other cut-changeups.

There's one more person we might compare him to, though: his past self. Over time, Hendricks's vertical movement on the sinker against righties has gotten heavier, as he tries to tilt the pitch for more horizontal wiggle. 

As he's undergone that change and accentuated his cut-change, though, he's just now found a major cut-change interaction between the heater and the cambio over the last two years. Obviously, it was a wildly successful adjustment in 2023, but so far in 2024, the results have been ugly. It might be that hitters have adjusted and compensated for this innovation, and that to stay viable in the big leagues, he has to find the next one.

Maybe his ramped-up curveball usage is that very innovation. Maybe there's still a trick or two in his bag. Even if he doesn't figure it out from here, though, and if The Professor's tenure is winding down, it's fun to note that he truly has been unique--not only in what he does, but in how he adjusts and alters what he does when the feedback from his opponents demands it.

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