K

by Tyler Kepner

  “I tell the guys, ‘The changeup is a power pitch,’ and they just look at me,” McGregor says. “I go, ‘You challenge them, balls-out throwing it, and you’d be surprised. You give it that effort and they go to hit it and it’s not there? They got no chance.’ ”

  * * *

  ————

  Frank Viola did not face McGregor that final day at the Metrodome, but it was his home park, and he was at the top of his profession. Viola had just won the World Series MVP award for the Twins, beating the Cardinals in the first and seventh games the previous fall. He was on his way to winning the American League Cy Young Award, the first by a left-handed Minnesota changeup maestro, with two more to follow in the 2000s by Johan Santana.

  The Twins had drafted Viola in the second round in 1981, just after his famous duel with Ron Darling in an NCAA tournament game at Yale Field. Darling fired 11 no-hit innings for Yale until allowing a bloop single in the twelfth. Viola twirled 11 shutout innings for St. John’s to beat him, 1–0.

  Viola did not throw a changeup then—“He didn’t need it,” Darling says—just a moving fastball, a curve, and an occasional slider. But the mix was enough to earn Viola an invitation to spring training in 1982. The Twins were terrible, and Viola had more polish than most of their pitchers. By June he was in the majors—nominally, anyway.

  That season Viola had a 5.21 ERA. In 1983 he led the majors in earned runs allowed. He needed a put-away pitch, and before the next season Podres introduced the changeup. After those first few tentative tries, they spent more than a year playing with grips. Viola needed to believe in the pitch before he could find the nerve to use it. But because his results were improving, even without it, there seemed to be no urgency.

  Then midway through the 1985 season, the Twins hired Ray Miller, the former Baltimore pitching coach, as their manager. By early September Podres was gone, grumbling that Miller did not like him because Podres knew more about pitching than he did.

  Podres knew enough to deliver one vital message to Viola as he left the clubhouse: “Don’t you ever give up on that changeup!” Viola did as instructed, and could not believe what he’d been missing. Sometimes he would call home and ask his father, in wonder, “How did I ever get here without this?”

  Viola tried to throw his changeup 10 to 15 miles per hour slower than his fastball. He rested his middle and ring fingers on top of the ball and applied pressure with his pinkie, below the left seam. He formed the OK symbol—the “circle” in “circle change”—with his index finger and thumb while hooking the right seam. To take still more speed off the pitch, he would tuck it further back in his palm. To Viola, the changeup allowed him to dominate, even if hitters felt differently.

  “You wouldn’t believe the feedback you’d get from hitters during a game,” he says. “You might strike a guy out on a changeup and they’re yelling at you from the dugout: ‘Throw it like a man!’ ”

  Viola could laugh off the taunting by pointing to his record. In his first seven seasons throwing the changeup, only one pitcher in the majors, Roger Clemens, won more games.

  The changeup was so good that Viola could give it away and still win. When the Twins traded Viola to the Mets in 1989—several years before interleague play—Toronto pitcher Todd Stottlemyre gave some friendly advice to his father, Mel, the Mets’ pitching coach. The Blue Jays’ hitters, Todd reported, had noticed that Viola would lift his right index finger off his glove when he dug inside to grip his changeup. Yet even with this intelligence, the Blue Jays had lost twice to Viola that season.

  Viola would make two All-Star teams for the Mets and retire in 1996. Fifteen years later, he embarked on a second career as a coach in their organization, building off lessons from Podres. One of his prospects at Triple-A in 2014 was Noah Syndergaard, a hulking right-hander with a monster fastball but little trust in his secondary pitches.

  Viola told Syndergaard about a game he pitched for the Twins. Podres instructed the catcher not to move all day. Throw whatever he calls, Podres told Viola, and watch what happens. Viola listened, succeeded deep into the game, and came off the mound to see Podres smiling.

  “Son, what’d you learn?” Podres asked him.

  “I guess my stuff’s pretty good.”

  “You’ve got to learn to trust it,” Podres replied.

  Syndergaard absorbed the lessons and made it through his first full season at the highest minor league level. The next spring he was in the majors, and Viola spoke with pride about his progress.

  “Look at him now,” he said. “It’s nothing different. It’s just confidence in knowing that he cannot be afraid to throw a 2–1 changeup if the catcher’s calling it. If the catcher’s got enough confidence in Noah to put it down, Noah’s gotta say, ‘Hey, if he’s got confidence, I’ve gotta have confidence, too.’ And that’s what makes you the pitcher you’re going to become.”

  Syndergaard would use more and more changeups as the season went on. His final victory of a standout rookie year came in the World Series.

  * * *

  ————

  Before he was known mostly as the older brother of a Hall of Famer, Ramon Martinez was a star for the Dodgers. He signed with them in 1984, at age 16, and soon developed a changeup. His long fingers made the pitch feel natural, and Martinez went on to win 135 games and toss 20 shutouts—three more than Pedro.

  Martinez learned his changeup from Johnny Podres, recognizing it instantly. It was the primary weapon of his hero in the Dominican Republic.

  “Mario Soto, he was my idol growing up, the guy that I watched, but I never got in touch with him,” Ramon Martinez says. “It wasn’t like I could see him and ask him, ‘How do you throw the changeup?’ Now it’s easier; we can go and talk to the kids and teach them how to throw the changeup or breaking pitch. But at that time, to meet Mario Soto, it would be tougher.”

  Juan Marichal was the first Hall of Famer from the Dominican Republic. He was Soto’s idol and the most prominent Dominican pitcher until Pedro Martinez. In between were World Series stars like Joaquin Andujar and Jose Rijo. Soto never got there, joining the Reds just after their titles in the 1970s. But his changeup endures.

  “The best changeup I’ve ever seen in baseball, the best—and he threw 95, too—was Mario Soto,” says Mike Brito, the famed scout in the white Panama hat who operated the radar gun behind home plate at Dodger Stadium for decades. “When he was on top of his pitches, nobody could hit him.”

  Soto was 23 years old and pitching irregularly out of the Reds’ bullpen in 1979. That September, he was called into a one-run game in the fifth inning with the Braves’ Dale Murphy at the plate.

  “It was a 3–2 count and Johnny Bench keeps calling fastball, fastball, fastball, and then slider,” Soto says. “I said, ‘No,’ and he got mad at me. He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to throw a changeup.’ He said, ‘Changeup, you’re crazy!’ But I threw that then, and that ball just dropped straight down. It dropped so much and I struck him out. From there on I say: ‘No more sliders.’ ”

  Soto had learned the changeup from Scott Breeden, a Reds minor league coach. At his best, he could sink it to the right, cut it to the left, or make it drop. He honed the pitch meticulously at spring training in Tampa, reporting to the Reds’ complex around 6 a.m. and dropping changeups into a target he had drawn on the back of the concrete center field wall.

  Tom Seaver, the ace of the staff, noticed Soto’s diligence and became his teacher. Seaver threw his changeup along the seams, somewhat like his sinker, while Soto threw his across the seams and applied pressure with his knuckles. Soto kept his own grip but embraced the finer points Seaver imparted.

  “Do you try to throw strikes with every pitch?” Seaver once asked.

  “Yeah,” Soto said, to Seaver’s dismay. “Why not?”

  “Because you have pretty good control. You wan
t to take advantage of that.”

  No one had ever explained to Soto the value in pairing stuff with command. Before that, he said, he had simply tried to throw a strike with every pitch; that is the definition of control. Yet simply finding the zone, he learned, was not the point. Putting your pitches where you wanted them to go—in or out of the strike zone, tricking hitters into swinging at stuff they could not handle—was the definition of command. That was an art.

  * * *

  ————

  That same realization hit Pedro Martinez at his first All-Star Game, with the Expos in 1996. On the bench in the right field bullpen in Philadelphia, he marveled at the warm-up of Tom Glavine, the Atlanta left-hander squarely in his prime as a master of the off-speed pitch. From close range, Martinez noticed Glavine directing his changeups and curves to precise locations, in and away. Martinez threw those same pitches, but never like that. The license to locate, as shown by a peer, was a revelation.

  “To me, that was so important, because I normally would rely on the difference in speeds between the fastball and the changeup,” Martinez says. “I was never worried about spotting the changeup or spotting the breaking ball. A lot of people tell me, ‘Oh Pedro, you were so gifted.’ I say, ‘No, I was just a patch of a lot of players. I wasn’t born with all this.’ ”

  The next season, Martinez began one of the most remarkable stretches a pitcher has ever had. In a time of extreme slugging, Martinez led the majors in earned run average five times in seven years. His ERA from 1997 to 2003 was 2.20. The major league ERA for those seasons was 4.48. In simple terms, Martinez was twice as good as the average major league pitcher.

  Curt Schilling was his teammate on the curse-breaking 2004 Red Sox, the second time Schilling rode shotgun to a World Series title with a winner of multiple Cy Youngs. In Arizona, he had seen Randy Johnson dominate with brute force: hard fastballs, hard sliders, endless ferocity. Martinez, Schilling said, was all feel. He was an intimidator, for sure, but succeeded by adjusting to what he saw and outwitting the hitter.

  Extraordinary vision sharpened those powers of observation, and Martinez’s body—deemed by the Dodgers to be too small for a starter—helped him execute his plans. Being shorter than Ramon gave him better balance, and while he was not quite double-jointed (“Almost,” he says), Martinez could bend his fingers over the back of his hand for maximum flexibility.

  “His hands were just ridiculously long,” Schilling says. “That’s one of the reasons why he had such a good changeup. Bigger fingers allow you more control over the baseball. It’s the same as basketball, right? If you have big hands in basketball it’s an enormous advantage. Now think about a ball one-tenth that size, how much more of an advantage you have with bigger hands. I think, to some guys, throwing a baseball is like throwing a golf ball, or a tennis ball.

  “That’s one of the things I implore people when they’re drafting pitchers: look at their hands. Because a guy with small hands is what he is, and maybe he might have velocity, but his stuff is not gonna change that much. Whereas a guy with big hands, you could teach him anything you want.”

  You could, but it still might take a while to find something that works. Ramon Martinez’s fingers were even longer than Pedro’s, and he threw his changeup with his index, middle, and ring fingers on top of the ball. Pedro tried the same grip after signing with the Dodgers, with mediocre results.

  He was 18 years old at extended spring training in 1990 when Guy Conti taught him the circle change he had learned from Podres. With his index finger hugging the left side of the ball and the fingertip tucked beside his thumb, Martinez wrapped his third and fourth fingers across the four seams. The pitch felt unnatural at first, but within two weeks it was behaving as Conti wanted. It would look like a strike to a lefty before slashing down and away, out of the zone. And it would look like a ball to a righty, who would give up on it, only to see the pitch veer back in to clip the outside corner.

  Conti was entranced by Martinez from the first time he saw him in the Dominican Republic, in a group of other young and unfamiliar pitchers. Conti knew the Dodgers had signed Ramon Martinez’s brother, but saw nobody with Ramon’s 6-foot-4 build. He found Pedro, who is five inches shorter, by the sound of his fastball, the way his fingers snapped off the seams as he let it go. He figured the kid must be special.

  Soon they formed a lifelong bond. Martinez calls Conti his white daddy. Conti calls Martinez a borderline genius. That intellect showed up in Martinez’s understanding of the changeup and the subtleties of using his fingers to locate it.

  “By taking that index finger off the ball, you take 50 percent of your velocity off,” Conti explains. “Now, throw as hard as you can. You’re only gonna throw it with 50 percent of your velocity. That middle finger is gonna be the only thing that really propels the ball.

  “So what we did—which he could do, because his fingers were long like Ramon’s—was we moved the ball even further. He was throwing that changeup with the inside of the middle finger and the fourth finger. Most pitchers couldn’t get such a grip on it, but he could do that, and he could jerk that ball in there. It was really a funky grip, but he got it.”

  Pedro Martinez—like virtually every pitcher—emphasizes that a well-located fastball is the most important pitch in baseball. His changeup was used to accentuate the fastball, and it was only good because his fastball was good. Yet even after his sterling 1999 regular season, when he was 23–4 with a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts, Martinez evolved.

  He had strained a lat muscle against Cleveland in the first game of the playoffs that October. When the decisive fifth game began in a blizzard of offense at Jacobs Field—it was 8–8 in the middle of the fourth—Martinez arrived from the bullpen to spin six no-hit innings. His performance gave the Red Sox their first postseason series victory since 1986, and he did it without throwing a fastball. The Indians feared it, but it never came. Martinez unplugged a thunderous lineup with finesse.

  “That’s where I used everything I learned from Maddux, from Glavine, from my brother, from Roger Clemens, from Nolan Ryan, all the people I used to see pitch, that’s when I came out to display everything,” Martinez says. “Because up to that point, I was a power pitcher. I was someone that would rely on 80 percent fastballs and blow it by you. And that day I didn’t have it, so I had to run to different sources. I had to run to the changeup, I had to run to the little cutter, I had to run to the curveball, I had to rely on location, and that’s when everything came together. For me, pitching at 87 and pitching at 97 was pretty much the same, except that I knew how to do it on either side—power or just, you know, outsmarting you.”

  The 2000 season would be even better: a third Cy Young Award, a 1.74 ERA, and a WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched) of 0.737, the best in baseball history for a pitcher who qualified for the ERA title. It also included the game of which Martinez is most proud.

  It was August 24, 2000, late in a stretch of 20 games in a row for the Red Sox without a break, in the heat of a pennant race with the Yankees. Boston’s bullpen was exhausted and the team was beginning a road trip in Kansas City against the lowly Royals. For the only time he could remember, Martinez says, he was asked before a game to pitch at least eight innings.

  Then he gave up five runs in the first.

  Single, single, pop out. Single, single, double. Strikeout, double, ground out. The next inning, he gave up a homer. There was no way to explain it, Martinez says, and no advance warning of such a beating. But he persevered because his team needed him and he somehow got the game to the ninth, helping the Red Sox win. “That was as satisfying to me as probably winning a game in the World Series,” Martinez says.

  He would do that, finally, four years later in St. Louis. Martinez fired seven shutout innings in Game 3, bringing his team to the precipice of the title. He never pitched again for the Red Sox, but wears their cap in bronze on his plaque
in Cooperstown.

  Two plaques in the Hall credit pitchers specifically for their success with the “change of pace”—Tim Keefe, a 342-game winner in the 1800s, and Joe Williams, a Negro Leagues star from 1910 to 1932. But Martinez’s was the first to include “change-up” in the text, and likely not the last. Someday, perhaps, there will be those inspired by Martinez, like Felix Hernandez, who had been in the majors four seasons before deciding to teach himself a changeup. Hernandez was already a star, but said Martinez and Freddy Garcia had shown what an effective weapon the pitch could be.

  “I tried to throw it because I wanted to take it to the next level,” Hernandez says. “I wanted to be the best I can be.”

  Hernandez holds the pitch like a two-seam fastball, with an extra finger (the middle one) on the white part of the ball between the narrow seams. Some hitters consider it a splitter or a sinker, because it dives down—and sometimes in—to a righty and tends to be only three or four miles an hour slower than his fastball.

  “He doesn’t throw strikes,” says Evan Longoria, “but his stuff is so good that he gets guys to swing, just because you think it’s a strike.”

  Longoria batted cleanup for the Rays on August 15, 2012, when Hernandez threw a perfect game at Safeco Field, finishing by freezing Sean Rodriguez on a sinking changeup—at 92!—for the final out. Hernandez had fallen behind 2–0, and then pulled even with sliders.

  “I said, ‘All right, now he’s definitely coming back heater,’ ” Rodriguez says. “Nope. Off-speed. Tip your cap.”

  Martinez threw nine perfect innings once, in 1995, but the game was still scoreless and he gave up a double to lead off the tenth. He never threw an official no-hitter, but his two hitless innings to start the 1999 All-Star Game, in which he struck out five of six hitters at Fenway Park, was a touchstone moment for his fans back home.