The Secret Ingredient That Gives Pablo López's New Change Its Kick: A New Position, and a New Angle

Say what he will about meditation, the nature of pressure in athletic endeavors, and being a self-possessed, well-rounded person, Pablo López is not immune to FOMO. When he came to the Twins in the offseason before the 2023 season, he and the team acted quickly to suit him up with the newest trend in pitching: a sweeper. It became, perhaps, the most important driver of his stellar first season in Minnesota, and it kept him hip to the trends of his craft.

Last year, the vogue pitch of the year was the splitter, and López was left out. The Twins aren't entirely averse to throwing the splitter, but it's not the way they prefer their pitchers to achieve the desirable effects of a good changeup. López already had a strong changeup. In fact, it was his best and most talked-about pitch, before he was traded from the Marlins to the Twins. Even if he wanted to throw the splitter last year, it would have been like when you wore down your parents and got that PS2, and then the XBox came out shortly afterward. You're not selling them on that one, at least until Christmas.

Happily, though, Christmas has come for the venerable Venezuelan, because this year's hot new pitch is a changeup even a nervous mother can love. The kick-change could turn out to be carcinogenic or something, but there's no evidence of that right now and it seems wildly unlikely. All your parents or López's pitching coach has to know is that it doesn't create that ominous tension in the tendons of your elbow that comes with shoving the ball deep into the 'V' of your first two fingers to throw the splitter. (Have you ever tried this? Go grab a ball, and grip it for a splitter, and just fe—oh, ok, you've heard it. Well, anyway.)

The wild and fun choice López has made, though, is to add this new variant of the changeup—because of the way it kills spin without diminishing speed, it plays much like a splitter and is thus tagged by most pitch classification systems—without scrapping his old reliable one. The league is seeing a greater proliferation all the time of guys with multiple fastballs and multiple breaking balls, and now, López joins a small but growing fraternity of hurlers with multiple changeups.

You know what they say, though. Change (not just changeups, but big-C Change, like the kind effected on a pitcher's whole approach and arsenal by the addition of a second changeup, am I saying 'change' too much?) can't be achieved while standing still. So, López is literally on the move.

Don't adjust your screen. Yes, there are two of Pablo López there. The main López—the one native to the rest of the frame we're looking at, which is from a game at Sox Park in Chicago last August—is the guy on the left, just releasing a fastball to then-Sox batter Gavin Sheets. López′ is the one who, because I'm not as good at Canva as Jim O'Heir, looks very definitely like he's been artificially dropped in. Here's the key, though: Whatever aspects of the superimposition I did clumsily, the part I got right is alignment. López′ is about eight inches farther toward third base (away from the first-base edge of the pitching rubber, where he's lived of late) than he was last year.

Why does that matter? Read on.