Davis Martin staggered a bit toward the end of his five innings of one-run ball Monday night, and the brevity of his outing backed by the umpteenth meager offensive performance predictably left the door open to the White Sox once more having the same number of wins as blown saves.
But after he yielded three-straight two-out singles, was nearing 30 pitches in the fifth, and had seen fellow Red Raider and close friend Jace Jung foul off five-straight two out pitches, Martin turned to something that has become arguably his most reliable and most-used weapon in a little less than three weeks since learning how to throw it -- a 91 mph hammer tilting toward his arm side as it dove below the zone.
It remains to be seen if Martin will continue to lean so heavily on his new kick changeup as the league grows familiar with it, since that clip represents his only swinging strike out of the 21 changeups he threw Monday night, easily its worst performance in the four games he's deployed it. It also remains to be seen if the misery of the 2024 White Sox is such that I keep up this pace of writing about Davis Martin every two weeks because he represents one of the few things around this franchise that seems like it's getting better in a way we can actually see.
What was immediately clear from the way Jonathan Cannon was grinning and nodding like Jack Nicholson at his locker when he first overheard Martin bringing it up in a postgame interview, is that its rapid development is fascinating to those who witnessed it.
"He started throwing it the day I was pitching," Cannon recalled of the Oakland series where Martin first learned the pitch a day before using it in a game. "I go out to catch play the next day and they're like, 'Davis got this new changeup, I think he's going to use it tomorrow.' I'm like, 'What's he throwing?' 'It's that new kick change,' and I'm like 'No way! That's cool.' And then to see him the first time out there throw it 40 percent of the time and just mow guys down, that's pretty cool that he picked it up on the fly like that and now it's his best pitch."
Cannon wound up giving a good plain language description of the kick change in this conversation, calling it a pitch with splitter action without the splitter grip. He explained that on a typical changeup, the middle finger is the last thing making contact with the ball upon release. For his seam-shifted changeup, part of an arsenal overhaul beginning this spring that would seem rapid by any other standard, Cannon's middle finger gets to the side of the baseball. But Martin's grip has him tuck his middle finger entirely, and its action is derived from the effect of its absence on the spin orientation.
But the degree to which the kick change specifically works for Martin's arm action became apparent when a collection of curious White Sox pitchers all tried it out for themselves.
"It doesn't really make any sense, but it's fun to watch," Cannon said. "The movement is very similar [to my changeup], we just throw it in completely different ways. I look at the way he uses it, but the way he describes how he throws it ... we all messed around with it and this doesn't work for me."
"We had every pitcher in Triple-A the next day trying to throw one," said Brian Bannister this weekend at Saberseminar.
As the reactions of Cannon and the Charlotte Knights pitching staff attest to, a breaking ball-heavy pitcher who could never pronate a changeup acquiring a game-ready alternative without so much as throwing it off a mound first is a marvel. But the crux of Bannister's presentation to an audience of statistical researchers at IIT was that this sort of rapid evolution is going to be a feature of modern pitching development where everyone is borrowing and building upon ideas from one another in real time, and why the league will have to take pretty drastic actions if they want to significantly increase the amount of on-field action and balls in play.
The kick change was actually developed at Tread Athletics, a North Carolina-based baseball training facility, where coincidentally Martin's close friend and minor league roommate Declan Cronin trained and worked at to earn a living during the COVID shutdown. Bannister and Ethan Katz's role was simply identifying that Martin's arm action was similar enough to Giants rookie Hayden Birdsong -- who himself had picked the kick change up secondhand -- that trying the grip was worth doing.
"It's more of a tricep-heavy, stabby arm action in the back, but then they both like to work outside of the ball," Bannister said of Birdsong and Martin's similarities. "My rule of thumb with motor preferences: Whatever happens out back is actually what happens through release. So if you stab [while drawing your arm back] you're more of an extender out front. That tends to be the profile that's worked with the kick change."
In a landscape where it's increasingly common for pitchers to train at private facilities in the offseason, or at very least all have the internet and can see what pitch design achievements are being made elsewhere, incorporating outside information is very necessary. Cronin for example, has yet to allow a home run this season with the Marlins thanks to a heavy sinker that only took hold in the minors when Tread suggested it to him and he presented their findings to the White Sox.
It's heavily a function of his role where he gets to rove around and suggest changes where he sees fit, rather than being bogged down in daily struggles, but Bannister's approach is that rapidly effective changes like Martin's changeup are crucial for distinguishing his voice from all the others in a modern pitcher's ear.
"My goal is to have a very high hit rate when I recommend something to a player," Bannister said. "Because that's my trust with the player. You recommend enough bad things to a player and they lose trust in you."
In a glimmer of hope for the ability of league hitters to keep up with the pace of pitching development, Martin's lackluster changeup performance on Monday night might have been the product of how quickly word has spread about it. He felt Tigers hitters were already sitting on the pitch, aware of his newfound feel for it.
"You’re seeing guys in counts I’ve been throwing them, some pitches over the center of the plate, like fastballs, and you’ll see some weird takes," Martin said. "And you start figuring out, 'OK, these guys are trying to sit on it.' But that’s pitching. They’re going to try to find your best pitch and eliminate it and right now I feel like my changeup is my best pitch. It’s moving it around, protecting it with other pitches, getting guys off the plate with four-seams and cutters in."
That's pitching, and also it's pitching in 2024.
"A couple of weeks ago it was, ‘Don’t throw your changeup.'" Martin said. "Now it’s 'Throw your changeup.' It’s definitely a funny turn of events."
