Changeups are supposed to be low-spin pitches. They fade, they tumble, they disappear because the spin gets taken off the ball. Logan Henderson didn’t get that memo.
The Brewers’ rookie right-hander has turned his changeup into one of the strangest pitches in baseball, and the numbers are loud. Henderson carries a 2.60 ERA into Friday’s series opener against the Rangers, and his changeup has the highest spin rate of any starting pitcher in the Statcast era, which dates back to 2015. Among current starters, he’s 200 rpm ahead of the next closest arm this season and 800 rpm above the league average starter.
SP with highest-spin changeups, Statcast era
- Logan Henderson: 2,556 rpm
- Ryan Pepiot: 2,476 rpm
3, Jackson Kowar: 2,421 rpm
- Danny Duffy: 2,379 rpm
- Domingo Germán: 2,371 rpm
MLB avg. SP: 1,755 rpm
That pitch has been a headache for hitters. Opponents are batting just .195 against it, it’s producing a 38% swing-and-miss rate, and it’s collecting a strikeout in one out of every three plate appearances.
"It gets results," Henderson said with a laugh. "It's unique, and there's not a ton of pitches like that in the league. And I think the fact that it's unique, and not a lot of guys have it, makes it a good pitch."
Milwaukee has seen this kind of thing before. Devin Williams’ airbender spun like crazy and moved like a screwball.
Craig Yoho had one, Trevor Richards flashed one when he briefly came over in a 2021 trade, and Chase Anderson had his own version back in the day. Henderson fits right into that lineage, but with his own twist.
His changeup isn’t built on dead spin. It actually spins more than his fastball.
Henderson’s four-seamer sits at 2,340 rpm, while the changeup checks in at 2,556 rpm. For context, the average starter’s four-seamer spins at 2,312 rpm, while the average changeup is down at 1,727 rpm.
That spin shows up in the movement. Henderson’s heater gets 17.2 inches of rising movement and 11.5 inches of arm-side run.
The changeup, meanwhile, generates more than 19 inches of horizontal break. Only Williams’ airbender is better on the horizontal-movement leaderboard.
What makes Henderson’s version even stranger is that the pitch is all sweep and no sink. It barely drops at all, moving almost entirely sideways, like a two-seamer that comes in 10 mph slower than his fastball.
"Out of the hand, maybe because it doesn't have as much depth. It tracks as a heater longer than it would [if it had more drop]," Henderson said.
"That's all pitching is, is just selling every pitch to be the same until you can make it break the last five feet before it crosses the plate. I've never stepped in the box against myself, but if I had to guess: It tracks as a heater for a long time.
And because it has so much movement, it's hard to screw it up."
The early results back that up. Statcast’s new swing timing metrics show hitters are swinging too early against Henderson’s changeup 72% of the time, the highest rate among right-handers and second-highest among all changeup pitchers, behind only Cubs lefty Matthew Boyd.
That kind of miss usually means one thing: hitters are reading fastball.
Henderson’s changeup also plays especially well against left-handed hitters because of the way it sweeps away from them. And this season, he’s seen plenty of them.
More than two-thirds of the batters he has faced have been left-handed, the highest rate among pitchers with at least 100 hitters faced. Whether that’s because of today’s left-handed-heavy lineups, opposing teams stacking lefties to gain an edge, or just the way the matchups have fallen, it’s been a strong setup for his best pitch.
The Brewers didn’t invent the pitch for him. They recognized it and pushed him to keep leaning on it.
"I'm just naturally able to spin the ball that way," Henderson said. "I remember, in high school, throwing on backfields with some of my buddies, and throwing it from a couple hundred feet, and that's just the way it came out of my hand with the movement I was trying to create. And I think it complements my arsenal really well."
That’s the Brewers’ lane, too: not just teaching pitchers new tricks, but finding the weird stuff already in the tank and making it work. Henderson had this changeup before the analytics ever came along. Milwaukee just made sure he kept using it.
"I've had this pitch before I even knew any of the metrics or anything," Henderson said. "Since I've been in the system, they've preached that, 'OK, this is a really good pitch.
You should throw it a lot.' It was never something I chased analytically.
It was just something that I happened to have."
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