Whether it's defensive shifts, locking up key players like Longoria to long-term deals before they get to arbitration, conditioning pitchers and here with innovative and unique pitching strategies, the Rays have been a franchise noted for their ability to effectively cut against the grain. They seem to do it not just for the sake of doing it, or out of blind necessity, but simply because it works.
In my opinion, this was part of the culture that flourished under Joe Maddon, and he gets a large part of the credit. Hopefully, it is not lost with Maddons move to the Cubs.
Baseball Prospectus | Overthinking It: The Rays' Changeup Revolution
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Baseball Prospectus | Overthinking It: The Rays' Changeu...
There are certain rules about changeup usage. The Rays, unsurprisingly, aren't beholden to those rules.
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The Rays' Changeup Revolution
“The game evolves constantly,” Tampa Bay Rays pitching coach Jim Hickey tells me on a Saturday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, after wrapping up a bullpen session an hour before first pitch. Evolution in baseball works a lot like it does in real life: traits that confer a competitive advantage tend to be passed on. But before a new approach is adopted around the league, Hickey says, “someone’s going to have to be successful doing it.”The Rays are often that someone. If the Rays have an identity—aside from their status as a team that doesn’t draw, locked into a lease that never expires—it’s that they do things differently. Driven by their need to make the most of their limited resources and the creativity of their front office and field staff, the Rays under General Manager Andrew Friedman and manager Joe Maddon have authored a long list of innovations. Shifting more aggressively than almost any other team. Giving defensive specialist Jose Molina a starting job for the first time at age 37. Opening an academy in Brazil. Refusing to sign free agent starters (before Roberto Hernandez). And so on.One minor innovation Maddon has made hasn’t received much mainstream attention: the manager’s tendency to stack his lineup with same-handed hitters against certain starters, intentionally surrendering the platoon advantage that most teams seek. Dubbed the “The Danks Theory” by Tommy Rancel of DRaysBay, who picked up on it after it was employed against White Sox starter John Danks in 2010, Maddon’s unorthodox tactic is an attempt to deprive opposing pitchers of their nastiest stuff. He’s broken it out against pitchers who throw one of their best offerings almost exclusively to batters who don’t hit from the same side, among them Danks, Mike Mussina, Dallas Braden, Shaun Marcum, Jered Weaver, and Jon Lester. Combat selected righties with righties and selected lefties with lefties, Maddon’s thinking goes, and what you lose in platoon advantage, you more than make up for by eliminating one or more of a pitcher’s most effective options from his arsenal.More often than not, the Danks Theory is put to the test against starters with good changeups. There’s a reason for that. Traditionally, changeups have been thrown much more often to opposite-handed hitters. “I can remember myself as a minor league pitcher, that was unheard of,” says Hickey, who spent seven seasons in the White Sox, Dodgers, and Astros systems in the 1980s. “You didn’t throw a changeup as a right-handed pitcher to a right-handed hitter.”The pitchers whom the Rays have deemed susceptible to the Danks Theory still pitch like Hickey did three decades ago; the left-handed Lester, for example, has thrown 93.8 percent of his changeups to right-handed batters this season. But if other teams were to try the Danks Theory, they’d have a hard time turning it against its creators. Most of Tampa’s changeup artists don’t pitch like Lester. Instead, they’re making what Hickey says was once a “taboo kind of pitch”—the right-on-right or left-on-left changeup—into a conventional weapon.***Speaking at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last March, Bill James said, “A lot of baseball’s conventional wisdom starts to sound silly when you become 13.” That may be true of many conventional baseball beliefs: closer usage, lineup construction, sacrifice bunts and the intentional base on balls. But while baseball’s loose ban on same-sided changeups is certainly conventional, it’s not entirely unwise. The theory behind it has some stats to support it.As Dave Allen noted in a 2010 study on pitch-type platoon splits, if a pitcher releases his changeup with roughly the same initial trajectory as his fastball and aims it around the middle of the zone, “the pitch will end up down and away to the opposite-handed batter and down and in to the same-handed batter. All else being equal a down-and-away pitch is much better than a down-and-in pitch.”Matt Moore, one of the relatively few Rays who throws almost all of his changeups to opposite-handed hitters, concurs. “When you think of lefties, they like to drop the head, it’s more of a sweepy swing,” says the southpaw starter. “The bottom of the zone, for lefties, it’s such a sweet spot. For me, typically where [the changeup] is going to go is down and in to a lefty, down and away to a righty.” Rays catcher Jose Lobaton, who likes the pitch, says, “The only problem people say with the changeup is that righties against righties, if you hang it, they’re going to hit it pretty good. With some lefties…when they hang it they can hit a popup, righties can hit it better. They say the ball moves inside to them.” If you make a mistake, changeups to same-sided hitters can be bad news.***According to Max Marchi’s research, the so-called “straight change” shows a reverse platoon effect: it’s more effective against batters who hit from the opposite side. But what Max called the “power change”—a harder one “with significant lateral movement,” or “movement similar to the fastball”—is platoon neutral: it works well against both righties and lefties.Despite Max’s study (and others with similar conclusions), there hasn’t been any league-wide movement toward throwing same-sided changeups, at least since the start of the PITCHf/x era.
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