Carlos Rodón's changeup is an exciting development

18/04/2024 14:30

The 31-year-old southpaw is on the road back to form and the changeup will aid that process.

Now that Carlos Rodón's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad debut season in pinstripes is in the rearview mirror, player, team and fans can have renewed optimism that the two-time All-Star can get back to his best. He showed up to camp early and in fitter condition, and so far he looks like a more athletic and mobile pitcher on the mound. However, we all know that is not enough from the Yankees' big money free agent signing of two years ago. The 31-year-old southpaw needs to show the form from Chicago and San Francisco if the Yankees are to achieve their goals in 2024.

Through his first four starts, I think we can say that we have seen improvement from Rodón while still acknowledging he has a ways to go to fulfill both expectations and his potential. Rodón sports a 3.66 ERA (112 ERA+) and 4.42 FIP in 19.2 innings. The good: Rodón has slashed his home run per nine rate by more than half relative to last season. The bad: his 12.2-percent walk rate is second-highest among qualified starting pitchers. The biggest concern to me is that he is struggling to put away hitters in two-strike counts. In his two All-Star campaigns of 2021 and 2022, 24.5 percent of Rodón's pitches in two-strike counts resulted in a strikeout. That mark shrunk to 18.7 percent in 2023 and stands at just 15.4-percent through four starts this year.

This is almost all down to the four-seamer not putting hitters away, the pitch falling from a 28.7-percent whiff rate between 2021-2022 to just 20.6-percent as a Yankee. We've covered how Rodón has added a cutter to try to mitigate his struggles and it appears he has a healthy amount of confidence in the new pitch, already throwing it 15.1-percent of the time. However, the pitch is not exactly a whiff generator and is more used to induce soft contact. If Rodón is to recover his league-leading strikeout abilities of two and three years ago, we need to find him another weapon.

It appears we may not have to search far, the lefty making a concerted effort to mix in the changeup his last two outings. It's interesting this is the pitch he chose to add — he almost never threw it in his career-best campaign of 2022. However, teammate Alex Verdugo provided an insight into why the changeup could be a particularly effective weapon for Rodón when speaking to Chris Kirschner of The Athletic:

"I think the biggest thing is he's adding some stuff. He's adding the cutter, he's adding the changeup, and he's throwing it with more confidence. I think the biggest thing is usually he's a fastball-slider guy, so some guys can kind of take their chance and open up a little bit more because for righties, everything is coming into them, and lefties, everything's going away. So just to add that changeup against righties, it humbles and balances it out a little bit. You can't have guys cheating. It forces them to be a lot more accurate with a barrel. He's been lights out."

I've spoken before on the site about how important it is to create separation between the movement profiles of the pitches in one's arsenal. By adding a changeup that moves away from righties, hitters have to cover a much large hitting zone for a given release slot. His previous two starts provide the beginnings of a roadmap of how Rodón intends to utilize the pitch. He has thrown 20, all to right-handers, with the pitch commanded almost exclusively arm-side and off the plate, thrown usually when level or ahead in the count.

During his start against the Marlins, Rodón flashed the deadly potential this pitch could have. Check out this sequence of back-to-back pitches to Jake Burger in the fourth inning, first a center-cut heater he fouled back followed by a nasty changeup that he whiffed over the top:

It's evident that Rodón already has a pretty good feel for how to play the four-seamer and changeup off each other. He's able to replicate the release slot for both pitches, allowing them to tunnel effectively toward the plate, the changeup dropping below the plane of the four-seamer only at the last moment. In this manner, the changeup can be a dual threat to righties, both as a swing-and-miss weapon as we saw Burger whiff in the clip or to induce weak contact against hitters cheating to pull the fastball.

Indeed, the pitch is already showing some of those encouraging results, with the caveat that a sample size of 20 pitches is not enough to draw definitive conclusions about performance (though we can still glean info about process). Through the early going, the changeup is inducing a 33.3-percent whiff rate and results in a strikeout a quarter of the time it is thrown in two-strike counts. Batters are managing a paltry .180 wOBA against thanks to an 83.3-mph average exit velocity and -3 degree launch angle when putting the changeup in play.

It's important to reemphasize that it is still early, both for evaluating the changeup as well as how Rodón looks overall. The number-one focus should still be executing his bread-and-butter pitches — the four-seamer and slider — in two-strike counts, not wasting so many uncompetitive fastballs above the zone and sliders in the dirt. He took a small step backwards in his last start against the Blue Jays, but I still came away feeling encouraged. In a few of the long plate appearances he faced, he relied perhaps a little too heavily on the heater and hitters were able to keep fouling them off as Rodón became more and more predictable, the PA often resulting in a walk or base knock.

As Rodón's confidence grows with the changeup, I think we could see a fair few of those instances turn into strikeouts or at the very least shorter battles that end in his favor.