Strictly speaking, many of baseball's starting pitchers have more pitches in their arsenals than they need. I’m not complaining! Take Shota Imanaga, the delightful 31-year-old rookie southpaw for the Chicago Cubs: Statcast says Imanaga has used eight distinct pitch types this season, including a four-seam fastball that he’s thrown a whopping 53 percent of the time, and a slow curve that he’s thrown exactly once. His pitch profile is a hoot: Overwhelmingly Imanaga relies on a combination of the four-seamer and a deadly splitter, effective against righties and lefties, but then there are six whole other damn pitches-two more than Luis Castillo has in his entire repertoire-that Imanaga throws just here and there, evidently whenever he is feeling zany. This is how you know starting pitchers are artists, or mad scientists, or both.
Paul Skenes, flame-throwing phenom and rookie ace of the Pittsburgh Pirates, has a changeup. I’m not totally sure I knew that. Skenes has thrown over 700 fastballs this season, but entering Tuesday’s start against the Chicago Cubs he’d thrown the changeup just 60 times. Like Imanaga, Skenes has a combination of go-to pitches that, when it’s working, tends to be overwhelming. His fastball is, of course, terrifying, and the dreaded splinker, an average of five miles per hour slower than the heater, is a diving, sliding, vanishing nightmare against which MLB hitters are slugging just .248. A changeup is a more complicated offering, something a lot of pitchers have to feel around for early in a start; Skenes can just rear back and hurl the splinker, and for good measure he’s got his choice of three effective breaking pitches.
The changeup is in Skenes's toolkit what a hand-cranked sausage maker has turned out, regrettably, to be in mine: A fun but clunky thing to play with, which might not be used more than a handful of times between now and 2050.
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