As pitchers, Josh Tomlin and Grayson Rodriguez have almost nothing in common.
Tomlin was drafted in the 19th round and spent his 12-year major league career outsmarting hitters while throwing 88 mph. Rodriguez, meanwhile, was selected in the first round and rose to become one of the sport’s top pitching prospects by overpowering hitters with a high-90s mph fastball.
But when Rodriguez was told by the Orioles to learn a changeup after the 2018 season — his first in the organization — he had Tomlin to turn to. The two right-handers from East Texas both spend their offseasons training at the same facility, and that winter became the genesis for a changeup that, when it’s working, might be Rodriguez’s best pitch.
“No doubt,” Tomlin said about whether Rodriguez’s changeup, with more consistency, could be his best pitch. “I’ve told Grayson this all the time: I can show you a heap of guys who throw 100 mph who get their brains beat all over the ballpark. It’s not necessarily velocity. The game has changed, and velocity is key. It’s great, and you can get away with a little bit more mistakes. But you can only get away with those mistakes for a certain amount of time in the big leagues. For him, that’s why he needed to learn that changeup.”
For the first time in his young big league career, Rodriguez last Sunday showcased what the elite changeup could do when he has the feel for it. After his rough first inning, he paired the nasty changeup with his hard fastball to strike out eight batters and get 12 swings and misses — most of which on his changeup, with some making established big league hitters look out of place.
“It’s absolutely disgusting,” Tomlin said.
It makes sense that Rodriguez, who starts his fourth game of the season Sunday against the Detroit Tigers, didn’t have a changeup when the Orioles selected him No. 11 overall in the 2018 draft. With a blazing fastball, it wouldn’t have made sense for Rodriguez to throw a changeup to high school hitters who couldn’t catch up to his heater.
After spending the first few months of his professional career in rookie ball, the Orioles told the 6-foot-5 right-hander to develop a changeup in the offseason. So he returned home and got to work with Tomlin, who Rodriguez called a “mentor,” at APEC, a training facility in Tyler, Texas, to “figure out the changeup.”
Tomlin, 15 years Rodriguez’s senior at 38 years old, said the focus that offseason was deciding what type of changeup and which grip would be best for Rodriguez. The goal was to find a “comfortable” grip to first make it a pitch that could get soft contact before later focusing on the swing-and-miss aspect.
“He was all about it,” said Tomlin about Rodriguez’s eagerness to learn the pitch. “He’s a very smart, intelligent kid. I’d never tell him that to his face. He’ll have to read this to see that.”
The goal for the first draft of Rodriguez’s changeup was to not slow down his elite arm speed. Rather than trying to finesse the pitch and locate it perfectly, the hope was to use the pitch’s spin to create movement — both down and with arm-side run.
“Guys with arm speed like Grayson, you don’t have to throw a traditional, conventional changeup,” said Tomlin, who last pitched in the majors in 2021 after nine years with the Cleveland Guardians and three with the Atlanta Braves. “The idea behind the pitch that we tried to create was to create action. The action is more important than the speed difference.”
Tomlin, now a special assistant for the Braves, said he’s honored that Rodriguez sees him as a “mentor,” but that the changeup the Orioles’ top pitching prospect is throwing now is one that Rodriguez developed himself.
In 2019 with Delmarva, Rodriguez went through a “trial-and-error” period with his pitch alongside then-Shorebirds pitching coach Justin Ramsey. The two worked with high-speed cameras and pitch data to hone the best grip and movement for it.
Ramsey, now the pitching coach for Triple-A Norfolk, said the changeup Rodriguez showed off last weekend is more similar to the one he saw him throw in the minors. In fact, Ramsey said he’s seen it be even better than what it looked like against the White Sox.
“When you talk about a guy who throws upper 90s, having a weapon like that really opens up everything for his disposal when it comes to the rest of his arsenal,” Ramsey said. “It neutralizes both the lefties and the righties, it helps everything else play up. When he’s got that going that way, you can tell why he’s the top pitching prospect in baseball.”
But the 23-year-old has struggled with his changeup’s consistency this year. Before it was devastating to hitters last weekend, it wasn’t getting the weak contact or the swings and misses it had when he dominated in Triple-A last season. Through two starts, a solid outing against the Texas Rangers and a rough one against the Oakland Athletics, Rodriguez got just three total whiffs on his changeup, instead relying on his hard fastball and sharp slider to get swings and misses.
“It just felt really flat. It didn’t have much depth,” said Rodriguez, who added that his start against Chicago was the first time he’s had his usual “confidence” in the pitch this year. “The speed was about the same, but I think with changeups what’s important is the depth that’s on it. That wasn’t there and the control hadn’t been there with it.”
To get that “depth” — the sharp downward drop combined with movement away from lefties and into righties — Rodriguez doesn’t simply rely on his circle-change grip. He pronates his hand and wrist — a motion similar to pouring a glass of water out in the sink — when he releases the pitch to increase the spin, making it move more sharply than if it had less spin. Pitchers naturally pronate when they release a pitch, but Rodriguez emphasizes it when throwing the changeup.
“It definitely has a good amount of pronation to get it to spin that way,” Rodriguez said. “I think when I throw my changeup, I’m trying to make it spin more. Some guys are trying to kill spin, I’m trying to do the opposite.”
That pronating action and the spin it creates is why, at its best, Rodriguez’s drop-off-the-table changeup can look like a screwball — a pitch that spins in the opposite direction of a traditional breaking ball that was popularized in the early 20th century but is rarely thrown anymore. That’s what some started comparing it to when Rodriguez pitched in the All-Star Futures Game in 2019 and debuted the pitch to a national audience.
“His ability to spin a baseball is pretty impressive,” Ramsey said. “It’s incredibly difficult for the hitters. We’re talking about the best in the world playing in the major leagues, and he’s getting swings and misses and frozen takes because they think [the pitch] is going to do something completely different because of his ability to spin the baseball.”
But it was in 2021 when he was pitching to catcher Adley Rutschman in Double-A Bowie when the pitch truly clicked for Rodriguez as he started throwing it more.
“It’s definitely a weapon,” Rutschman said.
He continued sharpening the offering in Triple-A last season with Ramsey, and he looked destined to show it off in the big leagues before a lat muscle injury kept him out for three months and delayed his debut until the beginning of 2023.
Despite the stuff, the start to Rodriguez’s career has been uneven. He’s already proved himself to be the best swing-and-miss starting pitcher on the Orioles’ staff with a 29.2% strikeout rate and 41 whiffs in three starts. But he’s also had one bad inning each time — a trend that began at the end of spring training that led to the organization’s decision to keep him off the major league roster to begin the season — and owns a 6.91 ERA and 1.605 WHIP.
But Tomlin believes Rodriguez will be just fine, especially if he continues pulling the string on his changeup the way he did last weekend.
“With his hard stuff — his cutter, his fastball — and that big breaking ball he has, that changeup is just going to mess up timing a lot,” Tomlin said. “I’ve told him multiple times about how good his changeup is.”
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