Seventeen years ago, the Miami Dolphins broke the NFL for an afternoon.
Miami entered Week 3 of the 2008 season at 0-2, one year removed from a 1-15 season, and traveled to Foxborough to face a Patriots team that hadn’t lost a regular-season game in 21 tries.
So naturally, they decided to stop playing normal football.
The Dolphins unveiled the Wildcat, putting running back Ronnie Brown behind center and sending Ricky Williams in motion. Six plays produced 118 yards and four touchdowns. Miami won 38-13.
And then everyone stole it.
The funny thing is that Miami hadn’t really invented anything. The single-wing concepts were ancient; the Dolphins simply found a different way to use something that already existed.
Because professional sports are ruthlessly unoriginal.
If somebody finds something that works, you copy it.
Which brings us, naturally, to Grant Holmes throwing changeups to right-handed hitters.
Tampa Bay came into Atlanta this week and took a series through speed and contact, but also showed me an interesting pitching trend they’re helping push forward: throwing changeups to same-handed hitters.
Grant Holmes doesn’t need to invent anything, either, as the pitch is already there.
If Holmes wants to go from “candidate for Atlanta’s October rotation” to the Braves’ clear No. 3 starter, he needs another weapon against right-handed hitters.
Tampa Bay may have just shown him where to find it.
Let’s talk about it.
The Rays are zigging while everyone else zags
Eno Sarris of The Athletic wrote Thursday about how the Rays have begun fixing Freddy Peralta. Most of those changes are mechanical: Scrapping the windup, extending his release point, and adjusting his arm angle up a few degrees.
But the most interesting adjustment isn’t mechanical. Tampa Bay has asked Peralta to throw his changeup more frequently, including to right-handed hitters.
That’s unusual.
The changeup is traditionally treated as a platoon pitch. Its arm-side movement takes a right-hander’s changeup away from a left-handed hitter, and vice versa for a lefty. Against a same-handed hitter, that movement can run the pitch back into the barrel.
But the reason that Peralta’s changeup works with this usage pattern is that it doesn’t behave like a traditional one. Since the trade, as Sarris writes, its usage has increased by more than 10%. Peralta threw more right-on-right changeups in his first start with Tampa Bay than he had in his previous four starts with the Mets combined.
And as we saw this week in Truist Park, the Rays have seven other pitchers with what Sarris calls “reverse-split” changeups. Compared with the traditional version, those changeups:
Have more drop
Are 3 mph harder
Have less of a velocity gap off the fastball
Have less of a horizontal movement differential off the fastball
It’s a power changeup, essentially: harder and with more drop than a traditional changeup, while its movement more closely resembles a sinker. Sarris likened it to a “platoon-neutral curveball.”
And Atlanta may already have its own version on the roster.
Enter: the kick change
I was irrationally excited when Grant Holmes added a kick change in spring training of 2025. He then proceeded to throw it exactly 23 times all season.
The good news is, his usage of the pitch is up this year, all the way to a whopping 6.7%.
More importantly, the pitch possesses many of the traits Tampa Bay looks for in a same-handed changeup. It is approximately three mph harder than a conventional changeup, leaving only three to five mph of separation from Holmes’s fastballs rather than the customary seven to 10. Its 13.8 inches of arm-side movement is also virtually identical to his sinker.
And Holmes is throwing it more because it’s working.
Opposing hitters have produced a .100 average and .123 wOBA against the pitch. They have put 26 changeups in play but have only three singles to show for it. Holmes is simultaneously suppressing hard contact, with an average exit velocity of 86.7 mph, and driving the ball into the ground, with an average launch angle of −5 degrees.
There’s just one problem: Almost all of those changeups have gone to left-handed hitters. Holmes has thrown only 23 to righties this season, accounting for 2.7% of all his pitches to them. It needs to be more.
The first reason is his modest platoon split. Lefties have produced a .303 wOBA against Holmes, compared with .314 for righties. That’s not massive, I know, but his current three-pitch approach (SL/FF/SI) has not given him the traditional same-handed advantage.
The second is the pitch’s ability to miss bats. Holmes’s changeup owns a 23% whiff rate, below the 37–39% generated by his breaking balls but comfortably above the roughly 15% rates of his three fastballs.
The point isn't that the changeup should replace those breaking balls. It's that adding another movement direction and velocity band gives righties one more possibility they have to account for.
The third is the limited but encouraging evidence against righties themselves. They have yet to record a hit in six plate appearances ending with the changeup, and Statcast assigns those matchups a .209 xwOBA. That sample is nowhere near large enough to serve as definitive proof that the pitch will remain dominant, but it is more than enough to justify expanding the experiment.
The Rays used Peralta’s pitch shape as permission to challenge a convention. Holmes presents Atlanta with the same opportunity. The Braves don’t need him to invent another pitch; they need him to use one he already owns against hitters who barely see it.
This isn’t a staff-wide prescription
Holmes wouldn’t even be the first Brave to do this.
Raisel Iglesias already does.
Iggy is a changeup-dominant closer, one that’s already throwing his changeup 25.8% of the time to righties. And like Holmes, Iglesias has a lot of the same “power changeup” characteristics to his cambio with both 88-89 mph base velocity and a movement pattern that matches that of the sinker. While Iglesias doesn’t regularly get the above-average amount of drop that several of Tampa’s changeups feature, he’s still able to manipulate the pitch for additional drop when needed.
There are two other pitchers who could probably lean further into the idea.
The first is Brent Suter. The rubber-armed reliever has an .786 OPS against lefties that is 100 points higher than what right-handers produce, and his changeup could help. It’s held left-handed hitters to a .238 wOBA since the All-Star Break, but his left-on-left usage has fallen from 18.7% for the season to 15.8% since the break. He’s already using it more than the league, but leaning back into it instead of letting it fade away down the stretch is the proper move here.
The second is Holmes’ main competitor for an October game three starting spot: Martín Pérez. He’s already changeup dominant, throwing his cambio 31% of the time, but that usage drops against southpaws to just 25.5%. With lefties holding both a higher OPS against him than righties (.739 vs .655, entering Thursday) and his left-on-left changeups allowing just a .205 wOBA, this is more of a “use your best pitch more often” argument.
But this is where some restraint is needed, as there’s a whole list of guys that either don’t need to do this or it doesn’t make sense to ask them to add this in September.
Reynaldo López’s platoon problem runs the opposite direction, while Chris Sale and Dylan Lee don’t have a pronounced enough problem to justify forcing an adjustment. Didier Fuentes, Dylan Dodd, Ray Kerr and Victor Mederos are already getting same-handed hitters out without relying on the pitch.
Tyler Mahle and AJ Smith-Shawver present another exception entirely: their splitters already provide the same-handed offspeed weapon we’re looking for.
Atlanta does not have a staff-wide same-handed-changeup deficiency. Iglesias, Pérez and Suter already throw the pitch to same-handed hitters at several times the MLB rate, while Mahle and Smith-Shawver use splitters in the same role. Suter and Pérez could lean into theirs further, but that would be optimization, not reinvention.
October is why this matters
This isn’t some sort of “confined-to-the-pitching-lab” theoretical exercise here. Grant Holmes is trying to win an October rotation spot. Chris Sale is Atlanta's unquestioned Game 1 starter, and Tyler Mahle’s slotted in behind him as the Game 2 starter. Behind them, Holmes and Pérez are fighting for the innings that could determine a postseason series.
Holmes doesn't need to become a different pitcher over the next three weeks. In fact, trying to become one would probably be counterproductive. But October lineups are specifically constructed to exploit weaknesses, and Holmes hasn't shown the traditional same-handed advantage you'd expect from a right-handed starter.
The kick change offers a possible answer without requiring him to learn anything new.
Holmes doesn’t need another pitch before October. He doesn’t have time to develop one anyway.
He needs to find another way to use one he already has.
The Dolphins didn’t invent the single wing in 2008. They found a different way to deploy it, watched it dismantle New England, and within weeks the rest of the NFL was stealing their homework.
Tampa Bay has spent the season doing something similar with the changeup.
The pitch is already in Holmes’ hand. He just needs to steal the idea.
Inciteful article. The Rays are an amazing franchise - little money but consistently able to re-tool pitchers and make them better, Perralta being the latest example.
"The single-wing concepts were ancient..."
We ran the single-wing offense in high school back in the early 1970's and I was the blocking back! It was kinda like being the QB, I called the plays that were signaled in from the sideline...but (almost) never touched the ball as it was directly centered to the tailback.