The legend of Airbender: Devin Williams and baseballs most absurd pitch

The pitch has become baseball’s version of The Dress. Is it gold? Or is it blue? Is it a changeup? Is it a screwball? Or, maybe the most intriguing choice of them all, is it a mashup that has become something entirely new? The debate has raged on in blog posts and the comments section. And at times, it has consumed the Twitter timeline of Rob Friedman, known better by his nom de GIF, the Pitching Ninja.

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Devin Williams, the man at the center of it all, only adds to this confusion. The 26-year-old Brewers righty has used the mystery pitch to transform his career.  For a team that is making a late surge for the playoffs, he’s been a revelation. In 25 innings over 21 appearances, he has racked up 52 strikeouts. The lone run he’s allowed this season came on a solo shot from the Pirates’ Colin Moran way back on July 27. By fWAR, Williams is the most valuable reliever in baseball and an under-the-radar contender for the NL’s Rookie of the Year.

“I’m maintaining that it’s a changeup,” Williams said this week, noting that his signature offering is thrown with the standard grip of a circle change. But just as quickly as he appeases one camp, he offers a glimmer of hope to the other. “I see it as a backwards slider,” he said. This description, of course, aligns more closely with the description of a pitch that once ruled the world and is now on the brink of extinction, the screwball.

It isn’t quite a changeup, and it isn’t quite a screwball, which is just as well. Neither name does the pitch its proper justice. But when Williams is asked if another descriptor might be more appropriate, he endorses a moniker coined recently by the Pitching Ninja. “He doesn’t call it a changeup anymore because everyone argues in the comments,” the pitcher said with a laugh. Besides, the new name better captures the way the ball darts out of his hand looking like a fastball, before swerving hard to the glove side as it approaches the plate, leaving hitters to flail, or worse, to watch.

“I kinda like ‘Airbender,'” Williams said. “It’s better than a ‘screwball,’ that’s for sure.”

All of Devin Williams’s Swing/Miss or Called Strikes on his Changeup from this season (so far).

Pitching Porn.
👇https://t.co/kpi4F8TRud

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 23, 2020

There have never been more ways to precisely measure what a baseball is doing once it leaves the hand of a pitcher. Yet, classifying pitches can be a difficult exercise. Sorting out a splitter from a changeup, or a cutter from a slider, is often left to the pitcher. If Williams calls his pitch a changeup, then that’s how it gets documented, even though there isn’t another pitch in the major leagues that resembles it. “It’s just an outlier pitch,” he said. “The spin I’m able to create makes it different from every other changeup.”

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The power of the changeup stems from its difference in speed. It’s thrown to disrupt timing. While spin gives breaking balls their movement, it’s less of an emphasis with changeups. The spin rate on an average big league change is 1,769 rpm. By contrast, Williams lets his fly at 2,853 rpm. That rate is so high that it’s more closely comparable to the spin found on sliders.

The Airbender comes from a circle change grip, in which the thumb and forefinger form a circle, as they do in the gesture for OK. The movement comes from the pronation of the wrist upon release, or the turning of the palm outward. “It’s really just staying inside the baseball, keeping my pressure on the inside of the baseball,” Williams said. “There’s like, a feel, mentally, where the circle part of my grip, I’m throwing that down in front and getting over the top of the baseball.”

On video, the movement of the wrist is a signature element of the screwball. So is the action on the baseball. Not only does it move horizontally, but it also features a significant vertical drop. But according to one expert, there are dead giveaways that it’s not the screwball, at least not in the traditional sense. “It’s an over-pronated changeup,” said Danny Herrera, a screwball-throwing lefty who pitched parts of four seasons in the big leagues, last with the Mets in 2011. “His hand does not get through the baseball enough to be a true screwball.”

Still, the shape of the pitch mimics that of a screwball, even if the spin isn’t precisely the same. Combined with velocity and command, any contact is likely to be weak. “The movement is so late and sharp, very, very impressive,” Herrera said. “That pitch is filthy — whatever you want to call it.”

In a way, the Airbender spent many years hiding in plain sight. Williams, who grew up near St. Louis, began throwing the pitch as a kid in neighborhood games with friends. Once he got to high school, he’d fiddle around with it on the side during practice, but when games came, he shoved it in his back pocket. Williams had been blessed with a blazing fastball, which is what got him noticed. “My fastball was just so overpowering to those guys, it was almost doing them a favor by throwing my changeup to them,” he said. “I really didn’t start using it until I got into pro ball.”

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Williams got drafted by the Brewers in the second round in 2013, then languished in the minors as a starter. Tommy John surgery wiped out his entire 2017 season. When he returned late the following year, a 5.82 ERA in 14 starts at High-A Carolina signaled his shift into the bullpen. Though he called the move “disheartening,” he also knew it represented his clearest path to the big leagues.

In 2019, Williams began the year at Double-A Biloxi, where the organization encouraged him to throw more changeups. Until then, he had not paid much mind to spin rates. That changed after he heard an interesting tidbit. “Our video guy told me, ‘yeah dude, that was like 3,000 rpm.’ That’s when I started paying attention to it. I know that’s about what a (Clayton) Kershaw curveball is. That’s pretty good.”

It was good enough to eventually get Williams a promotion to the big leagues, where he posted a 3.95 ERA in 13 appearances. But he noticed something different. It didn’t bend the way it did in the minors. There was something different about the baseballs used in the big leagues, and he noticed how it made it easier to overthrow. The extra velocity cost him movement, and he was so familiar with the pitch that he picked up on the subtle difference.

“I think it’s because I started it at such a young age,” Williams said. “The pronation is just really natural to me now. That would be my biggest guess, because my body has just adapted to rotate that way instead of the other way, like what you’d do when you’re throwing a curveball or a slider. I’m really good at spinning the ball the opposite way, whereas other people spend their whole life spinning it the other way.”

The offseason would be spent on refinement. Soon, the world would be introduced to the Airbender.

On Tuesday, Friedman posted a tribute video to his YouTube channel. The title is self-explanatory: “Devin Williams Airbender.”

The reel shows every called or swinging strike that Williams has induced with his signature pitch thus far this season. It lasts 4 minutes, 58 seconds, and it features an endless parade of the best hitters on the planet being rendered helpless. Lefty, righty, it does not matter. Some swing and miss with all their might. Some begin swinging only to realize that the ball has disappeared, so they give up. One nearly falls over, the momentum of his swing turning him into a human corkscrew. Others simply freeze.

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It is one of these that comes to mind first when Williams is asked to reveal the most telling reaction he’s seen from a batter this season. It’s at the 4:08 mark of the highlight video. The film shows an 84.8 mph Airbender on a 3-and-2 count, zipping back over the heart of the plate. It shows the batter, Brad Miller, lifting his hands as if he’s about to be struck by the ball. It then shows Miller marching toward the dugout, head down, unable to swing despite watching a pitch right down the middle. What the video does not show is the 2-2 pitch, a 97 mph fastball up and in, just off the plate. It was the perfect setup for the Airbender.

“It tunneled so well with the previous fastball I threw up and in … and I followed it up with a changeup on the same line that broke back onto the plate,” Williams said. “And he kinda froze on it because he had just seen the previous pitch coming at his hands.”

The combination has proven lethal. Williams leads baseball with 18.72 strikeouts per nine innings. By fWAR, his work has been worth 1.4 wins, a remarkable figure for a middle reliever. At the center of it all has been the Airbender. No single pitch in baseball has induced a higher rate of whiffs.

“Sometimes, as a pitcher, you feel you can kind of get backed into a corner where you’re stuck in a count where you have to throw the fastball here,” Williams said. “I haven’t felt like that recently. I can throw either pitch at any time, or I can even use my slider because I trust it that much, (though) there hasn’t really been a need for it.”

Williams’ emergence comes at a perfect time for the Brewers. For much of the season, they have paid the price for a lineup that has struggled to hit. But they have surged as of late and find themselves as part of the National League’s mad scramble for postseason spots. Milwaukee has a 27-28 record after Wednesday and is in sight of the No. 8 seed.

In high-leverage spots, manager Craig Counsell has frequently leaned on Williams, who delivered two scoreless innings Tuesday night in a tense 3-2 victory against the Reds. The outing lowered Williams’ ERA to 0.36.

“It’s history, what we’re watching,” Brewers closer Josh Hader said. “It’s not as talked about as it should be but what he’s doing, it’s fun to watch, You feed off the energy he brings, You’ve just got to appreciate what he’s doing on the mound.”

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Hader made mention of the changeup — er, the Airbender — which he described as “a lefty slider coming out of his hand.” Williams’ role as a middle reliever will almost certainly make winning Rookie of the Year a longshot. And because he doesn’t rack up saves like a closer, he’ll likely get overlooked when it comes to choosing the Reliever of the Year. But Hader, who has won the NL honor the last two seasons, said his vote would go to Williams. “He’s deserving of that,” Hader said. “Without a doubt.”

Williams has yet to process it all. “It’s been awesome just getting in those situations all year, but now it’s like, you try and make the playoffs so it’s kind of that do-or-die,” he said. “I’m excited for this challenge coming up here. I know I’ll be throwing a lot this week, hopefully.”

If all goes to plan, the Brewers will reach the playoffs, and new audiences will be introduced to the nastiest pitch in baseball. It will surely be referred to as a changeup, a label that’s not nearly as accurate as the new name, which was inspired by an old animated TV show.

“Pitching Ninja got me on the Airbender,” Williams said. “I think he might have the rights on that. But yeah, I like that.”

“He can have it,” Friedman said. “It’d be an absolute honor.”

(Photo: Larry Radloff / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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