It’s been a year unlike any other, but the Milwaukee Brewers are again in the playoffs.
Despite a global pandemic and a subsequently less-than-stellar season from the Brew Crew, they’re set to square off against the top-seeded Los Angeles Dodgers for a three-game series. But unfortunately, they’ll be doing it without an electrifying player: right-handed rookie relief pitcher Devin Williams, the First Airbender. He’s injured and will be out this week.
Devin Williams, Airbender.
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 23, 2020
Throughout the abbreviated season, Williams has baffled opposing hitters with a pitch that’s a little bit changeup, a little bit screwball, and wholly effective. The cartoon-inspired Airbender — a term coined by Twitter’s Pitching Ninja; Williams maintains it’s just a changeup — has racked up 52 strikeouts over 25 innings (and a 0.33 ERA!) for Williams, and turned him into a dark horse contender for NL Rookie of the Year.
“It’s history, what we’re watching,” closer Josh Hader told The Athletic.
Hader’s right. Baseball is a game steeped in tradition. It’s not often that something new comes along, but when it does it’s worth examining.
“Hard to comprehend”
If the Airbender looks like a sandlot sleight-of-hand, it’s because it is. Williams began throwing it during pick-up games in St. Louis, his hometown. He kept experimenting with it during high school, but only used it in practice. Thrown with the grip of a circle changeup (with the thumb and forefinger making an “OK”), the pitch’s motion is closer to that of a screwball. Paired with the righty’s heater, it confounds batters.
“My fastball was just so overpowering to those guys, it was almost doing them a favor by throwing my changeup to them,” Williams said. “I really didn’t start using it until I got to pro ball.”
Williams was drafted in the second round by the Brewers in 2013 and bounced around the minors for years after. Tommy John surgery ended his starting career in 2017, but Williams reinvented himself as a reliever thereafter, with the Airbender as the strongest weapon in his arsenal. He made a strong MLB debut for Milwaukee in 2019, spent the offseason refining his signature pitch, and the rest is history.
“I came in expecting to pitch well,” Williams said to Baseball America. “But I would be lying if I thought I’d be doing this right now.”
Now Williams is in contention for both Rookie of the Year and NL Reliever of the Year (both almost unheard of for a middle reliever). And why not? He’s struck out more than half of the batters he’s faced this season.
“The strikeout numbers were special,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s hard to comprehend a little bit, what he did.”
Devin Williams: Airbender
All of Devin Williams’s Called Strikes or Swinging Strikes on Changeups this season, so far. 😳https://t.co/kpi4F8TRud
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 23, 2020
“A devastating pitch”
Numbers aside, Williams is already a part of the game’s storied history. Baseball hasn’t changed all that much since its creation, so a new pitch getting invented isn’t something that happens every day. In fact, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the last time a new pitch entered the game. It might even be courtesy of former Brewer Zack Grienke, whose hard changeup (taught to him by Seattle Mariners legend Felix Hernandez) made waves a few years ago.
But in more concrete terms, the most recent invention is the splitter, or split-finger fastball. A descendant of the forkball, the splitter was popularized in the 1980s by Hall of Fame closer Bruce Sutter. Like Williams, Sutter would confuse batters by alternating lower velocity breaking balls with fastballs, practically giving the hitter whiplash. Former player and coach Gary Matthews Sr. called it “a devastating pitch.”
“After he threw it, his fastball looked like it was coming 100 mph,” Matthews told ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian in 2006. “If you stayed off it, you’d get a called strike. If you swung, you would miss. He perfected something, [it was] something new on the scene.”
It’s a story not unlike that of Devin Williams and his Airbender, a tandem that the favored Dodgers are lucky they won’t be facing this postseason.
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