On Saturday Chase Burns took the mound to start the Cincinnati Reds spring training opener against the Cleveland Guardians. The 2024 1st round pick and 2nd overall selection in the draft didn’t give up a hit in his two innings of work, but he did walk three batters in his time on the mound while striking out two.
One of the goals from Chase Burns during the offseason was to improve his change up. We talked about that earlier in the week, but one of the bigger points made in that was that while he did throw the change up in his two Triple-A starts a combined 13% of the time he barely threw it in the big leagues and he didn’t throw it at all in one start where he threw 95 pitches and in four of his last six outings of the year he didn’t throw a single change up. Not only did he need to improve it but also bring it back to games. Those two things often go hand-in-hand as a better change up would give a guy more confidence in using it.
Facing off against Guardians hitters yesterday afternoon Burns threw 32 total pitches. Only three of those were change ups. That’s not much of a sample size, so keep that in mind when you start reading the next portion of information that we talk about. We have data for Burns via Statcast/Hawkeye from his time in Triple-A and MLB. That is just over 1000 pitches, including spring training and the playoffs.
In that there have only been 68 change ups thrown by the right-handed pitcher. The 65 thrown prior to Saturday averaged 90.8 MPH. The three thrown yesterday came in at 88.0, 89.1, and 89.3 MPH. It wasn’t just the velocity that was different, which one could write off as “hey, it’s the first spring game and it’s February and most guys peak with velocity in July”, the pitch was moving more, too.
In 2025 he averaged 8.07 inches of horizontal movement on the pitch. Yesterday he averaged 8.86 inches. The vertical movement changed, too. In 2025 he had 2.93 inches of “rise” to it once you eliminate the fact that gravity exists, but the three on Saturday had 4.26 inches of “rise”.
Again, we’re talking about an incredibly small sample size on both ends of the spectrum, but things were a little different in terms of velocity and movement on the pitch. But perhaps something that is more important than both is that the release point was different. In 2025 Burns was throwing four pitches – the fastball, the change up, the slider, and the curveball. The fastball and the curveball had a nearly identical release point. His slider had a release point about 2.4 inches from those. The change up averaged 4.8 inches from that of the fastball release point. Keen eyed hitters who had that information may have been able to know it was coming at release based on that.
On Saturday the release point for both the change up and the slider were nearly identical. Both pitches, though, did have about a 3.2 inch difference from the release point on the fastball. While it’s better to have all of the pitches coming from the same spot, not isolating one from the rest of the group can be a big benefit as it makes everything slightly tougher to figure out in the very short amount of time a big leaguer has to figure out what’s coming.
It’s just one game and just a few pitches, but there was something there worth looking at. As Chase Burns get more starts this spring and more pitches under his belt it’s worth continued tracking of how the change up is progressing and how it looks compared to last year.