KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Lance McCullers wants to master his changeup, so he mimics a master.

The 22-year-old righty, who jumped to the big-leagues from Class AA in 2015 and finished the season with a 3.22 ERA and strong rate stats in 22 Major League starts, models his version of the pitch after the one used by perennial All-Star and former Cy Young Award winner Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners.

But the imitation goes far beyond simply watching Hernandez on video and attempting to ape his mechanics. McCullers wants his changeup to look the same way Hernandez’s does in the eyes of opposing batters, so he seeks out data from the Astros’ analytics team. The club, like every other team in baseball now, has access to data from Trackman, the pitch-tracking radar technology employed by MLB’s Statcast. That information shows McCullers where and when Hernandez releases the pitch, and its spin rate: The number of times it rotates en route to the plate.

“He’s on the Mt. Rushmore of changeups,” McCullers told USA TODAY Sports. “Before, you idolized guys because they throw like you, or you like the way they pitch, but now you can actually find guys that you think you kind of relate to — arm-angle wise and whatnot — and try to recreate pitches that they’ve mastered. There’s just more understanding of how to throw it, where I need to throw it in my delivery, where I need to throw it in my motion, and how the hitter needs to perceive it so it’s effective.”

Here’s a look at Hernandez’s change, courtesy the incredible PitcherList.com:
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And now McCullers’, via the same site:
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The Astros’ front office helped usher spin rates into the national baseball conversation after they acquired righty Collin McHugh, who was at the time a 26-year-old righty with a career 8.94 ERA in 15 big-league appearances. The club, which later cited the atypically high spin rate on McHugh’s curveball, altered his repertoire based on the data. Two years after being claimed off waivers from the pitching-starved Colorado Rockies, McHugh now represents a valuable piece of a good starting rotation, and owns a solid 3.39 ERA across 57 starts with Houston.

Here’s a look at that curveball:
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McCullers’ experience shows the ways the Astros use the data available to them to improve performance.

“We use it,” manager A.J. Hinch said when asked about spin rates. “We use it as information that helps us tweak their usage. It helps us maybe decide when guys are doing well or are not doing well. It’s all information that’s part of trying to find the solution for each pitcher.

“I don’t think it’s the end-all, be-all, but it’s an important ingredient for everybody to understand. Some pitchers want some background information on that stuff, some don’t.”

There’s no magic formula to identifying an optimal spin rate for any one pitch: Curveballs that spin faster tend to break more sharply, changeups that spin slower dive a bit more. Fastballs with high spin rates reap more swinging strikes, but fastballs with low spin rates induce more groundballs.

(Graphic by Steven Ruiz for USA TODAY Sports. Data: MLB.com/Statcast)

“Spin helps us understand how a pitch is likely to move, and by extension what kind of batted ball that pitch is likely to induce,” explained Mike Petriello, who covers Statcast and hosts the Statcast Podcast for MLB.com. “For example, a guy with a high curveball spin rate is probably more likely to be getting grounders, because curves have topspin, and the spin helps to push the pitch into the dirt. But of course, none of this is in isolation: Location, velocity, deception, spin… it all works together. Even a 100-mph fastball will get hit if it’s straight and a hitter knows it’s coming. Spin is another piece of the puzzle that helps to explain things like how Chris Young gets outs with an 86-mph fastballs, or how Justin Verlander bounced back.”

Astros starters Dallas Keuchel (left), Mike Fiers (center) and Collin McHugh. (PHOTO: Jonathan Dyer/USA TODAY Sports Images)

Every Astros pitcher interviewed for this story was familiar with spin rates and recognized their value in evaluation, but not all of them rely on the data as heavily as McCullers does. McHugh said he focuses more on the axis of his curveball’s rotation than its spin rate, and prefers personal feedback over that provided by the radars.

“PitchF/X and Trackman can tell you pretty much everything you want to know about pitches,” he said. “For me, it’s more about wanting to know the pitch is spinning the right way than how fast it’s spinning. You can tell, with a big, slow curveball — unlike with a hard slider or a sinker where sometimes it’s hard to visually tell what the ball’s doing at the plate — I can pretty much tell if it’s getting sharp or not.

“I like to get it from my catchers, if I can. I like to get a first-person opinion if I can get it, but it’s always good to have that there if it’s necessary.”

Both McHugh and Dallas Keuchel, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner, also make ample use of video. But Keuchel, perhaps understandably, hasn’t yet found a need to dive too deep into his spin rates.

“The higher the spin rate doesn’t always correlate to the best pitches, and I think that’s why I haven’t really put too much thought into it,” said Keuchel. “The whole spin-rate thing to me is that guys want to get the highest spin rate possible, but it doesn’t always translate to deceptive pitches going toward the hitter.

“I’d be open to discussion if there was somebody that wanted to come talk to me about it from the Astros’ side of things. But they haven’t yet. I’m sure if something was really bad, or really good, they’d tell me about it.”

(PHOTO: AP Photo/John Raoux)

McCullers was selected in the first round of the 2012 draft, general manager Jeff Luhnow’s first with the Astros. Though drafted out of high school, he needed less than three full seasons in the minors before graduating to the Majors. And he said he latched on to the club’s spin-rate data as soon as it was presented to him.

“I thought it was real cool from the get-go,” McCullers said. “Some guys, they throw 90, and they throw fastballs by everybody. And you’re like, ‘How does that happen, when I’m throwing 95 and I’m getting my fastball hit around the park?’ Or, ‘Why are some guys’ curveballs better than others?’

“It’s all about break, how it looks and how a hitter views that pitch, and based on the analysis that they gave us, we’re able to recreate that feel — that in-game experience — in the bullpen.”

Though by now, all 30 MLB front offices work to uncover every bit of information they can find to build better ballclubs, the players themselves often take a more conservative tack — questioning the utility of advanced stats or dismissing them as unnecessary for the purposes of trying to win games. And there’s no real issue with that: Players need to focus on the skills inherent in catching, throwing and hitting more than they do the numbers we have to assess them. But McCullers is part of a generation that came of age in baseball long after numbers became an integral part of it, and when presented with the ever-dreaded notion of “overthinking,” he hailed the certainty of his methods.

“I’m not overthinking anything,” he said. “This is concrete stuff. It’s not ten different opinions given to me, where I have to kind of go through and decide which I want to run with. This is 100% accurate stuff that has been proven to work, and that’s why I’m so excited about it.

“Even though you’re getting a ton of info thrown at you, you know it’s solid. The only reason you’re getting the info is to make you better as a pitcher. In today’s age, especially with some of the pitchers we have out there and some of the guys we have coming up, you have to stay cutting edge, and you have to stay as advanced as possible to keep yourself in the game.”