On the Captivating Desperation of the One-Pitch Playoff Reliever

I’m a big fan of Tommy Kahnle for reasons that don’t have that much to do with why the Tigers just signed him to a $7.75 million contract this week. Kahnle flatters the stereotype that most of a baseball team’s personality resides in its bullpen. I can offer two succinct anecdotes in support of the idea that Kahnle is someone your grandmother might euphemistically have referred to as “a character.”

The first: His torrid but fickle relationship with the Philadelphia Eagles. (Go Birds.) Kahnle has been on and off the Eagles bandwagon and back on again over the course of his career. Kahnle put the Birds in timeout in 2020 over their firing of Doug Pederson, which — far from being a sign of disloyalty — is actually precisely the kind of ferocious idiosyncrasy that makes Eagles fans the kind of people you don’t let yourself get trapped in a 1-on-1 conversation with. (Take it from me, I’ll talk your ear off about how I thought Macho Harris was the next Brian Dawkins.)

The other endearingly weird thing about Kahnle is how much he loves to throw his changeup.

Ben Clemens wrote about this in September of 2023, when Kahnle was lapping the field in changeup usage, throwing half as many changeups as guys like Chris Devenski. This past October, Kahnle took it to a new level. Over a span of five different appearances from ALCS Game 2 to World Series Game 3, Kahnle threw 60 consecutive changeups.

Kahnle was quite effective during the 2024 postseason, allowing a 2.08 ERA and stranding all three of the runners he inherited. Over the course of his all-changeup streak, Kahnle allowed three walks and three hits over four innings pitched, but only a single unearned run.

I’ll always remember this run in part because of how much John Smoltz, ordinarily the crankiest man ever to sit behind a microphone, seemed genuinely delighted by its absurdity. I hope he won’t mind if I go so far as to say he seemed tickled by it.

As well he should have! It’s ridiculous! The changeup is the only pitch in baseball that’s named for, and ordinarily defined by, its opposition to something else. What is it? No clue — we just know it’s not the default. Kahnle should have to call it something else.

And he could, because as Ben wrote in 2023, Kahnle’s changeup isn’t effective because of the contrast in velocity to his four-seamer. That’s why he can throw it as often as he does. Kahnle’s changeup bumps up against 90 mph when he’s really feeling it, and has hellacious vertical drop compared to the sinkers in its velocity band.

As much as the cutter-to-slider-to-curveball continuum drives me up the wall, there’s a similar taxonomic conundrum for pitches with arm-side break. What’s really separating a changeup from a splitter, which — if we’re still talking about linguistic pedantry in pitch classification — was originally branded as a split-finger fastball?

By that logic, if you’ve got a secondary pitch with upper-80s velocity and bat-missing movement, why wouldn’t you throw it all the time?

Kahnle certainly does.

This is not a common thing. Kahnle is an outlier. But he’s not unique, especially in the playoffs.

As you no doubt know already, the recent trend toward heavy reliever use and shorter starting pitcher outings only gets more extreme in the playoffs. If you’ve listened to Smoltz on the mic in the postseason, you might not know much else about baseball, but you’ll know this. And while I recognize that this reliance on relievers represents the state of the art in terms of in-game tactics, I don’t like it on an aesthetic or narrative level.

I loved the days of pitchers’ duels, of a single solitary man holding back the tide, inning after inning. When playoff games were not just chess matches but endurance tests. This ceaseless shuffle of increasingly anonymous and fungible relievers feels impersonal, sterile, antithetical to the sport’s great literary tradition. It feels disrespectful to Bob Gibson and Lefty Grove and — you know what? — even Smoltz, who took part in one or two great duels in his own time. You can recognize that it’s the way to win while still finding it ugly.

There are exceptions to this belief, places where the relief parade does something for me. And Kahnle represents one of them.

I shared Smoltz’s amusement with the age of the all-changeup repertoire, because absurdity is usually funny. But alongside that, Kahnle’s postseason appearances are resonant with tenacious desperation, like the films of Alexander Payne or the novels of Graham Greene.

Kahnle has been an effective relief pitcher for most of his career, but he’s never been subtle or precise. He doesn’t throw a lot of strikes, and he walks a lot of batters even for a one-inning setup guy. Maybe 15 years ago, you could win a title while consigning all the meaningful playoff innings to between five and seven good pitchers: three or four starters, a closer, and one or two trustworthy setup men. Now, all 13 pitchers have to contribute something, and more often than anyone would like, a reliever with one good pitch will need to provide not just outs but high-leverage outs, potentially multiple innings’ worth.

This is the fourth time through the order for the 2020s: There’s a one- or two-inning hole in the season, and if it’s not plugged, a torrent of runs are going to come pouring through. Not even the Dodgers or Yankees can conjure up enough elite starters and shutdown relievers to cover every high-leverage inning.

So the manager turns to the best guy left in his bullpen, and sometimes, the best idea that guy has is to throw his one good pitch over and over and over again.

Where 20 years ago championships were won and lost by whether Pedro Martinez or Josh Beckett could get through the eighth or ninth, now they’re won and lost here. Every pitch is a potential season-killer, so there’s no wiggle room to set hitters up or climb the ladder or establish the fastball or whatever orthodoxy Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani would just hit 450 feet.

Since 2017, there have been 15 postseason relief appearances of 25 pitches or more, where at least two-thirds of those pitches were a single secondary (i.e. non-fastball) pitch type. Kahnle and his changeup account for four of those outings. In total, the Yankees bullpen had four such appearances during the 2024 ALCS, as Jake Cousins contributed two slider-heavy outings to go along with two Kahnle specials.

Not all of these were desperation outings. Drake’s 2019 ALDS appearance came with the Rays up a touchdown, for instance. Others — for good or ill — came by the team’s established closer: Romano’s contribution to blowing an 8-1 lead to the Mariners in the 2022 AL Wild Card series, or a completely gassed Díaz getting kidney punched by Nick Castellanos and Bryson Stott in last year’s NLDS.

On the other hand, Pressly’s five-out save in Game 5 of the 2022 World Series was a bit of unremembered heroism. Pressly’s most famous moment in that series was closing out the combined no-hitter the night before, but in Game 5 he came in for a five-out save with the tying run on third and the go-ahead run on base, and got through the toughest part of the Phillies’ order to end the game without allowing a run. Failure would’ve sent the World Series back to Houston with the Astros down 3-2 in the series.

And speaking of the Astros, there’s the great ancestor of this type of appearance: McCullers’ four-inning save to close out the 2017 ALCS, marked by a string of 24 straight curveballs. By the end of that run, Brian McCann wasn’t even bothering to signal; he just pounded his glove on the dirt as a reminder to bury the deuce.

But for every McCullers outing, there’s Game 5 of the 2019 NL Wild Card series. Joe Kelly entered a tie game in the top of the ninth inning, then stayed in for an extra frame. The first 15 pitches of his outing were knuckle-curves, but Kelly’s command, as ever, wavered. He loaded the bases to start the 10th, got Howie Kendrick to foul off a curve that had just enough break to drop out of the red zone. The next pitch was a four-seamer, and Kendrick hit it over the center field wall for a series-winning grand slam.

Whatever the outcome, the proposition is the same. We’re not out of ideas; we have exactly one idea left. One pitcher, one pitch, over and over, until something gives. Given the choice, I’d rather go back to having pitchers’ duels. But this is a pretty compelling substitute.

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