Yes, he has the screwball, just like Devin Williams’s. Only none of the rest of his stuff is anything like Devin’s. And actually, neither is the screwball.

It’s remarkable that, just a year after being a relatively anonymous eighth-round pick, Craig Yoho had raised his profile so much that many Brewers fans were disappointed not to see him get a chance in the big leagues down the stretch this year.

It’s not normal for a pitcher to rise from that kind of entry point to professional baseball to the big leagues in a year, but Yoho nearly pulled it off, thanks to his devilish clone of the Devin Williams airbender.

In 58 innings of work, he pitched to an eye-popping 0.94 ERA as he scaled three levels of the minor leagues, with 101 strikeouts.

He did walk nine batters in 14 frames after a late-season promotion to Triple-A Nashville, effectively ensuring that he wouldn’t get that call to the majors, but on the whole, the story of his season was dominance.

Almost no one in professional baseball has a changeup that compares even loosely with the screwball thrown by Brewers closer Devin Williams, but Yoho’s is similar enough to have been mentioned as the heir to the airbender many times in his year-plus as a pro.

It’s a natural connection, since the two offerings are more similar to one another (in terms of their depth and the extremeness of the arm-side run on them, with high spin rates to boot) than to anything anyone else in the league throws.

In truth, though, they’re very different pitchers—and because of that, even their twin screwballs don’t really have a lot in common.

Williams, on the left, has a mid-90s fastball with ample carry to it, such that the screwball plays off it the same with a power curve or a slider with good vertical depth would, only in the opposite direction laterally.

Yoho, on the right, utilizes a sinker as his primary fastball, and it has the same amount of horizontal run as the scroogie. The differentiator is that extra depth on the screwball, but the vertical difference isn’t as great for Yoho as for Williams.

That said, you can imagine how this would be just as devastating as Williams’s pitch pairing. The ball comes out of the hand doing the same thing whether Yoho is throwing the sinker or the screwball, and then it either stays on that plane or it dives, viciously. Williams used that cutter you see in the plot above in 2023, but never made real use of it in 2024.

Yoho, by contrast, seems to have a good feel for his, and then he sets it all off against a big, sweeping curveball. As you can probably envision based on the plot above, Yoho throws from a low arm angle, so the curve can briefly look like it might be the sinker, before veering dramatically across the plate.

The screwball caught all the headlines, but the curve missed a ton of bats in its own right as Yoho climbed the ladder.

The sinker missed almost none, but it’s the pitch that he has to throw into the strike zone, to force hitters to respect and chase the screwball and the curve.

Here’s the question on which everything hinges: Will hitters swing enough to make Yoho a dominant reliever, rather than a fun novelty act who has to make major concessions just to become viable in the long run?

The differences between him and Williams become stark in a hurry when you chart all those nasty movements onto an actual strike zone.

Williams is no comfortable at-bat for opponents, but his fastball comes out of the hand almost a sure bet for the zone. Its shape naturally forces hitters to expand often on the screwball, because they so often misidentify it and know they have to defend the zone against the heater.

Yoho is a more complicated proposition. Since his sinker and screwball both move about a foot and a half one way en route to the plate, while his curve goes at least that far the other way, hitting the 17-inch plate is not easy.

Hitters who take an assiduously patient approach against him could turn a nifty profit doing so.

To this point, they haven’t been able to. I created a stat I’m loosely calling Deception Rate, to gauge how often a pitcher fools opposing batters. It’s simple to calculate: add in-zone take rate to out-of-zone swing rate.

In his brief stint in Triple A, facing hitters whose seasons were rapidly winding down, Yoho posted a 70.5 Deception%, which is tremendous.

It would be a 99th-percentile number in MLB. However, we should treat it with extreme skepticism, for now. His stuff runs a real risk of resulting in a below-average Deception%, which would be bad news, since he’s unlikely to throw even an average number of pitches in the zone.

Going into next season, the Brewers probably won’t have Yoho break camp with the team. Even assuming Williams is traded, the first shot at high-leverage bullpen roles will go to Trevor Megill, Joel Payamps, and a few other veterans, while Yoho will try to polish up his arsenal and prove that hitters will keep chasing against him once they’ve seen him a time or two.

As tough a look as he gives hitters, it’s important not to assume that the first time he faces a given set of them will reliably predict what happens the second time.

Still, his weirdness and wildness only make him more exciting.

Rare is the relief prospect who stands out so much that their progress and matriculation from Triple-A to the majors rates this much conversation, but Yoho is in that class.

If he can land any of his four pitches in the zone when hitters are sitting on something else, or fool them into bad swings the way he has so well to this point, Yoho could replace WIlliams seamlessly by the end of next season.

It’s just a matter of whether such a completely abnormal pitch mix can keep even the best hitters on Earth guessing over a prolonged exposure.