TAMPA — It’s the morning of day two for Devin Williams as a New York athlete, he’s already had to shave his beard at the Yankees’ behest, and now some reporter is asking about the worst moment of his otherwise dominant 2024 season. Geez.
“Why are we talking about last year?” Williams, soft spoken and friendly, asked while standing in front of his locker on Wednesday.
The new Yankee closer is clearly a nice person, because he then agreed to discuss THAT home run — the one that Pete Alonso hit off Williams to launch the Mets past Milwaukee in the Wild Card Series, that elevated the OMG magic to an otherworldly plane, and that probably bonded the team and Alonso back together for at least another season.
The reason I raised it more than four months later? It wasn’t merely the historic import of that moment to the Mets, but its relevance to the 2025 Yankees — namely, the question of whether Williams tips his pitches.
This stems from a viral video by the breakdown master Jimmy O’Brien, AKA Jomboy. In it, O’Brien shows Williams possibly holding his hand higher up on the glove before throwing a changeup, and lower prior to throwing a fastball. He also appears to lift the glove slightly closer to his chin while beginning his delivery of the offspeed pitch.
Alonso’s homer, a three-run shot in the top of the ninth inning of the decisive Game 3 of last year’s Wild Card Series, came off a 3-1 changeup. Did the Mets slugger know it was coming?
Jomboy posted his video on Oct. 4, the day after Alonso’s homer. I asked a Mets person then if the team did indeed have a tell on Williams; that person said that he had already asked Alonso directly, and Alonso had said he “didn’t have anything” on Williams. I checked this week with a second well-placed source, who reiterated “we didn’t.”
On Wednesday, I relayed all of this to Williams, who countered with his own question.
“I mean, if he did, is he really going to say yes?” Williams said. “Are they going to tell you guys [in the media] that? Are they going to put that out? I don’t think so.”
Fair enough, I said, but it was my job to find trusted sources. I was confident that the two folks who told me that Williams wasn’t tipping were speaking truthfully.
More importantly, Williams himself does not believe that he was tipping the changeup — and neither does his new team.
“I didn’t think that he did [have anything], no,” Williams said. “I also didn’t really watch the video. I saw a little bit of it. It was so slight. It doesn’t really matter if he did — that’s on me for tipping pitches if he did. But I never looked at it that way.“
To Williams, the issue was location. A changeup thrown by a right handed pitcher typically fades down and in to a righty hitter. But Alonso likes the ball down and in. Knowing that, Williams attempted a different strategy.
“I was trying to throw it away from him,” he said. “Just a little bit too up, too much plate.”
The Yankees have a comprehensive tipping program that they use to clean up their own pitchers’ tells. According to sources, the team did a deep dive on Williams before trading for him in December. They came out of it believing that he does not tip pitches.
That jibes with Williams’ results. A two-time All-Star and former National League Rookie of the Year, he has a career ERA of 1.83 and 14.3 strikeouts per nine innings. The Alonso homer was highly anomalous in a career defined by excellence.
So, with the tipping issue now settled, I promise not to make Williams talk about the 2024 Wild Card Series ever again.
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