Is Andrew Painter fixed? No one knows the answer to that, not even Andrew Painter. The former top pitching prospect in all of baseball has fallen on hard times over the past few years, but he’s shown signs of life with three solid outings in a row after returning from the minor leagues. Pitching guru Lance Brozdowski recently claimed that one very small tweak to one of Painter’s pitches could be the reason for his turnaround.
A 2021 first-round draft choice, Painter came to the Phillies with massive expectations and immediately made good on them by blowing past minor league hitters in his first two professional seasons. Unfortunately, Tommy John surgery wiped out his next two campaigns, and he came into 2025 as a total wildcard. That year didn’t go very well, as the lanky right-hander was torched for a 5.40 ERA across 22 Triple-A starts.
Despite this rather large speed bump, the Phillies handed Painter a spot in the Opening Day rotation this season and it was a complete disaster. Major league opposition laid waste to the 23-year-old, as he posted a grisly 7.06 ERA over 65 innings pitched before mercifully being sent back down to Lehigh Valley. It didn’t appear as though Painter would be back in the big leagues anytime soon, as the club sought to give him a near-total reset in the minors.
However, the Phillies’ black hole in the fifth spot of the rotation, combined with a worn out bullpen, pressed the Floridian into service once again two weeks ago and he’s responded marvelously with a 2.93 ERA in three starts since being recalled. In fact, Painter’s looked so good that Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski opted against adding any starting pitching help at the trade deadline, deciding to keep Painter in the rotation instead (we'll just forget about Sunday's five-run stinker, given that all it really did was set up an excellent comeback).
One subtle tweak could be changing everything for Phillies' Andrew Painter
So what is behind the former wunderkind’s sudden success? Marquee Sports’ Lance Brozdowski posited in a recent YouTube video that a slight tweak to how he grips his changeup could be making all the difference.
According to Brozdowski, Painter has closed the gap a bit between his index and middle fingers when throwing the changeup, and slightly shifted how he orients the ball in his hand. This minute change has led to some pretty astonishing improvements, as he’s added three miles per hour of velocity to the pitch and tacked on an extra four inches of vertical break, turning a pitch that had been getting crushed into a potentially lethal offering.
It remains to be seen if Phillies fans are witnessing a delayed breakout from a rising star, or just a little hot streak before the league figures him out again. Fans would be wise not to expect the up-and-down youngster to have put his troubles entirely in the rearview mirror from here on out.
However, the talent that made Andrew Painter the envy of the prospect world is certainly still inside of him, and he wouldn’t be the first struggling young hurler to figure things out after a rough debut. Heck, even the great Roy Halladay needed a minor league reset before he put it all together.
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