Tigers’ Kenny Serwa Gets Innovative With ‘Yoshi’ Knuckleball
It started with a conversation with his father.
When Kenny Serwa was 9 years old he expressed interest in throwing breaking pitches, but his father discouraged the experiment on the account of his youth.
For Serwa, necessity was the mother of invention, and an unorthodox journey began.
“(My father) said, ‘You can’t throw breaking balls until you’re older,’ so I experimented with different things,” Serwa said. “Then my dad was like, ‘Why don’t you try this knuckleball?’
“He showed a grip with his knuckles, and I started trying different variations. Eventually, I got my nails on there and figured out a grip where he couldn’t catch it in front of our house.”
Serwa’s father said: “That’s probably a good pitch to keep going.”
Over the years, it’s only gotten better for Serwa, a 27-year-old righthander who signed with the Tigers in January. He pitched collegiately for four schools from 2016 to 2022 before pitching in independent leagues in 2022 and 2024.
A relationship with the team at Tread Athletics helped Serwa get noticed by scouts. Now, he finds himself walking a dream with High-A West Michigan.
While throwing a knuckleball makes him unique, Serwa has taken it a step further and mixes two variations, the “Yoshi” and a higher-velocity option.
The Yoshi title came courtesy of Serwa’s college roommate.
“I threw one that was going in a circular direction,” Serwa said. “(My roommate) was like, ‘That looks just like a pitch from Mario baseball, like one of Yoshi’s special star pitches.’ So I thought, ‘That’s a pretty good name for it.’ “
The Yoshi variant averages 78-82 mph and moves unpredictably, making it both hard to hit—and hard to catch.
Serwa’s power knuckler can be ramped up as high as 88 mph. For context, the fastest knuckleball ever tracked by Statcast was 84.2 mph by Matt Waldron in 2023. R.A. Dickey topped out at 83.7 mph in 2010 and won a Cy Young Award two years later.
Serwa is still working on perfecting control of his harder knuckleball but makes a point to work with the pitch daily.
In five April appearances he recorded a 2.20 ERA with 16 strikeouts and five walks in 16.1 innings.
