The Rockaway Wave
Originally Published July 11, 2025
Every pitcher’s windup is different.
Clayton Kershaw has one of the most distinctive windups of all time. Dontrelle Willis would bring his right leg almost clean over his head. Carter Capps would actually hop off the rubber and move a few inches down the mound before he delivered a pitch.
Noah Hall does something unique in his windup.
“Everybody talks about that,” Hall said, laughing.
A right-hand pitcher, Hall’s windup is very similar to his stretch. He starts the same way, with both feet pointed towards third base, but before delivering the pitch, he takes his left foot and swings it backward, taps the ground with his toe, and then continues towards home plate.
“That quick toe tap is just a way for me to not get stuck on my backside and just make sure I’m staying quick and staying athletic,” Hall said.
Hall started using it in 2023, his final season at the University of South Carolina. He said he’s the type of player who needs to move quickly, and if he moves slowly, it’ll throw off his command. Enter the toe-tap. It’s the best way he came up with to keep his windup as repeatable and consistent as possible. With runners on base, the toe tap is simply eliminated.
“He would rock sideways quite a bit, and then he’d have a tough time finding his center again during his leg lift as he’s coming back,” Justin Parker, Hall’s pitching coach at South Carolina, said. “And he was always, at the time at least, he was better from the stretch because of course, you take that piece out of it. But the toe tap, where he’s not transferring any weight to that left foot in a rocker, was more something to keep the tempo up and then just keep his weight stacked through his right foot and much more consistent through his leg lift and windup.”
It’s a combination of a lot of Hall’s favorite pitchers, including his all-time favorite, Pedro Martínez. The Hall-of-Famer and four-year New York Met started with both of his feet pointed toward home plate, like a more traditional windup, and he didn’t have a toe tap, but there are some visible similarities. Martínez had a fast motion, like Hall, and would quickly step back and plant with his left foot before bringing the leg back up to deliver the pitch.
“We used to share a lot of videos on Pedro just from an arsenal standpoint,” Parker said. “Some of it was delivery, some of it was just Pedro even talking on I think it’s that MLB Network set that he does a lot of work with. We went back and forth quite a bit on Pedro.”
The Martínez similarities don’t stop at his windup. Hall’s signature pitch is his changeup, just like the 3-time Cy Young Award winner.
“I love that pitch,” Hall said.
Baseball America called it one of the best changeups in the class ahead of the 2023 MLB Draft, describing it as “a 70-grade pitch with extremely high spin rates and a tremendous amount of arm-side fading action and drop.”
Provided he sets it up correctly, Hall said, it’s his out pitch.
“He’s able to induce a lot of swing and miss, and the most important thing is he’s not afraid of using it right-on-right, which is something that you don’t see quite often,” Cyclones manager Gilbert Gómez said.
Hall has a deep arsenal aside from the cambio.
He throws three different fastballs: A traditional four-seam, a cutter and a sinker. He doesn’t get outstanding IVB on his four-seam, but he throws from a lower arm slot, which helps it play up. This season, it’s been clocked up into the mid-90s.
The sinker is a weapon to help induce ground balls, something Hall has been extremely effective at. Hall is producing a 47.7% ground ball rate, the fourth-best among all qualified Mets minor league pitchers. He trails just Jonah Tong, Brandon Sproat and Nolan McLean.
“I think the two-seamer [sinker] is something that he’s been working more and more on,” Gómez said. “It seems like he’s gotten to the point he’s able to induce ground balls with it at a high rate. He’s one of the guys that induces more ground balls for us, he’s always one pitch away from getting out of a jam.”
It gets a lot of run, Hall said, and he uses it mainly to go inside on righties’ hands. The cutter serves a similar purpose against lefties, getting in on their hands, as well as setting up his short gyro slider.
“That’s something that I’m really good at doing, I can make the ball move,” Hall said.
He also throws a sweeper, which replaced the curveball he threw in college. Hall said that they realized that with his arm slot, a curveball is a tough pitch for him to land consistently. So, they just changed the grip on what was his curveball, and the sweeper was born.
It’s still something he’s working on, and he said it’s shown flashes of it being great and flashes of it being awful.
“I think the sweeper has gotten better,” Gómez said. “I think he’s been able to land it in the zone more. He has that short one that he can throw for a strike and then the big one that he tries to put
guys away with. … I think he blends all those pitches well. The slider, he can make it look like the cutter or sweep it more. There’s that changeup that he can throw to get ahead and also put guys away. He can manipulate and move it around accordingly. It’s a lot of ways to put hitters out right now.”
Now 24 years old, Hall spent the first two years of his college career with Appalachian State University before transferring to South Carolina for his junior year. He was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in 2022 after one season with the Gamecocks, going at pick No. 612 — a 20th-round pick.
“At the beginning of my junior year, I didn’t pitch that well because I went from the Sun Belt to the SEC, so obviously I’m gonna struggle,” Hall said. “But once I started starting throughout the entire SEC play, I was a top-five, top-10 pitcher, and I just felt like the fact I went all the way to the 20th round, I thought I was pretty slept on. I thought it was honestly disrespectful to the work that I put in.”
Hall also said South Carolina was his dream school, and with another year of eligibility remaining, he wanted to go out after a better season than the one he and the Gamecocks had in 2022.
The Gamecocks did have a better season in 2023, making it to the playoffs and winning their regionals before ultimately falling to the University of Florida in the super regionals.
Hall was there, but kept out of action. He injured his back midway through the year, attributing it to doing too much in the weight room. That didn’t stop the Mets from drafting him in the 7th round at pick No. 216 — almost 400 spots higher than the year before.
He was assigned to the High-A Brooklyn Cyclones in 2024 to begin his professional career, but he injured his shoulder after just five starts. He missed practically the rest of the year, returning for a single one-inning appearance in Single-A St. Lucie in September.
For Hall, his 2024 was mainly rehab.
“Rehab sucks, dude, being down there in Florida, it really does,” Hall said. “But … instead of me being down there and just being like ‘Oh, I’m not playing, I’m in Florida, it’s hot,” instead of having that negative mentality, I made it a real challenge to myself to try to ignore those negative thoughts as much as possible and just try to come out better than I was before.”
He said he watched a ton of Mets games as a way to keep himself motivated.
“Watching [Francisco] Lindor, and playing for the same team that Lindor [plays for] is kinda crazy to me because I grew up watching him,” Hall said. “I remember in middle school, I literally wanted to be him.”
One opportunity rehabbing in Florida provided was the chance to speak to and learn from MLB pitchers who were also rehabbing like Kodai Senga, Shintaro Fujinami, Kyle Crick and Bryce Montes de Oca.
“Watching Senga throw his bullpens when he was down there and even in spring training, he’s so intentional with every single thing that he does,” Hall said. “He really sits there and thinks and knows exactly what he wants to do and what is needed for his body, and that’s what I took the most out of all of that.
He said Fujinami, and specifically his trainer/interpreter Issei Kamada, were especially helpful. Hall talked to him a lot about mobility, which he said was his biggest problem when he got hurt.
“I didn’t really realize that mobility and flexibility was a need in order to stay healthy and pitch, and he helped me a lot,” Hall said.
Everyone’s unique, Hall said, and his time down there helped him figure out what he needed for himself specifically.
“I just gotta be athletic,” Hall said. “That was one of the things that I had lost going to school, I lost my athleticism and I lost my flexibility just being in the weight room and hitting the weight so hard. I realized that I really don’t need to ego lift and do as much as I thought I needed to.”
This season, Hall is finally healthy, and he’s been one of the best arms in the Mets’ system.
In 71 and 1⁄3 innings, Hall has turned in a 2.65 ERA with 78 strikeouts. He’s only given up 54 hits, but he’s also allowed 42 free passes and hit five batters. He chalked the control issues up to the amount of time he missed, and said he’s still re-learning himself and how to pitch.
He still doesn’t feel like he’s completely in sync, but he’s just so happy to be back on the mound.
“I have to catch myself sometimes, being so hard on myself, because obviously I’m a competitor,” Hall said. “But I have to just tell myself, when I hurt my back, it was coaches and doctors telling me that I was never gonna be the same, this was gonna happen again. And just to be able to prove all those people wrong, and show them that God is a miracle worker, and you can get through anything if you just put your faith in him and just grind. It really is incredible for me to just be able to keep playing right now. It’s honestly indescribable. I missed it a lot, and I never want it to go away again.”
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