The search for a new change-up can involve fidgeting between grips until one fits, like a key in a lock. There’s the circle change that sets the ball deeper in the hand or the change-up that former Cardinals pitcher Jeff Suppan discovered — he called it a “FOSH,” because he was urged to hold the ball as if he were giving a “dead fish” handshake.

In his quest for a change, Zack Thompson found that feeling quickly.

“We’re only on (grip) No. 2,” Thompsons said. “And this one has got some traction.”

But it’s not any of the usual change-ups.

“They’re calling it the kick change,” he said.

Welcome to Day 2 of the Winter Warm-up, where Jordan Walker is talking about the weight that he gained, Masyn Winn is describing the lunge in his swing that he lost and two pitchers are dropping names of new pitches like “kick change” and “death ball.” This is what happens when they have some time in the offseason to follow former teammate Jordan Montgomery to a facility outside of Charlotte and aim to reshape a few pitches.

Both Thompson and right-handed reliever Andre Pallante visited Tread Athletics and while there took an audit of their pitches and their repertoire.

Their goals were similar.

“A little more swing and miss,” Pallante said.

“We’re going after some strikeouts,” Thompson said.

The “kick change” that Thompson’s adopted has a spiked middle finger as part of its grip — digging in with the middle finger as if it’s a shark fin off the ball. The result is a change-up that has less spin and thus has more vertical drop. Thompson’s previous change-up did not have that much depth, and that led to it straying up in the zone and rendered it ineffective. While his role fluctuated from reliever to starter throughout this past season, what did not for Thompson was the use of his change-up. He ditched it.

Fewer than 2 out of every 100 pitches he threw were the change-up.

Shortly after he threw his final pitch of the season, he sought to change that.

“Working at Tread this offseason, we were looking over my arsenal a little bit, and I knew coming in kind of the main thing I wanted to checklist was working the change-up,” Thompson said. “So we’ve been working on it. Trying to (also) steal a page from Monty’s book — a little bit of a smaller curveball too. Might have a couple of different shapes this spring.”

Traded to Texas at the deadline, Montgomery emerged as the Rangers’ postseason ace, and his curveball came complete with a nickname: “death ball.” It was a harder, firmer curveball that, because of his height and its release point, played off of his fastball.

That is what Pallante sought.

“The big focus of this offseason was trying to improve my off-speed (pitches),” Pallante said. “That was something that was lacking from my game last year. Hopefully, I can get a little more swing-and-miss, a little more chase out of the zone. So that’s the idea. That’s the goal. The way I went about that, I tried working on a couple different variations of slider and curveball. The curveball variation has been really coming along really well. I’m excited for that. I’m excited to go face some hitters in spring training and see what they think, and hopefully that is something that carries into the year and gets the results I’m looking for.”

This past season, Pallante threw a slider 17.5% of the time, and he dropped a curveball at 13.4%. The right-hander had greater success against left-handed batters, and he was one of the greediest ground-ball-getters in the game. That worked for him (quick outs with runners on base) but not as often as it seemed to work against him (ground balls skipping past fielders). The Cardinals spent time during the season trying to calculate how to nudge his mix of pitches slightly so that instead of weak ground balls he could get whiffs.

Or, as he put it Sunday: “Eliminate that ground-ball risk.”

The different ways he explored to do that were adjusting his slider, putting it on a more sweeper-like plane. He recognized that doing so telegraphed that a breaking ball was coming, so he shifted to a curveball — a pitch he could hide with the same release point as his fastball. And that he could throw harder than the 76.9 mph his curve averaged last year. He could get it up toward Montgomery’s 80.6 mph average. In other words: death ball.

“I know that is something someone tagged on Twitter,” he said. “The curveball is something that I’ve been able to do, and it’s easy for me. It’s consistent. I’m throwing it harder. I’ve been throwing it 3, 4 mph harder in my bullpens, been getting a good break on it. That is something that I think is going to take me a good, long way.

“The slider variation — I was trying to throw a more horizontal slider as opposed to the gyro slider I had been throwing,” Pallante added. “That required a lot of wrist manipulation, a little bit of movement with how I was moving my body, and I noticed my arm slot was changing with it. That’s not the direction I want to go. I’m trying to make this pitch look like my fastball. I’m not trying to throw a metric pitch that looks good on Trackman.”

Pallante said he’s eager to get to spring training to test the curveball against hitters and see if they see what he sees. That’s all that matters.

His hope is that the curve and the fastball come from the same release spot.

And then they go in radically different directions on the hitter.

At Class AAA, Thompson had difficulty taking advantage of that element of his delivery. A tall, upright left-hander, Thompson played his curveball off an elevated fastball for that same effect — the hitter had to react to a pitch that could stay up or plunge down. Nothing about Thompson’s delivery hinted at which one was which. Only the speed did. But the automated ball-strike (ABS) system used in the minors didn’t dig the elevated fastball.

“The ABS — I felt like I had to make a big adjustment with my game,” he said. “You can’t stick a fastball anywhere above the belt in Triple-A. It’s just not a strike. And for me, it’s a little tough. The fastball covers my curveball. I had to switch to more of a pound-the-bottom-of-the-strike-zone-with-the-fastball (approach), mix in the slider a lot more. (That) helped me in the long run coming back up. The slider turned into a weapon.”

Now he wants the curve back.

“I leaned on it hard and guys didn’t hit it hard a ton, but I didn’t get the whiff I needed on it,” Thompson said. “I need to be able to get those strikeouts, avoid wasting some pitches. We’re going after some strikeouts with the additional curveball this year.”

Which could be the death ball.

That goes with the kick change.

All to expand how much he can throw as a starter.

Or the pitches he can choose from as a reliever.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Thompson said. “It’s what arsenal do I need to be a consistent starter, to take the ball 30 times a year and put up innings. How do I get through a lineup three times, maybe more? I haven’t thought of what pitches I would need to scrap to go to the bullpen yet.”