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The pitcher is the planner, the initiator of action. The hitter can only react. If the pitcher, any pitcher, finds a way to disrupt that reaction, he can win. You need a little luck and relentless curiosity.
Wherever I went, in my travels as the national baseball writer for The New York Times, I sought people who could help me tell the story of every pitch. How did the great ones learn? How did their pitches move? When and why did they use them? What made them work? I settled on 10: the slider, the fastball, the curveball, the knuckleball, the splitter, the screwball, the sinker, the changeup, the spitball, and the cutter. Mussina, who taught me more about pitching than anyone else I covered in 12 years as a beat writer, isn’t sure there are only 10.
The slider is faster than the curveball and easier to control, with a tighter break, shaped not like a loop but like a slash, moving down and away toward the pitcher’s glove side.
Batters hit just .233 in at-bats ending with sliders in 2017, their worst average against any pitch. The Pirates’ Chris Archer, who has one of baseball’s best sliders, gave a simple reason why: “Of all the true breaking balls—slurve, curve, slider—it looks the most like a fastball for the longest.”
George Blaeholder and George Uhle, whose careers ended in 1936, were early pioneers.
Williams called the slider “the greatest pitch in baseball,” easy for a pitcher to learn and control.
It can be especially effective for a fast ball pitcher because it comes up to the plate looking like a fast ball. It has less speed, but not enough for the hitter to detect the slightly reduced speed early in the pitch. The slider darts sharply just before it reaches the plate, away from a right-handed hitter when thrown by a right-handed pitcher. It doesn’t break much—four to six inches—but because it breaks so late, the hitter has trouble catching up to it.
The logic behind the pitch was so easy to understand, and the pitch itself so simple to learn—generally, but not always: off-center grip, pressure applied to the middle finger, and possibly a late, subtle wrist snap—yet there remained an odd kind of backlash against it into the 1950s.
The pitch was widely derided as a “nickel curve”—a breaking ball, yes, but a cheap knockoff of the real thing. That term is long gone, but “cement mixer,” which describes a lazy and obvious slider, persists today.
Forever curious, Sain was the leading pitching mind of his era.
Call it a short curve, or maybe a slurve, but basically it acted like a slider, and Sain’s pupils used it to dominate the 1960s and early 1970s. All of these pitchers won 20 games under his guidance: Kaat, Whitey Ford, Mudcat Grant, Denny McLain, Jim Bouton, Al Downing, Jim Perry, Wilbur Wood, Stan Bahnsen.
Tom Glavine always remembered Sain’s advice on breaking balls: impart spin but think fastball, to protect your elbow through the delivery. Too often, pitchers try to generate break with their elbows and forearms. The safer, more effective way is to do it with the wrist and hand.
His Triple-A manager for the Cardinals, Johnny Keane, told Gibson that the pitch he called a curveball was actually a slider.
Gibson’s masterpiece was 1968, when he resolved to use the slider more, especially to left-handers, with catcher Tim McCarver’s encouragement. Gibson authored one of the greatest seasons a pitcher has ever had, going 22–9 with a 1.12 earned run average, the lowest ever.
Molitor faced 14 pitchers more often than he faced Guidry. Yet Guidry struck him out more than anyone—20 times in just 74 plate appearances. Molitor is in the Hall of Fame and Guidry is not. But for Guidry’s first 10 full seasons in the majors, no pitcher won more games.
Guidry learned pitching philosophy from one Yankee reliever, Dick Tidrow—“pitch ’em low, bust ’em high”—and learned his slider from another, Sparky Lyle, who threw with the same over-the-top technique. Lyle had come to the majors with the Red Sox. As a farmhand, he became intrigued by the slider when Ted Williams, then a spring training coach, told him it was the best pitch in baseball. Williams told Lyle how a slider spins, but said the rest was up to him.
Sometime during the 1992 season, Johnson was scheduled to throw a bullpen session before a game against the Rangers at the Kingdome. The Mariners’ bullpen was then located down the right field line, beyond the visitors’ dugout, which Johnson passed on his walk there. Rangers pitching coach Tom House had gone to USC, like Johnson, and asked if he wanted to watch Tex throw in the Rangers’ bullpen. Tex was Nolan Ryan. Johnson said yes, and it changed the course of his career.
“We’ve seen some things that you’ve been doing,” House told Johnson, who demonstrated his mechanical flaw for me, many years later, in a boardroom at Chase Field in Phoenix. He rose from a table and faced a wall. “I was landing on the heel of my foot, so I’d be spinning and I would lose my arm angle,”
Johnson won four Cy Young Awards for the Diamondbacks, part of a five-year stretch in which he averaged almost 350 strikeouts per season and beat the Yankees three times in the 2001 World Series, a year in which he struck out a mind-bending 419 hitters, postseason included.
John Smoltz, who entered the Hall of Fame with Johnson in 2015, also had a wipeout slider. Two, actually: one before his 2000 Tommy John surgery, and one after.
Every pitcher, no matter what else he throws, understands this rule: The best pitch in baseball is a well-located fastball.
The king of the box, in those days, was Old Hoss Radbourn, who was 59–12 with a 1.38 ERA in 1884. He logged nearly 700 of the 1,000 or so innings pitched by his Providence Grays.
“Radbourn was said to stand in the right-hand rear corner, turn his back on the batter similar to the way Luis Tiant did it in the 1970s, and then take a hop, skip and deliver his pitch from the left side of the box,” wrote Craig R. Wright and Tom House in The Diamond Appraised. “His motion was much like a modern shot-putter’s turn.”
Denton True Young, known as Cy for a wheeling, cyclone-like delivery in which he hid the ball from the hitter. Big for his time—6 foot 2, 210 pounds—he set nearly every longevity record with a disciplined lifestyle forged on a farm in Ohio as a boy.
Paige was such a control artist, he was said to warm up with a stick of chewing gum for a plate; he practiced hitting the corners of the wrapper. It wasn’t the only home plate substitute he could find at a drugstore.
In 1971, when Paige was elected to the Hall of Fame, he recalled his tryout for Bill Veeck with the Indians in 1948: “He asked me to throw at a cigarette as a plate, and I threw four out of five over it.”
Kaat led his league in hits allowed three seasons in a row, but he also won 60 games in that stretch, including one in the World Series.
Kaat wishes teams would take their hard-throwing prospects and tell them to work three innings without topping 90 miles an hour.
Ryan’s elbow finally gave out at the Seattle Kingdome on September 22, 1993. Pitching for the Rangers, he served up a grand slam to Dann Howitt (the last of the five homers in Howitt’s short career), and then departed before he could finish his last batter, Dave Magadan.
It is possible to be Picasso with a machine gun, as reliever Dan Plesac colorfully described Curt Schilling’s fastball command to writer Jayson Stark. But such artistry and power form a rare combination indeed; nobody born between 1857 and 1985 can top Schilling’s career strikeout-to-walk ratio of 4.38-to-1.
As UCL injuries interrupt or end more and more professional careers, the majority of Tommy John surgeries—56.8 percent, according to a 2015 study cited in The Arm, Jeff Passan’s brilliant exploration of the epidemic—are now performed on teenagers.
“Velocity doesn’t come from a program,” says Roy Silver, a former minor leaguer who worked with Bush in that parking lot and signed him for Texas. “If you’re an atheist, it comes from your ancestors; if you’re not an atheist, it’s God-given.
One of the game’s most dominant closers, Billy Wagner, threw 100 mph with the wrong hand.
“I can’t do anything left-handed other than throw,” Wagner says. “I can’t hold a pencil. I almost poke myself in my eye with my left hand if I’m trying to eat.
up until the big leagues, velo is king, and in the minor leagues, guys that have poor results but throw really hard get a lot more opportunities than guys that have really good results but throw 86, 88.
When pitchers suddenly throw harder, Wolforth says, they must also learn the right way to decelerate in their follow-through;
With so many hard throwers, Tom House believes, the traditional starting pitcher, as we have long known the role, will soon cease to exist. Future staffs, he predicted, will be made up of 12 pitchers throwing three times a week, with nobody working more than 45 pitches per game or going more than once through the lineup.
In 1976—in a 24-team league—47 pitchers reached 215 innings. By 2017, that number had fallen to zero across the game’s 30 teams.
Max Scherzer, a dominant right-hander for the Nationals, says hitters know they can’t string together singles against such overpowering stuff, so they tailor their swings to hit fly balls. They drive more misplaced fastballs into the seats and accept more strikeouts as a trade-off.
Those two trends are joined tightly together, another paradox in a sport full of them: when the fastball speeds up, the game slows down.
With the curveball, feel is big. The fastball, like nearly every other pitch, is thrown with backspin. The curveball is thrown with topspin, the seams whooshing downward as the pitch tumbles to Earth. Only certain pitchers have the loose, easy wrist action to make a ball act that way.
“Being able to spin the ball, either you can or you can’t,” says Nolan Ryan, who may have thrown the most devastating curve of all.
“The way many of us were taught to throw the curveball was to mentally think fastball out of the hand,” said Bryan Price, the longtime pitching coach and manager. “Even as you get up into what we call your power position, as your hand comes forward, it’s in fastball position first, and then accelerates into curveball position. That gives you hand speed through the pitch and gives you a tighter spin, tighter break, and more deception.”
Koufax has giant hands, and when he opened his glove wide from the stretch, savvy hitters knew he was gripping his curveball. Usually, it didn’t even matter.
Because lefties are harder to find, they tend to get more chances to stick, and rarely must resort to a last-chance trick like the knuckler or splitter. Lefty relievers invariably need a breaking ball that moves away from a lefty hitter; once they have that to go with a fastball, there’s usually little need for a third pitch.
If they do try one, it’s usually a changeup. If that doesn’t work, the splitter can be another option.
Many masters of the split-finger turned to the pitch for the same reason as Finley and Shreve. Ron Darling’s hands were too big for the changeup. John Smoltz threw his changeup too hard. Dan Haren could never turn over his wrist comfortably, and begged the Cardinals to let him throw his old high school splitter in the minors.
Craig became pitching coach for the Tigers in 1980 and taught the pitch to Milt Wilcox the next season. Wilcox was throwing it in the bullpen one day in Oakland in 1982, with Jack Morris watching. Morris was a star by then, but his slider had started to flatten and he needed an out pitch. In his previous start, in Anaheim, he had been torched for six runs without a strikeout. Wilcox showed Morris his grip.
“So I’m getting loose and I throw about 20, and nothing,” Morris says. “I was about ready to quit and he goes, ‘Put your thumb on the side this time, make sure you get your hand out in front, pull through out here.’ So I threw about three more and the fourth one was just—whomp, straight down. And immediately I go, ‘Holy shit, this is like cheating. If I get this down, there ain’t nobody alive gonna hit it.’
His unwavering support of the screwball is just a small part of the revolution he believes he could unleash: 10 miles an hour added to everyone’s fastball, and pronated breaking balls that never damage the elbow.
