All baseball pitchers have, basically, the same motion. If you had never seen a pitch thrown, it would look odd: The pitcher contorts his body in the “wind-up”, raising his hands above his head and swinging them back around when delivering the pitch. Or, if the pitcher is pitching “from the stretch”, there is no wind-up, but there is a similar, simpler sequence of moves the pitcher makes before delivering the pitch.
(Aside: I know, I know: there are submariners, side-armers, etc. But their motions are primarily tweaks of the baseline motion that all pitchers use.)
My question is: Is the motion adopted by baseball pitchers inevitable? In other words, is it the most efficient way for a human body to deliver a ball to a catcher 60.5 feet away accurately and with certain spin and velocity characteristics? Or, alternatively, is the motion a historically-based relic? Do pitchers pitching out of a wind-up lift their hands above their heads the way they do simply because some weirdos in a grassy field in 1880 did it?
A hypothetical helpful to me: Imagine we find a planet populated by humans who are physiologically identical to us, but have never had any contact with our planet. We teach them the rules of baseball. We leave. We come back in a hundred years. Are the alien pitchers throwing the ball the same way as the Earth pitchers?
I’m only guessing here, but given the number of people who play baseball at at least semi-competitive levels, I imagine that if there was a more-effective or at-least-as-effective way of doing it, someone would have stumbled upon it by now.
I always thought the hands-lifting was to get the elbows out of the way of a high-rising knee, which would be swinging a bit due to hip rotation.
The second thing I’m going to suggest may or may not have much relevance: you can take in a deeper breath with your arms raised. Perhaps that deeper breath, and the oxygen so delivered, allows the pitcher to work up just a tad more oomph on the delivery.
If you look at films of old pitchers you will see that the motion of current pitchers is much more efficient and refined. Pitchers motions are constantly filmed and analyzed. A lot of work has been done to break it down to a science. Pitching coaches look for flaws in the mechanics and make corrections to improve a pitchers accurancy and velocity. They know when a shoulder is dropping, the elbow is out too far, the release point is a little off, the pitcher is steppin wrong, etc., etc.
With all of the baseball that has been played there isn’t much that’s left to chance.
I cannot answer your questions directly. However, I do know that much of a pitcher’s movements are designed to get their whole body moving in sync. All the fancy mumbo-jumbo is done to get as much of the body’s momentum into the ball as possible. That being said, a full wind-up is also done to distract the batter. With every part of the pitcher’s body moving, it is harder for the batter to focus directly on the ball. Yes, it can be done with focus, but movement in the periphrial is very distracting. When there are people on base, the pitcher will use a “set” wind-up, where they bring the ball and glove to their chest, and make one movement towards the plate. This is quicker than the three part, full wind-up. Since pitchers use a full wind-up when they don’t have to worry about base runners, it must be advantageous to the set position.
That being said, it is my guess that it is actually the most effecient way. Bringing the ball above the head allows the pitcher to “whip” it towards the plate, using their arm and torso as the biggest possible lever advantage, rotating about the hips. Softball fast-pitches, in comparison, travel around 70 mph, about 30 mph less.
The pitching motion is certainly the end result of the basic rules of baseball. The most important of which says that the pitcher must deliver the ball from a stand-still atop the pitching rubber. Most other position players take multiple steps forward to help impart forward momentum on the ball. The only other position player who generally won’t run into a throw is a catcher when attempting to catch a base stealing runner, and a catcher (unless he is Benito Santiago in his prime) will generally use a similar motion without all the preliminary stretches and such.
For a person who has never learned to pitch, you might not ever notice know that a surprising amount of a pitcher’s power comes from the upper legs and not simply the arm and shoulder. The windup is a means to get the thigh muscles “behind” the the throw. The first time I really noticed this while watching a game was seeing Kerry Wood’s 20 K game.
It seems to me that the accompanying pre-pitch actions are mostly a means to ready the body to get into proper position to perform what is generally a very violent and complicated act (something like what martial artists do). The balk rule, which as its Wikipedia entry says, generally constrains pitchers into a limited range of legal motions leading up to a pitch meaning most pitchers generally follow the same set of procedures.
I coach Little League, and took my son to a weekend youth baseball camp once. It was run by a college baseball coach and his staff. I spent some time talking to the pitching coach, who had also been a pro pitcher in the minors. Having an interest in science, I was asking about efforts to do kinematic analysis of pitching motion to determine efficiencies. As **Spartydog ** says, the science of pitching as well as nearly every aspect of baseball mechanics has been studied rigorously. I can’t tell you the rationale for every single move of the pitching motion, and probably a lot of pitchers can’t either, but the best coaches can.
The interesting thing about sports, though, is that every human body is different and what works for one guy might not for another. Coaches learn to allow leeway for this variation. But as **Spiral Stairs ** says, regardless of how a pitcher gets started, whether the wind-up or the stretch, and whatever his idiosyncrasies, the pitch always ends up the same way (for the standard overhead motion).
(The same is true of batting. At this camp, they videotaped the boys batting, and then played it back in some software where you could indicate where are the knees, hips, wrists, bat, etc., and analyze the swing. They also had video of big-league players so you could compare your swing to A-Rod, for example. They didn’t do the same thing for pitching but I’m sure it’s the same process.)
Part of the motion is a result of keeping the ball and throwing hand hidden in the glove until the last possible instant. A pitcher will grip the ball differently for a fast ball vs. a curve, and doesn’t want to tip the batter as to what is coming.
Mike Marshall, NL Cy Young Award winner in 1974, has worked a lot on developing a pitching motion that is different than what is commonly used, but most of the pro coaches around are afraid to let their pitchers adopt it. A lot of that is because it is unfamiliar to them (and they can’t give instruction on it) and also because Marshall is disliked by a lot of people in baseball because he is an iconoclast.
I can’t say exactly what Marshall’s style is, but he has spent a lot of time researching it.
I heard Marshall speak at the SABR convention last year in Seattle and he advocated his pitching style as well as the idea that all players on a team should be paid relatively the same amount. For example, the Yankees would not pay A-Rod so much more than some guy who is not as experienced and/or good. He wanted a socialist model for paying players.
Fascinating. I would love to see some video of his motion. (Unfortunately, I was two when he won his Cy Young.) There might be some on YouTube, but thanks to my employer’s attitudes on internet usage, I can’t check until I’m at home.
I found this quote from him in an interview: “Professional baseball started about 130 years ago and baseball has just been copying the guy who won the most games that first year.”
Serious Nitpick to stop a commonly believed piece of bad information:
Please keep in mind the Yanks do not pay A-Rod so much more, the Ranger’s gave A-Rod his silly contract and pay enough of it each year that the Yanks are only paying around $18 million. The same amount or less than players like Jeter, Soriano, Beltran, etc. Therefore, while A-Rod makes a ridiculous amount of money, the Yankees neither signed the contract nor actually pay him the amount.
From the stands it’d look not too much different. Every pitch has a different approach, but the basic jist of it is that Marshall teaches pitchers to rotate the arm in such a manner that the palm faces outwards, and to throw with a motion that minimizes the initial backwards rotation, and expend more energy going forward. The pitcher commences his motion with both feet facing the plate, and brings the arm back, with the hand kept way back. It is then brought strictly overhand and driven towards the plate. Marshall emphasizes keeping the hand back and the arm moving in a line towards home plate, with no body rotation away from the plate and circular motion - e.g. force applied towards first or third base - absolutely minimized.
The motion sort of looks like a javelin thrower who’s learned how to pitch.
Marshall’s coaching isn’t just about the pitching motion; he emphasizes strength training.
Really? It seems like there’s enough time from the start of the windup to the pitch that someone on the team could watch with binoculars and signal to the batter if it were a big enough advantage to know this.
In case that is not sarcasm, no, the batter has to be focusing on the ball, and there is certainly not time to signal the batter…because the pitcher intentionally keeps the ball hidden until the last possible instant.
There would be no need to signal. An experienced batter could tell at a glance by looking at the orientation of the seams on the ball. cite note that there are variations, but a given pitcher is going to grip the ball exactly the same way every time for a given pitch.
Not sarcasm (probably just ignorance). I’m not too knowledgeable about baseball, but most of the time I watch it, it seems like there is a several second gap between when the pitcher gets into his “ready” position and when he actually lets go of the ball. The ball may be hidden from the batter, but wouldn’t be hidden from someone in the dugout with some kind of magnification device, and the signal from him could get to the batter in time.
Heck, I bet that a computer trained on the body language of a given pitcher could figure it out just from the way he holds himself. And doesn’t the catcher sometimes signal to the pitcher? Isn’t anyone watching that?
Clearly, what the game really needs is more counter-espionage tactics
The use of such devices is forbidden. In any event, no, you couldn’t see the pitcher’s grip because he’s usually holding the ball inside his glove at that point.
There is no explicit rule anywhere in the rules of baseball that prohibit the use of artificial magnification devices or remote signaling or anything like that to keep teams from stealing signs. If you read Joshua Prager’s “The Echoing Green”, he details how baseball has tried to take steps against this, but has never enacted a rule.
What happens is that when such instances turn up, teams get fined and players and coaches can get suspended, but usually nothing much happens. There have only been a handful of suspensions handed out for illegal sign stealing.
