Pitching

Factual Questions
1

“Shawn Estes Has been pitching wonderfully for the Giants in his last few outings. His fastball has been effective. He’s using his changes ups and breaking balls to keep the batters guessing, even his hard sliders aren’t getting hit…”

Huh?

Could someone straighten me out as to what all the types of pitches are? I’m a casual baseball fan(giants if you haven’t already guessed) and I’ve never known what the different pitches are. When I was a kid it was fastball and curveball and thats it.

Any help?

John

2

hmm, wonder where the big baseball fans are?
Well here’s another one
knuckleball - if I recall right the beauty of this pith is it has no rotation so it follows a path that is quite different from other pitches

I believe a change-up is just the same pitch at a different speed. Breaking ball might be the same kind of deal.

I’ve always thought that a slider was a kind of side-ways curve ball. So the pitch would ‘slide’ away from the batter. So it looks hitable but keeps drifting till it’s not.

3

thanks rat I was getting discouraged.

4

The following is largely derived from the chapter on pitching from Leonard Koppett’s “The Thinking Fan’s Guide To Baseball.”

A fastball is essentially straight, although it does have a little movement to it (what the commentators call a “live” fastball).

A curveball breaks down and away from a hitter of the same-handedness as the pitcher.

A changeup is a pitch that is significantly slower than usual. As a pitcher, you are trying to get the hitter to think you’re throwing a fastball, and thereby swing the bat far too early. A “straight change” is a changeup that travels the same basic path as a fastball. Some pitchers use their curveballs as their change-of-pace pitch.

A slider moves a little bit left or right, but not much up or down.

A sinker moves down, but not really left or right.

A screwball is a very rare pitch. It acts as a reverse curve, breaking down and in toward a hitter of the same-handedness as the pitcher. It puts a lot of strain on the arm, however.

A knuckleball is thrown with no spin, causing it to be randomly affected by the air. It’s so easy to throw, you can be a good knuckleballer well into your 40s.

A split-fingered fastball drops.

A spitball – or Vaseline ball or K-Y ball or whatever – will drop. For more information about these pitches, read up on Gaylord Perry, evil master of pitches involving illegal stuff.

Let me just add that there’s no such pitch as a breaking ball – that term refers to any kind of pitch that breaks. I must confess, I managed to make it into my mid-20s before I realized this fact. I always wanted to know what the grip of a “breaking ball” was.

5

I found a terrific guide to pitching on the official site of Roger Clemens. Check it out.

http://www.rocketroger.com/guide/

6

Breaking Ball vs. Curve anticipated your thread by a few hours and includes an link to a excellent Popular Mechanics site with complete descriptions of various pitches, how they’re thrown, what path they follow.

7

A very common pitch not yet mentioned is the “hanging curve”, so-called because it tends to hang over the plate until the batter knocks it over a distant fence. This pitch was a specialty of the Cleveland Indians’ teams of my youth.

8

And for those non-baseball people, or the casual fans reading this, I’d like to point out that PatrickM is kidding. The “hanging curve” is not a pitch to be learned and practiced, but just a curveball that didn’t do what the pitcher wanted, thus it gets knocked out of the park.

9

I also just wanted to clarify some of **Snooooopy’s **answers:
A curveball breaks down and away from a hitter of the same-handedness as the pitcher.
In other words, if the pitcher is right-handed, the curveball curves down and to the left. A lefty’s curve goes down and to the right.

A slider moves a little bit left or right, but not much up or down.
Whereas a curve ball moves in a curving path throughout, the slider will travel rather straight, and then ‘slide’ left or right. A good slider will also slant downwards slightly.

Sometimes you will hear an announcer talk about a “slurve” This is a pitch that is in between a slider and a curve. I don’t think this is an “official” pitch to be learned, as much as it is the result of the pitcher not quite throwing the slider or curve well. I could be wrong on that however.

A sinker moves down, but not really left or right.
To clarify this a bit more, the sinker goes straight, then drops down, sort of like a vertical slider. A sinker that doesn’t sink usually ends up as a knee-deep fastball and often gets hammered.

A split-fingered fastball drops.
And the difference between this and a sinker is that it drops hard. If you throw a split-fingered fastball, the catcher has to be ready to get that ball out of the dirt.

A spitball
As said, this is illiegal. So is using emery boards or razor blades to scuff up the ball, which casues the ball to move randomly when pithed.

10

One thing that has not been mentioned is that a good fastball (a “live” fastball) rises, which makes the split-finger fastball that much more effective.

11

According to this site, among others, the rising fastball is a myth.

[hijack] How do you attribute a quote to its source in vb code? [/hijack]

12

And to work on clarifying the clarification…

I don’t think the slurve is an “official” pitch, as such, but it certainly can be extremely effective. It’s, as you may imagine, partway between a slider and a curve.

Much of the time, it may very well be due to a misthrowing of a slider.

However, some pitchers (and here, I am thinking of Kerry Wood) throw the thing on purpose. When you see highlights of guys that Wood has just struck out standing there looking like total fools, this is generally what he threw. Ask the Astros, and more recently, the Giants, about it.

Of course, it has a tendency to stress the elbow. Fortunately, there’s this wonderful thing called Tommy John surgery…

13

In tennis, a sliced ball will rise due to the underspin. IMHO, in baseball, a fastball will rise for the same reason. The pitcher releases the ball wsith his two fingers across the seams, causing underspin.

The engineers also once said that it was impossible for a baseball to curve, until it was proven otherwise.

14

No human being can throw a baseball fast enough to make it rise. It is impossible.

However, the underspin can cause a hard-thrown fastball can have less drop than you would expect; since it drops less than anticipated, it can give the illusion of rising. This is especially pronounced if the pitch is high; owing to perspective, a shoulder-high fastball doesn’t seem that high until it gets to you.

15

Quoth Crunchy Frog:

Sorry to disappoint you, but the horizontal component of any baseball’s motion (aside from random effects from the wind or an illegally modified surface) is an arc of a circle, for the entire path. You can get some interesting vertical paths from the combination of gravity and lift, but the same doesn’t work horizontally. Note that things may well look different from the plate, though. What’s probably happening here is that the pitch is originally aimed a slight bit off to one side, as it leaves the pitcher’s hand, and then curves towards the other side.

16

Chronos, care to explain why the motions that can cause lift or sinking cannot cause horizontal movement?

If we agree that the ball’s spin-properties can ‘steer’ it, then why does this steering go out the physic’s window when horizontal movement is involved?

A slider is thrown with a relatively stiff elbow, so that the up/down effects are minimized, and the horizontal effects are maximized. Steve Carlton (aka “Lefty”) used to embarrass left handers by throwing sliders that wound up outside the strike zone, with good leteral movement on the ball.

The pitch was so good, and so tempting to the batter, that he could throw it three times in a row and drop Willie Stargel like a school boy.

So, you conceded lift, so don’t you automatically concede lateral movement?

17

Philster, with vertical movement, you have two forces at work-the lift (positive or negative) from the spin of the ball, and gravity. With horizontal movement, all you have is the ‘lift’. (I don’t know what to call that force when it’s horizontal-I guess that will do.) Chronos’ point is that the path of any breaking pitch (again, as he said, barring scuffing of the ball & wind effects) viewed from above will be either a straight line or an arc of a circle. This does not preclude the possibility of the pitch appearing to take a sharp inside or outside break, from the point of view of the batter.

Viewed from the side, the path of a breaking pitch will be the sum of a parabolic path (from gravity) and the arc of a circle (from the lift). Because the parabolic portion does increase in pitch, the effect of the curve ball ‘falling off’ at the end of its path is not entirely illusion-but in fact, at the speeds of your typical major-league pitch, the better part of the curve is from the lift, so even that is actually mostly perception. (The exception would be a very slow curve with lots of motion, eg. Scott Sanderson’s [anyone remember him?] putaway pitch.)

18

No one has yet mentioned the “purpose pitch,” also known as “a little chin music.” This pitch is very effective at not only moving the batter off the plate (particularly if you catch him right on the ear guard), but it has also been known to clear both benches. If Randy Johnson ever decides to toss a purpose pitch your way, do yourself a favor and get the hell out of the way.

19

Many a sliced tennis ball has been hit to me (and, I proudly say, many I have hit) that are below the level of the net cord, rise at the last moment and clear the net, before gravity takes hold. Fastballs can travel in excess of 90 mph. A good fast serve will be slightly higher (the fastest recorded was 149, but that’s the exception).

I dare say that for the average player ground strokes are not hit as hard as a baseball can be thrown. I have no data and I may be wrong,but that’s my educated guess.

20

A tennis ball is quite a bit lighter than a baseball. Also, I am guessing it is possible to get more spin on a tennis ball using a racket than a pitcher can produce with his hand. The spin produces lift, which must counteract weight in order for the ball to rise. The shape, size, and outer surface of the ball probably also play a role in determining how much lift can be produced at a given rpm. I think these factors make a direct comparison very difficult.