V-Lo & radar guns

Fred Martin was credited with teaching the split. Bruce Sutter was his student. Worked out pretty well for Sut.

 

Bruce Sutter and Jack Morris were two of the best wheeling and dealing the split IMHO.

 

Splitters are a refined version of the forkball. The forkball is a very old pitch and mostly relegated to the ashbin of pitches.

 

The "hard as you can" is to make it look like a fastball. Forkballs and splitters have low rotation and move differently from a circle change also thrown to look like a fastball.

 

Might as well throw in curveball and slider as they are all off speed pitches.

Screwball is more like a curveball with opposite spin and not a change. Very few could master it at a high level. Mike Marshall pitching for the Dodgers in the 1970's had a great one. I would think that pitchers with a really good two-seamer might be able to throw that pitch.

And all these different pitches that you lump into "change up" all look different at the plate.

And you forgot the Eephus pitch.

And two-seam, four-seam and cutter fastballs are not just fastballs.

 

jhf—

Still, I’d rather listen to a real baseball guy that played at the highest level and played that position talk about it over some analytics person rambling numbers without any real working knowledge of the game.

 

Fernando Valenzuela threw a lot of screwballs

 

Yes he did—across the history of the game he was one of the top five pitchers IMHO that had great success utilizing his screwball. The other four (at least in my eyes) were Christy Mathewson, Warren Spahn, Mike Cuellar, and Tug McGraw.

For whatever reasons it seems that there’s not a lot of interest in making the pitch a working part of today’s pitching repertoires.

 

I think that if you have a natural two seamer with a lot of arm side motion you can learn to throw a screwball without messing up your arm. You already impart the rotation required with a natural motion but just need to throw it slower and with a bit higher spin rate. And it would come out of the same arm slot.

But if you have a natural two seamer with a lot of armside motion you probably are not looking at a screwball as a pitch to throw. You already have a pitch that breaks that way with some sink. A straight change might be more effective.

 

Carl Hubbel?

 

Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey are two of the greatest screwball comedies of all time.

In cricket they call it a googly. Spin bowlers threw whatever they call the ball with a lot of spin and once it hit the pitch it would take sharp turn.

Never played the game but I knew a lot of guys from India that did.