Once upon a strikeout, the only pitches mentioned as part of a repertoire — for right-handers as well as left-handers — were the fastball, the curve and the change-up. Pitchers hoping to make it in major-league baseball were scouted on their abilities to throw each, or all, of those pitches.
Occasionally, along came a knuckleball, not only difficult to throw — allegedly — but also difficult to predict its destination. Nobody, including the man who threw it, seemed to know where it was going to land, which often wasn’t in the catcher’s mitt. The Washington Senators — from another era — once had a catcher named Clint Courtney who came up with a catcher’s mitt that was approximately twice the size of normal. It was such a novel idea that photos of the glove were wired around the country by The Associated Press.
Also occasionally, pitchers threw the spitball. It also made strange and unpredictable movements after being lathered with saliva, grease or whatever concoctions pitchers could find to throw an illegal pitch playing a game whose participants historically try to find ways to break rules. Once, spitballs were legal. Burleigh Grimes of St. Louis was the last to throw it legally, almost a century ago, and Gaylord Perry (of eight teams) became the poster child of the illegal version. It’s still thrown today, which is why umpires make spot checks of pitchers’ equipment on the way to or from the mound.
Also thrown today are pitches with names as foreign as the substance spitballers used. The latest is the sweeper, legitimized as a member of the MLB glossary only last year. It breaks two and a half times more than the slider, and put them together and you have throw the slurve. There’s also a high sinker, which sounds like an oxymoron to me, and today’s fastballs include a two-seamer and a four-seamer, which leaves the three-seamer feeling left out, like that middle child. There’s a cutter, another variant of the fastball, which seems to have more variants than COVID-19. It was made famous by Mariano Rivera, the all-time king of closers who threw almost nothing but cutters.
Nearly everything falls under the umbrella (even if it’s not raining) of the breaking ball…even fastballs, which were formally the repertoire’s straight guys.
As a graduate of Winnipeg’s little-known now non-existent Image Plains Athletic Association, playing on an under-12 team that only periodically fielded nine players, I paid little attention to pitches I couldn’t hit. That would be all of them. I eventually parlayed those credentials into becoming a major-league baseball writer, and continued to ignore the identity of pitches.
What I do remember was when Bruce Sutter, no relation to Alberta’s family known for throwing bodychecks, exploded out of the Chicago Cubs’ bullpen and won a Cy Young Award because he invented a new pitch. His split-fingered fastball became the pitch-of-the-decade, but it’s nowhere today…it probably has a pseudonym.
My preference was to adopt Montreal Expos broadcaster Dave Van Horne’s theory about not identifying pitches, which I have adopted retroactively. Dave’s explanation was he didn’t think he was qualified. That works.
Today, I am qualified. I can read the imprint of “splitter” on the screen as well as anybody.
