Last weekend, as many may have noticed, Arizona Diamondback prospect Trevor Bauer was engaging his twitter followers in regards to fastballs both in the upper and lower part of the zone. Well, to be more accurate, he was suggesting that the fascination with throwing your fastball down in the zone was overrated and generally just wrong. It all began with this:
During Yesterday’s Phillies and Pirates game, Phillies announcer Garry Matthews Sr. stated that he believes fastballs are almost always the next pitch thrown after a pitching coach comes to the mound to talk to his pitcher. Mike Axisa caught this and passed it along, and the topic seemed interesting and worthy of research.
The logic behind Matthews’ statement seems valid. A pitching coach most often comes to the mound when a pitcher is struggling, and a pitcher’s fastball is often the pitch he can most easily get over for a strike. But if this actually were the case, hitters would sit on fastballs each time the pitching coach came out. Hitters perform exceedingly well in fastball counts already, and this would basically be free knowledge that a fastball was coming if teams and players operated in this manner. I suspect that teams would not be this predictable.
Read the rest of the Best Pitches series: fastball, slider, changeup, curve.
The final installment of our Best Pitches series is “other” pitches, meaning not (four-seam) fastballs, changeups, curveballs or sliders. A couple names pop up on this list who have been on one of the other lists, which exemplifies just how impressive those pitchers actually are. Another pitch is one that every person would expect to be on this list, which has been the case for the past 15 years.
There were a lot of pitches to choose from for this article, but I went to find the nastiest sinkers, cutters, splitters, knuckelballs, or screwballs that I could find. Below is the criteria used in Carson’s original post, along with the four pitches I included. Also, I broke the pitches down between relief pitchers and starters, doing two for each.