Phil Coke on Mariano’s Long-Toss Cutter
Phil Coke, who joined the Blue Jays bullpen today, has traded in his slider for a cutter. I’ll write more on that in this Sunday’s Notes column. Tonight, I’ll share something the lefty reliever told me that seems hard to believe. Then again, the person he was talking about was no mere mortal on a baseball field.
According to Coke, Mariano Rivera could throw a cutter while long tossing.
“When I was a rookie, Mariano was my throwing partner,” said Coke, who broke in with the Yankees. “He was throwing me 300-foot balls that didn’t cut until the last five feet. It was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I was like, ‘How are you doing that?’
“The movement was short and late. It was crazy. He would throw the ball, and I’d be like, ‘Here comes a four-seamer.’ Then, wham! It was on line to hit me in the face, then all of a sudden I had to bail out from where I was standing to catch the ball way over there. Mariano would just smile at me.”
A cutter from 300 feet? Come on, Phil. How is that even possible?
“I swear on my life,” Coke told me. “It was crazy.”
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
He may swear to it on his life, but I seriously doubt that the ball wasn’t moving until it got to within 5 feet. It was most likely moving the whole time, but some trick of the eyes made it seem like it wasn’t moving until it got close to him.
I’m not a physicist, but I’d posit it is impossible. Somebody activate the Alan Nathan signal!
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the physics don’t support a ball that “breaks late” no matter how far away you throw it from. There are a number of forces (air resistance, air pressure, gravity, inertia) that act upon the ball in flight and those forces don’t change appreciably in the fraction of a second it takes to get to the plate. Breaking late would give the impression that the pitcher would be able to increase the spin rate substantially after the ball has left his hand which probably isn’t possible unless he somehow managed a huge leap in quantum entanglement.
Really, Rivera was incredibly deceptive and had Maddux like control so its very difficult to pick up the movement until the ball is right on you
Kinda like a line drive to CF that feels like a knuckleball, I would think.
The only thing I can think of that would produce an actual “late break” would be a pitch that decelerates particularly quickly, i.e. that the amount of lateral movement appears to increase because the velocity towards the hitter decreases. I’d also bet this hypothesis is something like 0.05% legit and 99.95% complete BS, but I was an econ major so I’m supposed to be good at that kind of thing
Could a pitch with a lot of spin undergo boundary layer separation as the spin reduced?