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.”
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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?
It was probably more than five feet, but I could see it breaking late enough to, at its pace and angle, look like it jolted suddenly at the last second.
I believe Coke is being honest about what he saw, but I think Coke was being deceived by his perception.
I remember playing catch with a teammate in high school and I was messing around with some grips. I used a knuckle-curve grip on one toss but threw it normally. The ball did nothing until the very end where it suddenly broke from my partner’s left hip to his right knee. He stared at me in shock and demanded that I throw it again. I tried and tried but couldn’t replicate it. Must have been a perfect storm of a toss there.
Clown story, bro.
So, you threw a curve without snapping the wrist during long toss….somehow it was accurate..as a baseball player I’m calling shenanigans. Unless it came out as a knuckler…I give up
I used to do stuff like this all the time. The ball is moving the whole time, but sometimes the spin is so tight that it isn’t really perceptible at long toss distances. I would throw a ‘slurve’ which would corkscrew and then drop. In long toss you could really only perceive the big drop at the end.
I would also throw a ‘cutter’ in long toss but that would change direction about half way. In high school I would send a lot of kids running after that one, lol.
These stories are gonna get better and better every year he’s gone.
“To Bill Brasky!”
It’s almost certainly an embellishment. Still pretty cool though.
Short snippets like this keep Fangraphs fresh and entertaining, a perfectly digressive complement to the great statistical analysis. The reporting/ player interviews on this site have really come a long way.
As Mariano always use to say…it was the pitch from God
I thought spin above a certain threshold has less effect on ball path than some slower spin. So, above 5000 rpm, no effect, between 2000 – 800 substantial effect, and below 800, little effect (and this in combination with apparent ball speed). Under this hypothesis, late breaking balls when released have a spin rate that doesn’t alter ball path as much, then air resistance slows both the ball and the spin, then the ball path is more affected during that optimal effect period of spin and then below some threshold the effect is reduced again.
Mariano, in Cole’s story, would throw with a lot of extra spin, much more than his normal cutter. On a really lucky day, the ball wouldn’t slow its spin rate to max effect until much later in it’s travel than during a regular pitch.
Everyone would agree that more spin on a pitch is not better. There’s definitely optimal spin for each pitch.
Re Janson’s comment:
We have a huge amount of very precise data on the trajectories of pitched baseballs, thanks to PITCHf/x (and Trackman, although the latter data are not generally available). If I understand correctly Janson’s model for “late break” (and perhaps I am not understanding it), there is very little (if anything) in the data to support that model.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a brief comment for Baseball Prospectus about late break, specifically using Mo as an example: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=19994