Rick Porcello on Losing and Then Rediscovering His Curveball

Rick Porcello has a plus curveball. That wasn’t always the case. He could really snap one off in his amateur days, but then something strange happened. Shortly after signing with the Detroit Tigers, who drafted him 27th overall in 2007 out of a New Jersey high school, Porcello found that the pitch had gone missing.

When I talked to the 29-year-old Red Sox right-hander recently, the plan was to include him in my ongoing Player’s View: Learning and Developing a Pitch series. As it turns out, the story behind his hook merits a longer look than can be folded into three or four paragraphs. A tale of disappearance and recovery is not only compelling, it takes time to tell.

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Rick Porcello: “When I was a teenager I had a really good curveball. It was something that came naturally to me. Then, when I got into pro ball, I didn’t have a good one in my first start, and I didn’t have a good one in my second start. It turned into this thing where it wasn’t there all year. I completely lost it. But I did have a really good sinker and a really good changeup, so I was fortunate enough to make the big-league team the next year.

“The Tigers had me working on a slider to go along with my sinker and my changeup. They didn’t want me to throw a curveball. Again, I didn’t have a good one at the time, because I’d forgotten how to throw it. So I spent probably my first two or three years in the big leagues trying to throw a slider, and it wasn’t good. It was getting crushed.

“The offseason going into 2013, I kind of said, ‘Screw it, I’m going back to throwing my curveball.’ And slowly but surely I got confident with it. I started throwing it in games during spring training. Jim Leyland came up to me and said, ‘That’s a pretty good pitch. Where did you learn to throw that?’ I said, ‘I’ve always had a curveball, but you guys didn’t want me to throw it, so I haven’t been throwing it.’ He was like, ‘Well, you better f-ing throw it now, because it’s really f-ing good.’

“Why had I lost it when I got into pro ball? That’s a good question. For one thing, the ball is a little different. But you also go through a lot of changes. Your body goes through changes when you’re learning how to make 30 starts a season and pitch every fifth day. For a kid coming out of highs school, who is used to pitching once a week and 60-70 innings a year, that’s a lot of work. It’s a really big jump. You don’t have the same energy and repeatable mechanics, because your workload is so much higher. You’re trying to fight fatigue and still maintain velocity and the sharpness of your pitches.

“It got to the point where physically I wasn’t throwing it well, and then it turned into a mental thing. I simply didn’t have the confidence to throw a curveball. I completely lost the feel for how to throw it. A crazy thing about baseball is that you can play the game your entire life and forget how to do stuff you’ve always done well. It’s such a skill-, feel-oriented game.

“The offseason I got it back, I worked with a pitching coach I’d worked with in high school. He was a big factor in helping me relearn how to throw it. That’s basically what it was: learning how to throw it all over again. It started getting better and better, and now it’s obviously a big pitch for me.

“The biggest thing now is that I’ve learned to change speeds with it. I believe that, against certain hitters, a big slow curveball is one of my more effective pitches. Developing an ability to do that came through playing around with it down in the bullpen. I’ve learned how to throw a little bit shorter, harder curveball, and I’ve learned how to throw a bigger-breaking, slower curveball. I’ve kind of turned it into two different versions of the same pitch.

“Taking speed off my curveball is more of a lower-half thing. You’re basically killing your legs; you’re not generating power out of your legs. I kind of just throw with my arm. It looks the same in my delivery, but the feeling of pushing off the rubber like I would on a fastball isn’t there. That’s how I’m able to keep the same arm motion but throw it slower.

“So, it’s funny. I had a pretty good curveball, then I lost it, then I got it back. I don’t know how good of a story that is, but I do know that if I have a good feel for it on a given day it’s a pretty big weapon for me to lean on.”