They are the primarily colors of the only sport where the defense starts with the ball.
The Fastball, Curveball and Change-Up are the building blocks upon which baseball is built upon. How each one of them gets from pitcher's hand to catcher’s mitt is a scientific process involving spin, drag, gravity, wind pressure, and guts.
The Gas
The most basic pitch carries with the most bravado.
Since the game was invented, rearing back and throwing as hard as possible has always been there.
“There are guys that have stuff that looks like it explodes,” Auburn Doubledays pitching coach Sam Narron said about throwing the cheese. “A lot of it has to do with their delivery too. A hitter can’t see the ball until it just leaves their hand and then it blows up on them.”
A four seam fastball, the highest velocity pitch, is thrown by placing the index and middle finger across the seams of the baseball. Infielders and outfielders also try to get this grip when throwing in the field.
A fastball comes in at 85-100 miles per hour and spins between 1000-1400 revolutions per minute. In baseball lore, the fastball is thought to “rise” or “explode.”
Enter Sir Isaac Newton.
In 1666 he was watching tennis in England and noticed how a spinning ball is affected by the air:
“For, a circular as well as a progressive motion…, it parts on that side, where the motions conspire, must press and beat the contiguous air more violently than on the other, and there excite a reluctancy and reaction of the air proportionably greater.”
In other words, it is all about how the ball is spinning. Not necessarily how hard it is thrown.
A traditional fastball actually drops about 9-14 inches over the 60 feet six inches it takes to the plate thanks to gravity and drag, but it stays close to its original course because a pitcher imparts backspin on the ball. Backspin creates a pocket of faster air in front of and above the ball and a pocket of slower air behind and below the ball. Bernoulli’s Principle takes over (think of the lift created by airplane wings) as the slower moving air creates higher pressure which combats gravity and drag to “push” the ball up. The ball drops less or “rises.” Since a baseball is not a perfectly smooth sphere, the combination of pressures pushes a baseball in flight and is known as the “Magnus Force.”
These aerodynamic concepts are used in everything from fastballs to artillery fire.
“When I started with the Rangers we had (radar) guns that would give two reading. One out of the hand and one at the plate. The one at the plate was always 8-10 miles per hour slower than the ones out of the hand,” Narron said. “Just shows you how much energy (the ball) loses in those 60 and a half feet.”
There are some slight variations on the straight heat on the diamond. Holding the fingers along one seam or another, but using the same basic motion puts some side spin on the ball which make is “tail” or “run” one way or another; towards or away from a batter. Those pitches can break bats, rallies, and spirits.
The Hammer
Think of a catcher’s mitt as a clock face.
Just as with the fastball there are some come misconceptions about the curveball, but a true curve doesn’t move side-to-side. A bender moves in the plane of 12-to-6 on that clock face.
“You have to get over the top of it and pull down,” Narron said using a baseball as a surrogate window blind string. “You don’t want to be on the side. You want to pull over. So it gets good topspin. There are guys like Barry Zito that throw crazy breaking stuff that starts over a hitters head and ends at his shoetops.”
Now, just with the way a pitcher’s arm works, there can be some natural sidespin on the ball making a curveball follow a more 1-to-7 for righties or 11-to-5 path for lefties, but the movement is mostly vertical.
The secret of the curveball is the spin. A curve has the exact opposite spin from a fastball as the pitch is infused with more topspin then the fastball has backspin. A good curveball (one that breaks upwards of two feet) is thrown between 65-80 miles per hour and has about 1,800 rpm or more worth of spin on it. The spinning action of the ball creates faster moving air (lower pressure) behind and behind the ball while faster air (higher pressure) is above and in front of the ball pushing it into a dive.
A pitcher gets that top spin by pulling the ball down with the middle finger (and sometimes the index finger) on the "horseshoe" of the ball.
There is a curveball in how a curveball was discovered.
According to an obituary in the New York Times on May 29, 1933, New Yorker Alphonse Martin first used the pitch during his service with a New York Volunteer unit in the Civil War (he was wounded at the battle of Antietam). He was called “Phoney Ball” Martin for figuring out the physics and pitched for teams in The City and Troy during his career.
Martin’s claim is in dispute as the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum credits William “Candy” Cummings as the first pitcher to throw a curve. In 1863, around the same time as Martin, Cummings and friends threw clam shells and saw how they curved in the air. The idea to do that to a baseball was born. It took about four years of trial and errors, but Cummings unleashed the pitch that would get him to Cooperstown in 1867 as a member of New York’s Excelsior Club against Boston’s Harvard Club.
Different forces at play.
The Pullstring
Make the "OK" sign touching your pointer finger and thumb together then you can grip and throw a circle change-up.
It is a pitch that has many different incarnations (the circle, the pitchfork – three fingers going with the seams, the palmball – the ball packed back into the hand), but change-ups all boil down to the same thing every time.
“When you get more skin on it, it means more friction,” Narron explained. “More friction means less velocity. We get a looser, less backspin, spin then even a two-seam (fastball). Which gives it more depth.”
In theory, the change-up is a mini screwball. Instead of a pitcher “pulling” on a ball, for a curve’s top spin, a pitcher pushes a change away.
A pitcher is using backspin like a fastball, but instead of creating a Magnus Force directly in front of and behind the ball a pitcher gets counterclockwise side spin on a change by pushing it off the ring finger and pinky of the throwing hand. A change up fades away from the pitching hand. It is typically thrown between 65-75 mph and spins about 750-900 rpm.
With less energy and less spin imparted on the ball, gravity and drag have a greater effect on slowing the pitch down and upsetting a batter’s timing.
The Rest of the Family
One pitch that has nearly become part of the original trio is the slider.
The slider is a close cousin of the curveball, but this is where the ball starts to move from side-to-side as opposed to up-and-down.
The secret of a slider is that it is thrown harder (85-90 mph) than a curve and has an in-between spin on it (1300-1600 rpm) which makes it break diagonally and much later in the delivery.
Other pitches include: the splitfinger fastball and forkball (similar to a curveball in that they dive in their trajectory), the knucklecurve (a variation of the curve), the screwball (the opposite of a slider that is very hard on a pitcher’s elbow due to the counterclockwise spin needed) and the efface (basically, a lollypop pitch).
The knuckleball is the fried dough pitch of baseball. So good, but only in small doses. More on it tomorrow in The Citizen…