推 HidekiMatsui:希望Proctor不要太操 去年有休息就會丟很好 03/04 16:13
推 decorum:Torre向來保護SP 虐待RP的 在他領軍下 RP要有覺悟 03/04 16:38
推 appshjkli:Torre是一直操他信任的那幾個..不信任的就擺著不管 03/04 16:45
推 acidrain:然後請現金人拿去換可信任的人？XD 03/04 17:00
Tinkering Never Stops for Top Pitchers
By TYLER KEPNER
Published: March 4, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2e5zgh
TAMPA, Fla., March 3 — It can spin or cut or dip or tail. It does not
rise, but it seems to sometimes. It can sink or fade or tumble or —
gasp — hang. It can go faster or slower, this way or that.
Marketing experts could not invent a more captivating plaything.
“It’s endless, really,” said Scott Proctor, who uses it for a living.
“You can do anything you want with it, as long as it’s legal. Moose
can tell you the physics behind it; I don’t know. I just know when
I grip it, if it does something, I try to do it again.”
It is a baseball, of course, and it practically begs to be manipulated.
Mike Mussina — or Moose, the Yankees’ clubhouse physicist — invented
his old knuckle-curveball when he was 12. Proctor, at the same age,
threw his fastball with three fingers to control it better.
This was before they knew how good they would grow up to be. Their
curiosity has complemented their talent. The best pitchers never stop
learning new grips. It can be a matter of survival.
“I never threw a changeup,” the Yankees’ pitching coach, Ron Guidry,
said with some pride. “Not until I was about 36 years old and I was
going out the door.”
In Guidry’s prime, his catcher, Thurman Munson, had only two signs,
each with a variation. One finger meant a straight fastball. If
Munson wiggled the finger, he wanted a tailing fastball. Three fingers
meant the vicious slider Guidry had learned from Sparky Lyle. Three
wiggling fingers meant a slider thrown just a bit slower.
Then Guidry aged. Forced to improvise, he got a strikeout on the first
changeup he tried. The startled hitter was so offended, he cursed
Guidry and called him gutless.
Andy Pettitte may soon know how Guidry felt. Pettitte is returning to
the Yankees a different pitcher than the one who left for the Houston
Astros in December 2003. Elbow surgery the next season cost Pettitte
the late life on his fastball, and he has come to rely on his changeup
and curveball.
“He will be completely different,” said catcher Jorge Posada,
who knows how versatile Pettitte can be.
Both players were drafted by the Yankees in 1990. The next year,
they were a battery at Class A Oneonta. Pettitte showed off a knuckleball
for a coach, Hoyt Wilhelm, who had mastered the pitch in a Hall of Fame
career. Wilhelm was impressed, but Posada wanted no part of it.
“I never called it, because I couldn’t catch it,” Posada said.
“He’d throw it in the bullpen, and I couldn’t put a glove on it.
It was everywhere except the glove. But he had a very good one.”
He still does. Pettitte, 34, has never used the knuckleball in the
majors, but as he ponders his pitching mortality on a one-year contract,
he has not forgotten it.
“Let me tell you something, I’ve been out there and gotten knocked
around enough that I’ve almost pulled it out,” Pettitte said,
laughing. “You never know, I may have to do it this year. Sometimes
you’ve got to make stuff up.”
Mussina made up his knuckle-curve and used it for more than 20 years.
He hooked his index and middle fingers into the seams and used his other
three fingers to support the bottom half of the ball. As he propelled
the ball forward, he shot his fingers out to form a V. The result was
hard topspin action that caused the ball to break in different directions.
Now that he is 38, with an elbow that has bothered him in recent years,
Mussina no longer throws that pitch. His current curveball is one he
learned at Stanford in 1988. He digs into the seam above the sweet spot
with his index finger only — a so-called spike curveball — and rests
his middle finger a few centimeters away.
Phil Hughes, the Yankees’ top prospect, showed Mussina a similar
grip one day last spring training. Hughes had pitched after Mussina
in an exhibition game, and Mussina had noticed him struggling to
command his curveball.
Hughes held his curveball just like Mussina’s, but with his index
finger brushing against his middle finger. He tried it Mussina’s way,
with that sliver of separation, and noticed a difference.
“It was a lot better,” Hughes said. “I’ve just kind of stuck with
it, and it’s really come a long way.”
When the Yankees drafted Hughes in the first round in 2004, he did
not throw a curve at all. As a policy, the minor league pitching
coordinator Nardi Contreras tells all high school draftees who throw
sliders to abandon that pitch for a curveball.
A typical curveball is roughly 10 miles an hour slower than a slider,
with more depth to its break. For a hard thrower like Hughes,
the curveball may be a better complementary pitch. “For a power guy,
that’s where they get strikeouts,” Contreras said.
The pitch can be difficult to throw, Contreras said, because it is the
only one in which the fingers are in front of the ball — not behind it —
upon release. On every other pitch, the pitcher’s palm is still facing
the hitter.
A flexible wrist is essential, Contreras said, and he could tell Hughes
would learn the pitch quickly from the way he played catch. There is an
easy snapping action to Hughes’s wrist, Contreras said, and his struggles
with the curveball were minimal.
With Mussina’s refinements, Hughes was judged to have the best curveball
in the Yankees’ system last season. This spring training, he wants to
reinvent his high school slider to give it a tight, darting action.
“Not like a huge breaking ball,” Hughes said. “I don’t really want
two of those.”
Pitchers’ repertories change over time. Roger Clemens used a slider at
the start of his career and learned his splitter on a golf outing with
the former Cy Young award winner Mike Scott. Clemens taught the pitch
to Pettitte in the winter before the 2002 season, when the two were
teammates with the Yankees.
Pettitte threw it that spring with great success. But three starts into
the regular season, he injured his elbow and missed two months. Although
the injury occurred on a fastball, Pettitte never threw a splitter again.
As his repertory evolves by necessity, Pettitte speaks with admiration of
the right-hander Chien-Ming Wang, his new teammate. Wang’s heavy sinker
(or two-seam fastball) tails in on right-handers and seems to produce
ground balls at will.
“If I could throw a two-seamer every pitch and get it to do what I want
to, I would just throw nothing but two-seamers,” Pettitte said. “Really,
they’d never be able to get it in the air. But yet, somehow, if I’m
throwing my two-seamer and it flattens out, that ball gets killed. You
have to be perfect.”
Wang said he gave up his slider after shoulder surgery in 2001. He learned
the sinker over two months in 2004 from his coach, Neil Allen, and his
catcher, Sal Fasano.
Proctor, also a hard thrower, can credit his sinker for helping him make
the Yankees’ roster last year. He threw it repeatedly in camp because
he wanted to show he could throw more than straight (or four-seam)
fastballs.
“I had to prove to them I had something else I could go to,” Proctor
said. “In turn, that helped me.”
He made the team and soon became Manager Joe Torre’s go-to reliever,
compiling a major league-leading 102 1/3 relief innings. Some days,
Proctor was tired and his best fastball deserted him. On those days,
he had to be creative.
When he enters a game, Proctor uses the same sequence of warm-up pitches:
two or three four-seamers, then a changeup, a slider, a sinker and
a curveball before a final four-seamer. Yet he was never confident in
the slider until last June in Detroit, when his fastball was shot and
he turned to the slider in desperation.
Proctor pitched two and a third scoreless innings and had four strikeouts,
including one against Craig Monroe. The next series with the Tigers,
in August, Monroe hit Proctor’s slider for a game-winning home run.
Proctor said some fans sent him angry letters, chastising him for being
beaten on something other than his best pitch.
Few pitchers can be Mariano Rivera, the sublime closer often hailed for
succeeding with only one pitch: his cut fastball. Rivera has more traditional
fastballs, too, and he is working on a changeup.
But the cutter is still otherworldly, carving left-handers’ bat handles
and scurrying away from a right-hander’s barrel. It is a pitch teammates
envy but concede they cannot match.
Mussina once asked Rivera how to throw it, but it was a lost cause.
They use different arm angles, and at 94 miles an hour, Rivera throws
at a speed Mussina cannot reach.
Rivera can demonstrate how he holds the cutter, with a stiff wrist and
his index and middle fingers on the right side of the seams. But he
cannot teach it, because he cannot explain how it works.
“It just happened,” Rivera said, repeating those words for emphasis.
“I threw the ball and the ball was moving. Just a gift.”
It is a gift that has kept on giving, a toy that still works after all
these years.
INSIDE PITCH
The Yankees improved to 3-0 this spring with a 4-3 victory against the
Pittsburgh Pirates at Legends Field on Saturday. Mike Mussina started
and worked two innings, allowing a long home run to Brad Eldred. “I’m
in midseason form on the home runs, because that was a pretty good one,”
Mussina said. After the game, the Yankees assigned six players to minor
league camp, bringing the total in camp to 58.
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