A welcome change
By MIKE SIELSKI
phillyBurbs.com
Picture Cole Hamels in 1999, as a 15-year-old high school freshman:
Built like a bedpost, he'll be 6 feet 3 and 175 pounds by the time
he's a senior, but he's shorter and thinner now. Maybe 5-8. Maybe
140 pounds. His cap looks a bit too big for his head, his glove a
bit too big for his right hand, and his royal blue-and-white baseball
uniform for Rancho Bernardo High School in San Diego droops off him.
For his age, he has a hard fastball and a good curveball, but he
decides he should develop a third pitch, something to set himself
apart. Under head coach Sam Blalock, Rancho Bernardo has become
known as “The Factory,” for all the major league prospects produced
there, and as Hamels will say when he is 23 and pitching for the
Phillies:"The competition there is so steep that throwing 95 miles
per hour just doesn't cut it, and everybody's got a curve or a slider."
So he needs something else. The San Diego Padres, his hometown team,
are coming off the finest season in their history, winning 98 games
in 1998 and reaching the World Series. Their closer, Trevor Hoffman,
saved 53 games, had a remarkable 1.48 earned run average, and did it
all with a finesse pitch — a change-up.
Hoffman fascinates Hamels. Hitters are late on his fastball because
they're guarding against the change-up, and they can't hit his change-up
, even when they know it's coming, because of the pitch's downward bite
and Hoffman's deceptive arm speed.
I need one of those, the 15-year-old thinks.
He tries to throw one during practice. He grips the baseball with
his whole hand, locking his left wrist and keeping it straight. Rarely
does the ball travel the full 60 feet, 6 inches to the catcher's mitt
before it thuds against the ground.
His pitching coach notices. Try this, the coach says. He curls
Hamels'index finger, touching the tip of the finger to the tip of
the thumb, and he rotates Hamels' wrist counterclockwise to a slight
angle, loosening it. In that moment, it's as if the coach has just
turned a tiny key, opening a magic box that contained something
Cole Hamels needed, something special.
Cole Hamels — 4-1 this season for the Phillies, with all of 180
innings of major league experience — possesses the best change-up
in baseball.
This is not the opinion of a major league scout, though one scout
did tell ESPN.com's Jayson Stark that Hamels' change-up was the
equal of Twins left-hander Johan Santana's, and Santana has won
two Cy Young Awards.
This is not a measure of public relations from the Phillies'
organization, though Gorman Heimueller, the franchise's roving
pitching coordinator, did say:"Our philosophy is, we're not
going to try to make it any better, because we can't."
This is, to a degree, a quantifiable fact.
Earlier this year, Tom Koch-Weser of STATS Inc., a company that
analyzes sports information and statistics, calculated the
“whiff rate” of various pitches from various major league pitchers.
If a batter's goal is to make contact, Koch-Weser wrote in an article
for Yahoo! Sports, then calculating a given pitch's "whiff rate"
the ratio of the number of swings and misses to the number of
swings — will determine how difficult it is to hit the pitch.
According to Koch-Weser's analysis, Hamels' change-up had a
"whiff rate" of .514 in 2006, meaning that if a hitter swings
at Hamels' change-up, there is less than a 50 percent chance his
bat will make contact with the ball. No other pitcher's change-up,
not even Santana's, was close.
"I would rate Cole's change-up in the top five I've seen"
said Tom House, a former major league pitcher and pitching coach
and the co-founder of the National Pitching Association, where
Hamels has trained.
"And remember, there's more in the tank."
The Phillies have not produced a homegrown 20-game winner since
Chris Short in 1966. Nevertheless, Hamels, who in 47 2/3 innings
this season has struck out 52 and compiled a 3.59 ERA, has a
chance to be the next, provided his health permits him — a
projection that, for now, remains uncertain. His 1811/3 innings
last season, over three minor league stints and his time with
the Phillies, are the most he has thrown in one year. And since
learning his change-up, he has suffered a series of injuries,
including elbow tendinitis, a broken hand from a bar fight, chronic
back problems, a shoulder strain, and a finger he accidentally
sliced with a Swiss Army knife.
The first of those injuries, though, was the most severe, the most
sickening, and it put Hamels' entire baseball career at risk. That
he has maintained his mastery of his change-up — even with metal
in the marrow of his bones — suggests the pitch really is a gift
from the gods.
The coach who opened the magic box is Mark Furtak, a physical
education teacher at Meadowbrook Middle School in San Diego and
the pitching coach at Rancho Bernardo High. Furtak had played
for Blalock in high school, and after pitching for the University
of Hawaii in the mid-1980s, he returned to San Diego to complete
his college degree, teach and coach. He and Blalock have worked
together at Rancho Bernardo since the school's opening in 1990.
When he began tutoring young pitchers, Furtak often would show
them how to grip a split-fingered fastball, the pitch du jour of
the late 1980s and early 1990s. But after noticing how Greg Maddux
threw his circle change-up, Furtak shifted the focus of his teaching
sessions, in part because a change-up doesn't put as much strain
on a teenager's arm as a slider or split-fingered fastball does.
Because Hamels threw a four-seam fastball, placing his index and
middle fingers perpendicular to the baseball's fat, horseshoe-shaped
seam to keep it on a straight flight toward home plate, Furtak
showed him, in essence, a four-seam circle change-up. To this day,
Hamels curves his index finger and thumb along the horseshoe
stitching, resting his middle, ring and pinkie fingers on the white
hide of the ball. By letting the ball tumble off those three fingers,
Hamels gives his change-up the look of a four-seam fastball but the
action of a screwball; it fades down and away from right-handed
hitters and down and in to left-handed hitters.
Three times a week, Furtak had Hamels throw a 35-pitch training
session. Of those 35 pitches, 10 to 15 would be change-ups.
"When he first started throwing it, it was all over place," the
41-year-old Furtak said by telephone. “It had real snaking action.
It would sink. But I kept forcing him to throw it.”
Hamels made the varsity team as a sophomore. By then, he could
use his change-up as a strikeout pitch. "It wouldn't be over
the plate," he said, “but I could always get guys to fish.”
So effective was the pitch that Blalock and Furtak began to notice
a pattern: Matt Wheatland, the senior ace of the Rancho Bernardo
staff and an eventual first-round draft pick of the Detroit Tigers,
would win a game, surrendering a run or two. The following week,
against the same opponent, Hamels would throw a shutout.
"Guys were more confused against Cole," Blalock said. “We
were like, "Whoa, we've got something here.' ''
They did have something, until a game later that season. Hamels
tried to throw a fastball. The ball left his hand and soared
straight up, landing on top of the backstop, and a loud crack
paralyzed every player, coach and spectator.
It was the humerus — the long bone that runs from the shoulder
to the elbow — in Hamels' left arm. It sounded like a tree
branch had broken.
"Chills," Blalock said. "You don't ever want to see that"
Blalock remembered the look on Hamels' face in that instant, his
bewildered countenance, his arm dangling at his side, as if Hamels
were asking himself, "What just happened to me"
Eventually, Hamels met with Dr. Jan Fronek, the Padres' team
physician. Fronek told him the spiral fracture required an
unusual surgery, and even then, Hamels might never pitch again.
To stabilize Hamels' arm, Fronek slid thin metal rods, each the
thickness of a coat hanger, into the marrow of the humerus. For
eight months, Hamels was not to touch a baseball; that way, the
bone could fuse around the rods.
Fronek then called House, whose National Pitching Association
is based in San Diego. After Hamels finished his medical rehabi-
litation, he joined House at his pitching camp and performance
laboratory, where House uses three-dimensional motion analysis
and digital imaging to break down a pitcher's arm motion and
determine his optimum conditioning and strengthening programs.
Hamels' program started simply enough: House had him throw rocks.
"People used to throw rocks at rabbits to eat," said House, 60.
"The first thing I tried to do was find what was natural for him.
I would say, "Just pick this up and fire it.' Or, "Hit this tree
over there.' ''
House's drills strengthened Hamels' rotator cuff, and when he
began throwing baseballs again, Hamels found he had retained
the touch on his change-up. “He showed up with thatpitch
House said. "I can't take any credit for that"
Truth be old, the greater obstacle for Hamels was in his mind.
He had to overcome the apprehension that accompanied taking the
mound in a competitive situation — the fear that he would break
his arm again. He did not pitch in a varsity game for Rancho
Bernardo his junior season. In fact, Furtak said, he was scared
even to throw a bullpen session.
"There were times he said he was progressing fine," Blalock
said, “and the next day, he'd say his arm was sore, and he
didn't know if he could throw. I told him, "Cole, you forgot
you get sore. It's time for you to get back on the hill. You're
going to start on this day, and that's it.' ''
For that first start of Hamels' senior season, against Valley
Center High School, Blalock and Furtak kept him on a 50-pitch
limit. They removed him from the game after five innings.
He had not allowed a hit.
His fastball had registered 92 mph on the radar gun.
And in the first inning, Cole Hamels had struck out the side
on nine pitches.
"He may be the best high school pitcher I ever saw" Blalock
said, “and it's because of his change-up."
*It wasn't until after the Phillies made him their first-round
pick in 2002, during his first year of pro ball, that Hamels
learned to throw his change-up for strikes. The secret, he said,
is to keep his wrist loose, so that he can snap it when he
releases the ball.
“He has a lot of flexibility in his wrist and forearm to be
able to create the action on it,” Scott Lovekamp, who was Hamels'
pitching coach at Single-A Clearwater, said in an e-mail.
That wrist flexibility allows Hamels to control the change-up's
direction. Though his natural release causes the ball to drop down
and in to a left-handed hitter, Hamels also can throw a change-up
that breaks in to a right-handed hitter. In the fourth inning of
his 8-5 win Sunday over San Francisco, Hamels threw three such
change-ups in a row to the Giants' Randy Wynn. Wynn took the last
one for strike three.
"The past couple of years, I've actually been able to do it more
effectively,” Hamels said. “Day in and day out, you have to have
confidence to throw it.”
Why wouldn't he? After all, everybody's got a curveball or a slider.
He has a pitch that sets him apart. Eight years after he was that
rail-thin freshman in search of something special, Cole Hamels has
found it. Maybe, finally, the Phillies have, too.
Mike Sielski can be reached at 215-949-4215or msielski@phillyBurbs.com.
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