Major League Baseball

The continuing search for baseball's next great weapon

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 7:06 p.m. ET

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If you were to name the most prominent characteristic in the war between pitchers and hitters, it would be the continuing search for the Next Great Weapon.

Morally questionable or not, steroids were the Holy Grail for offense: Hitters became bigger and stronger and, thanks to their chemicals, seized the advantage in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Although the use of PEDs is more closely regulated now, the calculus is unchanged. Everyone still wants to tip the balance of power in their favor, either through better data or better technology. Now more than ever, information is king.

But what if pitchers launched their own revolution, finding a new way to make the ball sink or drop or rise? What if a new pitch suddenly appeared out of the cosmos?

Logic says it’s impossible. While music and literature are as limitless as the universe, there are only four possible trajectories out of a pitcher’s hand: up, down, left and right. The ball’s dimensions remain static as well: nine inches in circumference, stitched 216 times, weighing five ounces.

Every experiment over the last hundred years — from the spitball to the curve, to the slider to the forkball and the more recent cut fastball — has been based on the same two-dimensional premise. A pitcher winds up and, regardless of how the ball is gripped or the arm-angle chosen, delivers the ball in conventional overhand fashion.

There are exceptions, of course. Pat Neshek’s low three-quarter arm slot turned him into an All-Star in 2014. And there’ve been a number of submariners through the years. Some of them, like closers Dan Quisenberry and Kent Tekulve, took their teams to the World Series. But who’s to say those rules can’t be broken altogether?

What if the evolutionary process brings pitching back to its origins — all the way back to an underhanded delivery?

Yes. Underhanded, with a single-arm, full-circle wind-up. Like fast-pitch softball.

“Honestly, I could see it happening some day,” said former Mets right-hander Ron Darling, now a broadcaster for the team’s SNY network. “If it’s taught properly, I could see someone saying, ‘Screw all these other garbage pitches, I’m going to throw underhanded, 200 pitches a game if that’s what it takes.’”

Darling added, “It’s easier on the arm, you could start every three days and you could make the ball drop, spin and rise like in softball.”

The idea would be flat-out crazy if it didn’t make sense on an even crazier level. Considering the epidemic of elbow injuries lately — and the virtual waiting line for Tommy John surgery — there has to be a better, healthier way to maximize a pitcher’s long-term potential.

Whether or not it means emulating softball is up for debate. Darling is right — the required culture change, let alone the education, would take years, if not decades. And the jury is still out as to whether the famed Gyroball, introduced in this country by Daisuke Matsuzaka in 2007, ever rewrote the laws of physics. Thrown with a football-like spiral, the Gyroball was supposed to create the illusion of sinking when it was actually rising.

But critics weren’t buying it. They said Matsuzaka was throwing the equivalent of a screwball — a fairly decent one, but hardly worthy of the international hype. 

The Japanese right-hander never quite revolutionized the big leagues the way the Red Sox hoped. The conversation among pitching theorists soon returned to perfecting what already exists.

“The emphasis now, besides preventing injuries, should be on disguising pitches and getting more movement,” Orioles minor league pitching instructor Rick Peterson says. “That’s the most realistic goal of this era.”

In other words, take advantage of the modern-day pitcher’s enhanced physical skills. Or better yet, take advantage of the rules. The Marlins’ Carter Capps uses a hop-step delivery that catapults him a foot or more in front of the rubber, shortening the distance to home plate. That might account for the right-hander’s incredible 16.8-per-nine-innings strikeout ratio.

So far Capps’ delivery is still legal; that may or may not last. But he isn’t averaging 98 mph just because of a gimmick. Capps, like most hurlers today, trains smarter, eats healthier and benefits from advances in video and computer analysis. In short, pitchers throw harder than their predecessors because they’re closer to machines than ever before. That’s why the search for a new pitch might be found in every stadium’s radar display. Whereas the average fastball used to be 88-90 mph, the present-day staff has at least three or four pitchers who can light up the gun at 95 mph or better.

So the next great pitch could be the 100-plus mph fastball, weaponized to be the rule and not the exception. And this isn’t a science-fiction curiosity, either.

“I don’t buy into the hard-core statement that the human arm can only handle so much,” says pitching guru Tom House, a former major league left-hander whose career spanned the early to mid-'70s. “The body will accommodate and adapt to what you ask it to do, if it’s done in allowable intervals.”

In other words, “I don’t think we’ve reached the maximum yet,” California-based House says. He likens the 100-mph fastball to the four-minute mile: “Once it was broken, it was broken incrementally many times after that.”

That advent of the faster, harder-to-detect four-seamer would lend credence to the theory that there’s simply no new way to grip a baseball. All the experimenting, which began in the 1920s after the spitball was outlawed, is likely done.

Still, it’s fun to think of the impact the curveball made when it was still in its infancy, forcing hitters to change their eye level. The up and down re-focusing was so revolutionary even the great Babe Ruth initially struggled with it. He batted only .118 against the Giants in the 1922 World Series, and every pitch was called by manager John McGraw from the dugout. The Babe reportedly wept after the Yankees were beaten.

Of course, Ruth soon learned how to identify the curve by its unique spin. Generations of future hitters similarly realized that reading the seams out of a pitcher’s hand was the essential counter-move to any new pitch. That’s why the forkball and screwball are practically extinct.

The forkball, despite its sharp, downward break, had a signature too unique to miss. The ball tumbled, but it spun slowly. There was nothing else like it, so hitters smartened up.

The same was true of the screwball, the pitch made popular by Fernando Valenzuela and Tug McGraw. Thrown properly by a lefty, the pitch would drift maddeningly away from right-handed hitters, although the counter-clockwise rotation of the seams was a dead giveaway.

Pitching coaches realized there were more efficient ways to create that same movement, and with better velocity, too. The two-seam fastball prevailed in the battle of pitching-Darwinism, although outside-the-box thinkers like Darling don’t believe we’ve seen the last of these currently outdated assets.

The screwball version 2.0? The return of the palm ball? Very possibly. As Darling put it, “Pitches are like clothes. Eventually everything comes back into fashion.”

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