You don’t want to miss the long Memorial Day weekend’s big matchup Sunday night, when Dodgers’ ace Clayton Kershaw is scheduled to take the mound in Queens, N.Y. to duel with Mets’ ageless wonder Bartolo Colon, aka “Big Sexy.” Kershaw’s coming off his third shutout of the year, a two-hitter against the Reds, which brings his record to 7-1 with an ERA of 1.48. Some argue that he’s not simply the best pitcher in baseball but one of the game’s all-time best, closing in on Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, and Roger Clemens.
How important is pitching? Consider the age-old theological riddle concerning the omnipotence of the creator: Could God make a rock so large that even God couldn’t budge it? Now, transfer the same principle to the diamond—could God throw a fastball so hard that God couldn’t hit it? And the answer is clear: Good pitching beats good hitting.
As Jeff Passan explains in The Arm, the centrality of pitching is why major league baseball spends more than $1.5 on pitching every year. That and the amount of damage done to the limb compelled to perform an entirely unnatural motion. Literary critic John Smoltz says The Armis “the most important baseball book in years.” I’m hardly one to argue with the hall of fame starter and closer, but look for my review here shortly.
Until then, check out “The Art of Catching,” an essay former Yankees all-star Jorge Posada wrote for The Players’ Tribune, a sports site published by his former teammate Derek Jeter. The two of them, along with Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera constituted the Bronx Bombers’ “core four,” the nucleus of the Yankees late 20th-century dynasty. “I know Mariano Rivera like he’s my brother,” writes Posada
Catchers, as Posada explains, need to know their pitchers and the other team’s lineup. Here he is explaining how he’d ask for a certain pitch early in the game because he suspected he might need it later.
The changeup seems to be an important factor in the success of the Indians’ Danny Salazar, a power pitcher who seems to be coming into his own this year, with an ERA of 2.32. He learned the changeup, Salazar tells David Laurila at Fangraphs, when he was a kid. “This guy taught it to me when I was really young, back in the Dominican Republic. It was a random guy I met during a Little League game. He told me that grip one day. He was like, ‘That’s a curveball change.’ I was like, ‘What is that?’
“I grip it with my middle fingers together in the spot where you throw a two-seam fastball. Then I have these two fingers apart, around the ball, and the other one in back. It’s not a split. The grip has been the same since I was maybe eight years old.”
That’s right—eight years old. Pitchers.
