The vanishing (baseball) screwball

Good feature in this past NY Times magazine section.

Today there's only one major league baseball player throwing "the screwgie", to quote Phil Rizzuto. Rizzuto would (as any longtime Yankee fan would know) have been referring to Luis Arroyo and his screwball – and his glittering 1961 season as a Yankee reliever.

No reference to Arroyo in this article – but some discussion of other famous screwgie pitchers – Spahn, Hubbell, Valenzuela. The reason the screwball is unpopular: an evidently false notion that it is more damaging to your arm then other pitches.

Excerpts below, but great article to read in it's entirety if you're into baseball.

The Mystery of the Vanishing Screwball

Earlier that day, in a spring-training game, Santiago, a 26-year-old southpaw from Newark in his fourth season, threw a screwball to the All-Star outfielder Carlos Gomez of the Milwaukee Brewers. His previous pitch, a fastball, hit 94 m.p.h. The screwball approached the plate at 76. The difference in velocity alone would be difficult for a hitter to process, but the clockwise spin on the screwball also caused it to drop precipitously and veer to the left, away from the right-handed Gomez rather than toward him, as a curveball would. Gomez swung mightily and missed. “That pitch was filthy,” he told me later. “I was looking for it. I had it. And it disappeared. Put that guy on ice, man. He’s going to win a lot of games.”

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Today few, if any, minor leaguers are known to employ the pitch. College coaches claim they haven’t seen it in years. Youths are warned away from it because of a vague notion that it ruins arms. “Pitchers have given it up,” says Don Baylor, the former player and manager, who now works with Angels hitters. “Coaches don’t even talk about it. It’s not in the equation.”

Many of baseball’s best hitters have never seen a screwball. This spring, I spent time in nearly a dozen clubhouses asking about the pitch. “Maybe in Wiffle ball,” David Freese, the Angels’ third baseman, said. “But I’ve never sat in a hitters’ meeting and heard, ‘This guy’s got a screwball.’ It doesn’t come up. I’m not sure I even know exactly what it is.”

As a result, the pitch has taken on somewhat mythical properties. “I don’t think it’s physically possible,” the Giants’ Buster Posey, the 2012 National League M.V.P., told me one morning. “I just don’t believe that a right-handed pitcher can make a ball move as though he were left-handed. I just don’t.”

Posey’s clubhouse locker faced the corner where many of the team’s pitchers dress, including Tim Hudson. The veteran fastballer had overlapped in Oakland with Jim Mecir, a right-handed journeyman who threw screwballs from 1995 to 2005. “I didn’t think I’d ever see one,” he volunteered. “I thought screwballs were just really, really good changeups. Then Mecir threw one, and it broke like a curve in reverse. That’s when I understood.”