Just Tell Me I Can't by Jamie Moyer

Author:Jamie Moyer [Moyer, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781455521593
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Unlike his relationship with, say, the curveball, Moyer’s courtship of the changeup was long and complicated, characterized by fits and starts and disappointments, before culminating in wedded bliss after Piniella’s 1997 intervention.

In the early ’80s, Moyer was a dominant collegiate pitcher with essentially two pitches: a roughly 84-mile-per-hour fastball and the looping curve he could throw over the plate for strikes. At St. Joseph’s University, that was enough; he rewrote the school’s record book, setting a single-season mark for strikeouts (90), and winning 16 games (fourth all-time) with a 1.99 ERA. His ERA of 1.82 in 1984 was the twelfth best nationally.

But he knew his limited repertoire of pitches wouldn’t be enough to get him drafted. Enter Kevin Quirk. Quirk had been a dominant St. Joe’s righthander who had graduated from the school in 1981, Moyer’s freshman year. Quirk was drafted by the Yankees, but never made it out of the minors. He returned to campus after two minor league seasons to help out the baseball team, his unique changeup in tow.

Befitting the name, Quirk was a free spirit, a hard partier who as a student had doubled as the St. Joe’s Hawk, the mascot at basketball games who ceaselessly flaps his arms. (ESPN once applied a “flap-o-meter” to the Hawk during a telecast and concluded that the bird flapped its wings an average of 3,500 times per game.)

Quirk showed Moyer his changeup. Even to this day, there’s no one way to throw a change. Some pitchers palm the ball, others throw a “circle change,” their fingers encircling the ball. Quirk’s grip was particularly unusual. With the open horseshoe facing first base, his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers would grip the top of the ball. The index finger and thumb would rest off the ball, underneath it. It was almost as if he were making an “OK” sign with his fingers and wrapping it around the ball. The removal of the dominant index finger creates a looser grip and more backspin, slowing the ball down in flight.

Moyer must have thrown thousands of changeups before ever working up the courage to attempt it in a game. When he first tried it, the ball would either sail clear over the catcher’s head or bounce well in front of the plate. But gradually he came to see the pitch for what it was: the ultimate deception. To this day, he calls it the most important pitch in baseball, other than the fastball. The grip allows you to throw the changeup with the same arm speed, and from the same release point, as the fastball, but it’s far slower. Once he could master control of it, he knew he’d have something to counteract the lack of velocity on his fastball, something to regularly keep hitters off balance with.

By the time he was in the minors in the Cubs system, the changeup had become Jamie’s best pitch. It was utterly emasculating to hitters; their eyes would widen as it approached the plate, so slow, so hittable, and yet they’d swing at it well in front of their bodies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.