K

by Tyler Kepner

  When Floyd Bannister pitched for the Rangers, his son, Brian, liked to stand behind the pitchers while they threw in the bullpen, to see the movement from their point of view. Brian Bannister grew up to pitch for the Mets and the Royals, and later joined the Red Sox as a pitching consultant and coach, equally versed in the science of the craft and the mind-set of the craftsmen. To Bannister, the curveball is unlike anything else in pitching.

  “The curveball is unique,” he says. “It’s its own special pitch, because the break comes from the spin. With the slider, the changeup, the splitter—the break comes from gravity. You’re dealing with a unique pitch with the curveball, because the rate of topspin is what makes it go down, and go down faster than gravity.”

  The slider, he explains, is a game between how hard a pitcher can throw it while also maximizing the pull of gravity. The curveball is all spin, right through to the pitcher’s finish.

  “On the curveball, you’re actually trying to tuck the arm and decrease the radius of the arc, which increases the spin—whereas on the slider, you maintain a full arm length and a full follow-through and all the spin is created by the wrist and fingertips,” Bannister says. “Two totally different approaches, which is why some guys throw sliders better and some guys throw curveballs better and why most guys struggle to throw both. Somebody like Clayton Kershaw is very rare, to throw elite versions of both.”

  The curveball can start as something else before finding its true identity. Mike Mussina taught himself a curveball that Olson, his future Baltimore teammate, said nobody else could ever throw.

  “When I was a kid, I couldn’t throw a curveball,” Mussina says. “I mean, everybody’s teaching you how to throw curveballs, get ahold of it like this and whatever, and I’d throw it and it just wouldn’t do anything. It was like: ‘That can’t be what I see on television. That’s crap.’

  “So I started messing around, and I’m throwing knuckleballs—and I could throw a knuckleball, but the ball would spin too much. And so I figured: ‘Wait a minute, what if I can do that on purpose? Can I fire my fingers out hard enough that I can make the ball do that on purpose—like, fast?’ And I just kept working at it, working at it, working at it, working at it, and that’s how I held a curveball for most of college—flick my fingers out and the ball would come out with topspin. Now, it wasn’t biting and nasty, but it was good.”

  It was good enough to take to the majors, with the Orioles in 1991, but it was not the curveball Mussina used for most of his career. That was one he learned at Stanford from a teammate, Lee Plemel, who tucked his curveball into his palm and held his index finger up, resting it lightly on top—the spike curveball. That grip felt comfortable instantly, and Mussina could vary its speed and shape much more than he could with his old one. It worked from different arm angles, too.

  “It’s like any technological advancement,” Mussina says, pointing to his smartphone. “Why would I talk on a rotary phone when I could talk on this now? It’s the same thing, my own evolution. I found something better.”

  Mussina, at various times, could find any kind of pitch. He faced Wade Boggs so many times that he once flipped him a knuckleball, just to mix things up. Midway through another game, Mussina called catcher John Flaherty to the mound and told him what to signal for the splitter. Flaherty reminded Mussina he didn’t have a splitter; “Today I do,” Mussina replied.

  Mussina won 20 games in 2008, bringing his career total to 270. If he had gotten much closer to 300 wins, he reasoned, he would have had to go for it. As a 40-year-old father of three, he didn’t want to pitch three more seasons—but he could have, because his will matched his talent. Mussina was capable of invention, and hungry enough to constantly pursue it.

  “I don’t know if I was completely lucky, but it’s just not that easy to do that kind of stuff, apparently,” he says. “And it took me a little while to figure that out, but once I did, that’s how I was able to play. It wasn’t because I threw 96. It was because I could keep learning, I could keep adjusting, and I had a large—not large—but a pretty good selection of ways to pitch. I didn’t just have to be throwing as hard as I could, plus a curveball. I could be a thumber, I could sink the ball, I could throw 75 percent sinkers instead of 75 percent four-seamers.”

  A thumber?

  “A thumber’s just like a guy who throws a lot of junk, that you might as well throw with your thumb, as hard as you’re throwing it,” he says, smiling. “Instead of throwing it, you’re just kind of flipping it, junking it. That’s what a thumber is—a junkball pitcher.”

  Every junkballer has a curve. When the fastball goes, a slow, looping curveball, with impeccable command, sound mechanics, and a durable body, can keep a pitcher going for a long time.

  “I saved my best fastball for 20 percent of the time and the other 80 was just nibbling and changing speeds,” says Frank Tanana, describing how he survived after injuries zapped his heat. “So when I threw my 80 or 85, it seemed like 95, because the other stuff was so crappy—or so slow, I should say. It’s just an art, and I was very blessed.”

  Steve Stone could describe himself the same way, for different reasons. Stone was 33 years old in 1980, when he went 25–7 for the Orioles. He wears a custom-made ring with “Cy Young” surrounding a diamond on the face, commemorating his award for the achievement. Stone won largely by throwing as many curveballs as he could—seven out of 10 pitches, most days. His trick was to vary his curves at three speeds, depending on where he held the ball and how he applied finger pressure. Maybe all those curveballs hurt his longevity, he says; he lasted just one more season, a casualty of elbow pain.

  But the recognition from his big year led directly to a long and successful career as a broadcaster. And maybe the curveball didn’t ruin his arm at all.

  “I had also completed my twelfth year of pro ball,” Stone says. “And this might have eluded you, but I’m not the size of C. C. Sabathia. So I think being a relatively smaller pitcher at 5'9"—or 5'9" and a quarter; I swelled up during the season—my arm only had so many pitches in it.”

  * * *

  ————

  Gregg Olson also blew out, and when he describes his best curveballs as coming from “a violent turn of the elbow,” injuries sound inevitable. Actually, Olson says, a mechanical change was responsible; his drop-and-drive, hip-twisting motion looked peculiar but worked for him, and his arm reacted badly when the Orioles forced him to learn a slide step. His favorite pitch is blameless.

  “When you come through and your hand’s facing your face and you’re pulling down in front, I believe that is fine for your arm,” Olson says. “My curveball was thrown correctly and it was protected with my body.”

  Adam Wainwright’s most famous curveball was the called third strike to the Mets’ Carlos Beltran that ended Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS. (He would also end that fall’s World Series with a strikeout, against Detroit’s Brandon Inge, but that was on a slider.) Looking back, Wainwright says, the Beltran pitch was a product of youthful swagger; ahead in the count, 0–2, it was crazy to throw a strike to such a dangerous hitter.

  But the pitch was just that good, and would remain so for many years. In 2013, two years after Tommy John surgery, Wainwright threw a staggering 276⅔ innings, including the postseason. A year later, he won 20 games. Wainwright’s brother, Trey, who is seven years older, showed him a curveball grip at age 10. The pitch felt perfectly natural. “Back then there was no talk of age limits to throw curveballs, which I believe plays into people hurting their arms by not throwing it till later in life,” Wainwright says. “Everybody’s parents think it’s bad for them to throw curveballs, but we have a higher rate of Tommy John [surgeries] than ever, and everybody’s throwing harder than ever. So people are building arm strength, building arm strength, building arm strength, and then they say, ‘All right, you’re in high school now, you’re throwing 90, now we can work on a curveball.�
�� So what you’re doing is you’re taking an arm that’s fully developed and strong and throwing bullets, and then all of a sudden you’re entering a totally new movement at max speed rather than bringing along a properly thrown curveball. A curveball’s much less strain on your arm than a slider is. A slider is a variation of the fastball, and you kind of have a wrist twinge. It’s just not as good on your elbow.”

  Curveball enthusiasts say this all the time: the slider is more dangerous, and the curveball, when taught properly, is just fine. Teaching it, though, is the problem. There are far more young pitchers than there are coaches qualified to teach a safe curveball.

  “I tell kids and I tell parents: throwing a curveball will not hurt your arm if you throw it properly, but the problem is that most people don’t throw it properly,” Nolan Ryan says. “So they have to learn to throw it properly. If you do that, it won’t hurt your arm any more than a fastball. Everything’s the same, it’s just your hand position on the ball. So with kids, it’s a touchy thing to get ’em to understand what they have to do and what they shouldn’t do. It’s not something you learn overnight, either.”

  What do kids do when they throw the curveball improperly?

  “They try to put spin on the ball by putting pressure on the elbow, which is not where you get it,” Ryan continues. “You get the spin on the ball, it’s in your hand and your wrist.”

  Jon Lester, the veteran left-hander who won titles with the Red Sox and Cubs, says the curveball itself is not a problem. The danger, he says, is that kids often struggle to repeat the proper mechanics.

  “People always ask, ‘How old can I be when I start throwing curveballs?’ ” Lester says, shrugging his shoulders. “Throw ’em when you’re two years old. That’s not the problem. The problem is your mechanics. The problem is you have a 12-year-old, he can’t repeat his arm slot. That’s the torque on the elbow. That’s the problem with throwing a curveball when you’re younger: you can’t repeat. You’re not strong enough.”

  When a pitcher throws a curveball properly, the arm protects itself by tucking itself in, toward the glove-side rib cage, as it follows through. A slider puts more pressure on the elbow because it requires full extension. Blyleven dismisses the notion that curveballs cause injury—“A myth,” he says. “A slider will hurt your arm more”—and Mussina echoes him. Mussina never had arm surgery and says that whenever something felt off, the fastball caused him more discomfort than the curve.

  “Anytime that I had a sore elbow or anything like that, I never, ever, ever felt like it was my curveball that did it,” he says. “Never. It was never really in a place that seemed like my curveball would be the reason.”

  Mussina lives in the shadow of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, home of the Little League World Series, and has served on the Little League International board of directors. Every August, there’s a mild outcry when folks watch 12-year-olds spinning curveballs in Williamsport on ESPN. Yet Mussina doesn’t rail against the dangers of the pitch, and neither does Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who studied the issue with his colleagues by tracking the progress of 481 youth pitchers for a decade. Their report, issued in 2011, found no relationship between throwing curveballs before age 13 and serious arm injury after.

  “What was a strong indicator was pitching too much,” Fleisig says. “So the kids who pitched year-round baseball in high school and these travel teams, they get hurt whether or not they’re the ones who throw the curveballs.”

  For pitchers of all ages, Fleisig says, the fastball and curveball exert similar amounts of stress on elbows and shoulders; the curveball, in fact, was found to have 5 to 10 percent less stress on the shoulder, though that was deemed statistically insignificant. (The study did find “significantly less elbow and shoulder torque and force” from the changeup.)

  If kids who throw curveballs get hurt more often, Fleisig says, don’t blame the pitch.

  “The kids who threw curveballs at the younger age were also the ones with the pushy parents,” he says, “and also the ones who played year-round.”

  Need more testimony? Here’s Tom House, the former reliever and pitching coach: “The curveball, which everybody thought was the worst pitch on the arm, is actually the easiest pitch on the arm, because if it’s thrown properly, it’s the strength position, and it’s the slowest velocity. When you’re karate-chopping a brick, you’re not doing it with your palm, you’re doing it with the side of your hand, just like you throw a curveball. If you twist when you do it, that’s where all the issues in the elbow come in.”

  Curveball hysteria is misguided. There is just no evidence that, with proper technique, curveballs are bad for developing arms. And it’s not just recent science. Here’s Bob Shaw, a longtime pitcher and coach, in his 1972 pitching manual:

  “At what age should a youngster start throwing a curve ball?” Shaw wrote. “In my experience, most of the good curve-ball pitchers have started young. You can injure your arm at any age if you do not throw the curve correctly. Age is not a factor.”

  * * *

  ————

  You see it all the time in the clubhouse, or if you watch the relievers while they’re sitting in the bullpen. They’ll flip balls to themselves, like a lifeguard lazily whirling her whistle around her fingers while staring out at the water, just to pass the time. In this case, though, there’s a purpose: spin. It’s not the same kind of spin, exactly, but the more idle time you spend flicking that ball, exercising the wrist and fingers on the muscle memory of a curveball, the better.

  “You’ve got free time, you’re just sitting around during a game,” Mike Montgomery says. “Why not grab a ball, grip it how you would, and just spin it?”

  Hitters would rather you didn’t. One of the best, Mike Piazza, learned this at a young age as a bat boy for the Dodgers. Someone asked Bill Madlock, the veteran third baseman, how to hit a curveball. “Don’t miss the fastball!” Madlock replied. By then he had won four batting titles.

  “It’s just harder to hit,” says Mark Teixeira, who slugged 409 home runs. “Drop a ball from a 20-foot ladder and have me try to hit it, going straight down. Even for the best hitters in the world, that’s gonna be tough to do. Now, give me a 100-mph fastball—straight, in the zone—I’ll hit it every time. I may not get a hit, but I’m gonna hit it. But if you do it the other way, that’s what a curveball does. A good curveball with a lot of break, it’s not necessarily that I don’t recognize it, but it’s moving so much that it’s tougher to square up.”

  A few decades ago, some worried that the slider would all but wipe out the curveball, because it is easier to throw and easier to get called in the strike zone. Candy Cummings found a way to work around that problem; a century later, it persisted.

  “The strike zone was bigger in my day,” says Carl Erskine, who pitched from 1948 to 1959. “Just under the letters used to be a called strike; now if it’s above the belt, it’s a ball. So the strike zone has been compressed, and that’s caused pitchers to adapt more to breaking pitches that are smaller. It’s hard to get the big curveball a called strike sometimes, because it starts above the strike zone and breaks down into it. Sometimes the umpire sees it too high.”

  Al Jackson, a stalwart lefty of the early Mets, later became a coach with the Red Sox. In 1977, he lamented to The Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan: “Pitchers have become so slider crazy that the curve is fast becoming a dying art.”

  Yet the slider never came close to eliminating the curveball. Ryan and Blyleven overlapped with Mussina and Olson, who overlapped with Zito and Wainwright, and so on. Now, as pitchers dominate with high, hard stuff as never before, it is more and more critical to have the contrast of a tumbling curveball.

  “Guys are throwing so hard, if they can throw a slower pitch, it’s too big a speed variance to cover,” Wainwright says. “If you’re throwing fastball/slider, everything’s hard, so a hitter can gear up for basically one tempo, one
speed. Whereas if you’ve gotta worry about hard/slow, it’s very tough.”

  John Smoltz, a power version of Mussina, loved the curveball. When Smoltz had his hard stuff going, as he usually did, the curve would give him a free strike. Hitters prepared for a fastball or slider, and when Smoltz tossed a curveball instead, they’d be so surprised at the different shape and speed that they’d lock up and watch it drop in the zone. Smoltz calls the curveball a forgotten art and is glad to see it coming back through stars like Kershaw and Madison Bumgarner. There’s really no excuse for a curveball—at least the kind to steal a strike—to be missing from a pitcher’s tool belt.

  “When I was first coming up, you’d see the big 12-6 curveball, with Matt Morris and Darryl Kile for the Cardinals,” says David Ross, who caught in the majors for 15 seasons, through 2016. “I think that’s starting to come back. It’s just evolution. When guys are throwing so hard now, you have to commit a little bit sooner as a hitter, and you’re way out in front. It’s one of those things where the fastball’s so hard, so the 12-6 starts at your head and drops in for a strike, or it starts where the fastball does and it’s more of a chase pitch.”

  Ross ended his career riding off the field in Cleveland on the shoulders of his Cubs teammates, after Montgomery’s final curveball won Game 7 of the World Series. That concluded a season in which major league pitchers threw 7,732 more curveballs than they had in 2015, according to Statcast data from MLB.com. The average curveball was also spinning more, at 2,462 rpm, up from 2,302. In 2017, pitchers threw curveballs with 10.6 percent of all pitches, a 15-season high.

  There are get-me-over curveballs to dump in the zone for called strikes, and curveballs in the dirt to bait a free swinger. But more and more, Montgomery is convinced, pitchers are throwing true curveballs: pitches in the zone, meant to induce swinging strikes. It is simple evolution, with the information flowing from the front office to the field. The data tells decision makers what to seek, so now they seek curveballs with high spin rates.