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by Tyler Kepner

  “When you throw the screwball, you start out with the hand facing away from you, which means you are already in a full pronated situation,” Marshall says. “And you can’t do anything but put spin on the ball. But the way that I throw, you come in and drive and my elbow pops up, and the powerful inward rotation gives me a very high spin velocity. I can start it over your head and it’ll end up at your ankles—one of those pitches that will really bite the air molecules.”

  Like so many others, Marshall was initially told not to throw the screwball. His fifth organization, the Montreal Expos, finally let him throw it in 1970, and he went on to lead the majors in relief appearances for the decade. He calls the screwball “an absolute must” for any pitcher, and has spent many years as a college coach and private pitching instructor in Zephyrhills, Florida.

  Yet for all the innovation in baseball lately, the sport has never turned to Marshall in any official way. His unwavering support of the screwball is just a small part of the revolution he believes he could unleash: 10 miles an hour added to everyone’s fastball, and pronated breaking balls that never damage the elbow. Baseball teams are willing to innovate with their methods, but not to blow them all up.

  “There’s no major league team that seems to be interested in having a completely injury-free pitching motion,” he says. “These traditional pitching coaches, they just get together and talk about this stupidity stuff, and nobody’s interested in learning how to have the very best pitchers you could possibly get. Of course, this would change baseball. You’re gonna have to move the mound back.”

  That’s quite a thought, but it’s also a fantasy—the pitching distance has been 60 feet, 6 inches since 1893, and it’s not changing. Velocity is climbing, anyway, and for his part, Valenzuela laments the loss of nuance in the modern game.

  “If scouts don’t see 90-plus, I don’t think they can sign pitchers,” he says. “I can see a good pitcher in Mexico with good control, but if the velocity’s not there, they say no. No velocity, no prospect for the big leagues.”

  Valenzuela threw a fastball and curveball when he signed with the Dodgers in 1979, at age 18. Mike Brito, the scout who signed him, visited Valenzuela that summer at Class A in Lodi, California, and decided he needed a third pitch. After the season he sent another pitcher he had signed, Dodgers reliever Bobby Castillo, to teach Valenzuela the screwball.

  “We believed that his fastball was below average, so we needed a pitch to make his fastball better,” Brito says. “That was the pitch that made him successful in the big leagues.”

  Valenzuela, it turned out, had just the right wrist for the screwball, and soon he would catapult to stardom, packing stadiums and connecting with Los Angeles fans in a way no other Dodger ever has. The Dodgers rode him hard, and in Valenzuela’s first 10 seasons only one pitcher in the majors (Jack Morris) logged more innings.

  That workload, not the screwball, is probably the main reason for Valenzuela’s sharp decline in his 30s. Even so, his prime was so inspiring that you’d think some pitcher, with two weapons but not a third, might ask him how he threw his best pitch.

  As he leaned on a fence in Arizona one spring day, signing autographs and watching the Dodgers practice, Valenzuela considered the question and shook his head.

  “If somebody approached me, I’d try to help them out,” he said. “Right now? Nobody.”

  Really? All those pitchers in camp, majors and minors, and nobody asks?

  “Nobody,” Valenzuela said.

  * * *

  ————

  We see this phenomenon with the splitter, too—a pitch proven to be a devastating weapon, but now mostly hidden behind layers of yellow police tape. At least some pitchers still throw splitters, though. Almost nobody throws a screwball on purpose anymore. Most pitchers still need something that moves away from the opposite-handed hitter. But there are more options today, and the screwball is a relic.

  “What you see nowadays is a modern variation of it, and it comes in the form of a Felix Hernandez or Zack Greinke changeup,” says Brian Bannister. “It’s the modern, power, flat-spin-axis changeup. That’s how it’s evolved. Instead of in your mind trying to throw a backwards curveball, in a way it’s, ‘Let’s throw a changeup with no vertical rise,’ one where the bottom just falls out—like James Shields. The ball is spinning like a helicopter, therefore it has no backspin and no vertical rise and the bottom just falls out. That to me is the modern screwball.”

  Jim Mecir, a right-handed reliever for Oakland and four other teams from 1995 to 2005, was the last pitcher to have a long career throwing screwballs. Mecir learned it at Eckerd College from a coach, Rich Folkers, who played for several teams in the 1970s. Mecir threw it as a classic reverse curveball, turning his fingers away from his head and pulling down, never pronating, never hurting his elbow—and always keeping his catchers on alert.

  “Just like a left-handed breaking ball,” says A. J. Hinch, who caught him briefly for the A’s. “You’d have to remind yourself to catch it with your thumb up, because it was going to go the wrong way.”

  Mecir’s career was a testament to ingenuity. Born with a clubfoot, he could not generate much power with his legs as he pushed off the mound. His strength came from his upper body and he threw awkwardly, with an open delivery that kept him from having a good curveball or slider. The screwball was his remedy—but he wouldn’t recommend it.

  “I teach pitching lessons and I would never think about—especially with liability now—‘Hey, do you want to throw a screwball?’ ” Mecir says. “Because I don’t know, myself. I just know it works for me. My mechanics were a little different and it’s what I had to do.”

  It is not a pitch anyone seems interested in teaching, from Hubbell on down. In 2016 Fox aired a drama series called Pitch about a woman, played by Kylie Bunbury, who makes the majors by throwing a screwball. But fantasy did not meet reality: her on-set coach, the former Oriole Gregg Olson, has never taught a screwball to a nonactor. Too hard on the shoulder, he says.

  Even as a family heirloom, the pitch often stays on the basement shelf. Clyde Wright was 1–8 for the Angels in 1969, learned a screwball from Marv Grissom in winter ball, and immediately had a dream season: 22 wins, an All-Star appearance, a no-hitter. His son, Jaret, went on to pitch in the majors, too, but Clyde never thought to teach him a screwball.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Wright says. “He had the circle change. When you can throw it 97, 98 and you can get it over with the breaking ball and the changeup, you really don’t need it.”

  Jaret Wright’s career began with great promise—he nearly pitched the Indians to victory in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series—but injuries ultimately held him back, even though he never used the screwball. Clyde is not convinced the pitch is dangerous. It never hurt his elbow, he said, yet pitchers today seem to be constantly in pain.

  “If they’re worried about it hurting arms, then somebody’s a lot dumber than I am,” Wright says. “How many guys go on the DL every year in the big leagues—and not one of them throws the screwball that I’ve heard about.”

  Yet Wright, too, knows the story of Carl Hubbell and his inverted pitching arm. That example is not the reason the screwball has gone away, but it symbolizes the pitch’s notorious reputation. Few people threw the screwball to begin with, and now there’s almost nobody to advocate for it, let alone teach it.

  “There’s just too much at stake now,” Bannister says. “With the money in the game, it’s not worthwhile for a coach to put his own career on the line to destroy a kid’s arm. Whether he would or not isn’t the issue, it’s just that any form of risk in pitching, as far as health is concerned, is considered taboo.

  “Teams in general are always in this limbo between performance and health. You have these massive investments in money and kids, and you don’t want to blow them out because you only get so many draft picks, and they�
�re expensive. But at the same time, there’s this sacrifice in performance that a lot of older pitchers used to have, because they were willing to go places with the pitches and with their arm action that most teams won’t approach nowadays.”

  Some pitchers, like Hector Santiago and Trevor Bauer, have periodically promoted the screwball in recent years, rooting for its return. They’ve never really stuck with it, or stood out enough for people to pay much attention, but as teams chase every little edge, they’re more and more open to shattering old perceptions. Theoretically, this could help the screwball’s chance of survival.

  One day in 2016, around the batting cage in Houston, Astros pitching coach Brent Strom spoke about the splitter, how it was the rage of the 1980s. “I want the next rage,” said general manager Jeff Luhnow, smiling. “But we’re not gonna tell you what it is.”

  Could it be the screwball? Strom, a contemporary of Marshall, McGraw, Jim Brewer, and other screwball masters of the 1970s, wouldn’t dismiss it.

  “It’s the easiest pitch to throw and nobody throws it,” he said. Because the arm is already pronated on a screwball, Strom explained, it’s in a better position to decelerate than it is for other pitches. Think of a car slowing down as it approaches the stop sign, instead of slamming on the brakes.

  That is the analogy used by Brent Honeywell Jr., a top right-hander in the Tampa Bay farm system whose background and attitude make him the screwball’s best hope. Honeywell’s father, Brent Sr., is Mike Marshall’s cousin. Marshall coached Brent Sr. at Saint Leo University in the 1980s, and taught him the screwball. Brent Sr., who pitched briefly in the minors, passed on the pitch to Brent Jr., telling him the screwball would take him to the majors.

  Honeywell is not especially close with Marshall, who disagrees strongly with any teaching not precisely aligned with his own. Specifically, he worries that the Rays will ruin Honeywell by forcing him to throw a traditional breaking ball, not the pronating version Marshall favors.

  But Honeywell did work with Marshall as a teenager, and he stays limber and flexible by training with a six-pound shot put, a Marshall technique. He also has a strain of iconoclasm in the way he talks about the family pitch: when it comes to the screwball, Honeywell is a true believer. Before the Rays could even think about taking the pitch away from him, Honeywell said, he told them to forget it.

  “I think there’s this false thing about it that it hurts people’s arms,” Honeywell says. “That just scares people away. It’s actually better on your arm than another pitch, because it takes the stress off the elbow, is what it does. You pronate to maximum pronation, is what people call it. I just call it turning it over. When you turn it over as far as you can turn it over, you’re getting full-on pronation and it takes the stress off your elbow. It’s better for your arm. It’s what Mike says and what is scientifically proven.”

  Honeywell succumbed to Tommy John surgery in spring training 2018, but insisted the procedure was inevitable and had nothing to do with his screwball, which had dazzled his U.S. teammates at the Futures Game in 2017. The Astros’ Derek Fisher called it a “dinosaur pitch,” and Lewis Brinson, now with the Marlins, was awestruck.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Brinson said, “but it started in their dugout and ended up in the strike zone.”

  Jim Hickey, who spent 11 seasons as Tampa Bay’s pitching coach before joining the Cubs in 2018, does not call the pitch a screwball. “Remember Daisuke Matsuzaka and the ‘gyroball,’ how it was gonna revolutionize the game—and it was a freaking changeup,” Hickey said, referring to the Japanese sensation who never quite matched his hype for the Red Sox. “Brent’s more inside the ball than you would be with a conventional change, but I’m not sure you’d call it a screwball.”

  Honeywell is used to skeptics; teammates joke with him that his precious pitch is nothing more than a glorified changeup. He laughs off the doubts. “It’s gonna be the first time they’ve ever seen a changeup move like that,” he says.

  Fair enough. The screwball is its own pitch. But this is roughly what has happened, in simplest terms: the screwball gave way to the splitter and the splitter gave way to the changeup. And all three pitches, in most cases, are different means to the same end.

  With his family connection, Honeywell has a natural tie to the screwball. For others, there’s little reason to reach so far back through history to find it. Even Herrera doubts it will ever return.

  “You’re looking for a revival of something from the old times, and I just don’t think it can,” he says. “I don’t think guys are really, actually willing to try and develop it. Most of the guys that I’ve tried to show, they’ll throw it a couple of times and they’ll either say, ‘That will hurt my elbow’ or ‘It’s just too weird.’ ”

  The weird pitch that hurts the elbow. In the graveyard of baseball, those words could be etched on the tombstone of the screwball, a pitch that once brought glory to so many. The fadeaway, it turns out, was the right name all along.

  THE SINKER

  The Furthest Strike from the Hitter’s Eyes

  The sinker used to be baseball’s most sensible pitch. Its allure was efficiency, not force. Throw it low for ground balls, conserve pitches, last deeper in games.

  “All you had to do was take it off the plane that the hitter was starting his swing at,” says Steve Rogers, a five-time All-Star for the Montreal Expos. “Just take it off the plane that much, in the last 10 feet, and it’s a soft ground ball.”

  A sinker is really just a fastball, usually thrown with the index and middle fingers aligned with the seams at their narrowest point, the hand slightly pronated at the finish. It is also called a two-seamer because, thrown this way, only two seams bite the air for each revolution.

  Yet it is not really a fastball in the way we tend to think of that pitch. You would not test your arm strength at a carnival booth by throwing a sinking fastball. You’d slap your fingers across the seams and fire it as hard and as straight as you could. With that kind of fastball, four seams backspin each time through the air, defying gravity just a bit longer.

  “If you throw it 96, 97 miles per hour, the ball gets to home plate before the spin has a chance to make it sink,” Tommy John says. “But the metrics people don’t want that. They want speed, speed, speed.”

  They might not be wrong. If we started the sport all over again, untethered to tradition, we might structure it the way many analysts now prefer: pitchers throw fastballs up and curveballs down (the north-south approach, as they say) for short bursts, then turn the game over to another pitcher, and another, and another, all throwing hard. With a deep supply of power arms today, why bother conserving pitches? And if you’ve trained all your life to throw hard, why sacrifice speed for sink?

  “It’s a harder sell, because there’s a lot of glory in throwing the ball hard,” says Dave Duncan, one of the most successful pitching coaches in history, mostly for the A’s and the Cardinals. “If you throw 98, 100 miles an hour, you get a lot of attention. How are you gonna get signed as an amateur? You think they’re out there signing 90-mile-an-hour guys? No, they’re not signing them. You know why? Because scouts see a guy that throws 99, and he may not be able to throw it through a door, but that scout can say, ‘Hey, this guy’s got a great arm, he throws hard, all he needs is someone to tweak him a little.’

  “It’s safe. But that guy that throws 92, 93, sinking fastball, decent control and movement on the ball? That’s the guy I love.”

  Duncan—who had been a power-hitting catcher in his 11 years as a player—loves the sinker for a very logical reason. The easiest way to score runs, he reasons, is with extra-base hits. Except for hard grounders right down the line, almost every extra-base hit is a ball in the air. Pitchers, therefore, should live at the bottom of the strike zone with a hard slider, hard curve, changeup—or, most reliable, a two-seam sinker.

  Duncan built those pitchers in St. Lou
is, helping the Cardinals become consistent contenders and two-time champions in the early part of this century. He encouraged Chris Carpenter, a league-average pitcher in Toronto, to use more sinking fastballs, and Carpenter became a star, passing on the gospel to teammates like Adam Wainwright, who continued to spread the message.

  In 2011, Duncan’s final season as a full-time pitching coach, the Cardinals won the World Series. That season, according to Baseball Savant, major league pitchers threw more than 167,000 pitches that were classified as two-seam fastballs or sinkers. The Cardinals’ staff ranked second in the majors in such pitches, throwing them more than 34 percent of the time.

  Not all old coaches are as enthusiastic as Duncan. Bill Fischer started and relieved for four teams in the 1950s and ’60s, distinguished by how often batters put his pitches in play. Fischer holds the record for most consecutive innings without a walk, with 84⅓ in 1962, and averaged just 3.4 strikeouts per nine innings. Coaches told him to throw two-seam fastballs, not four-seamers, and he followed orders. But he never liked the results, and when Fischer became a coach he vowed his pitchers would be different.

  “I had Roger Clemens,” Fischer said in 2017, at age 86, still in full uniform at the Royals’ spring training camp, rambling through the back fields in Surprise, Arizona, on a golf cart with his name on it.

  “The first year in Boston, he struggled, his arm was bothering him. I said, ‘How do you hold your fastball?’ He said, ‘With the seams.’ I said, ‘Roger, you gotta turn that ball around in your hand and throw four-seamers.’ He said, ‘I pitched this way in college and I had success, I want to do it the same way.’ He was a hardheaded son of a bitch.