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by Tyler Kepner

  The pitchers in that World Series highlighted the era’s defining trick. Cliff Lee won Games 1 and 5. Rivera saved Games 2 and 4. Andy Pettitte won Games 3 and 6. All of them featured the cutter as their primary weapon. A month after their loss, the Phillies traded Lee and upgraded to Halladay. When they brought Lee back in 2011, they set a franchise record with 102 wins in the regular season.

  Lee would pitch 13 years in the majors, with one Cy Young Award and a 7–3 postseason record. In his prime, nobody had better command. His fastball never averaged even 92 miles an hour, but it carried him through college and into the pros. It wouldn’t have brought him much further without a cutter as a complement, in place of his ordinary slider.

  “Cliff didn’t throw hard, so what it did was it gave him another element of guys laying off his fastball,” says Ace Adams, his pitching coach at Class A Jupiter in the Expos’ farm system. “He threw 88 to 92, and when you have that late cutter instead of using a four-seamer in, that just jams ’em. They’re looking for a fastball in a hitter’s count and all of a sudden here comes a cutter and it’s late, right on your hands. It blows their bat up. It gave him more leeway with his regular fastball. Now he could throw that thing right down the middle and let it run, and they couldn’t sit on it because they knew he had this cutter. So that changed him.”

  Lee learned the cutter from Adams in 2001, and by the end of the next season, he was in the majors with Cleveland. Adams learned the pitch from Ray Fisher, a right-hander for the Yankees and the Reds from 1910 to 1920. When Fisher wasn’t throwing the spitter—legal back then—he threw cutters. He started and lost Game 3 of the 1919 World Series, in Chicago’s Comiskey Park against the infamous Black Sox, who had lost the first two games on their way to throwing the series.

  After his pitching career, Fisher would spend decades as the head baseball coach at the University of Michigan, where the baseball field is named for him. He was retired by 1971, when Adams arrived at Michigan as a left-handed pitcher, but would help out the team almost every day, working with the pitchers at Yost Field House, where the hockey team now plays. Fisher was very thin and not quite six feet tall, but his hands were enormous; each one could hold five baseballs.

  He was 84 then, too old to throw, but he could demonstrate technique, always emphasizing “wrist pop” to make the ball spin. Adams eagerly soaked up his tips and stories, and would walk to Fisher’s house from his West Quad dorm in Ann Arbor to watch the World Series on TV. Fisher thought modern pitchers were soft, compared to those from his day, but he gladly analyzed their stuff for Adams, and shared memories of his time on that stage.

  “They were blowing it on purpose and I still couldn’t beat ’em,” Fisher would say. “We all knew they were getting paid, and it actually made us a little nervous, because we knew they were trying to blow it and if we didn’t beat ’em, it was embarrassing. So it wasn’t fun. We knew it was going on, we heard everything. We didn’t know everything behind the scenes, but we all knew. Damn right we knew.”

  Three of the White Sox who would be banned for life—Chick Gandil, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Swede Risberg—had hits that led to runs off Fisher. Still, he did not pitch badly, allowing just two earned runs in seven and two-thirds World Series innings. There’s no precise data on which pitches he threw, of course, but it’s safe to say the cutter was among them, though Fisher always called it the cut fastball.

  “He taught me to off-center it, hook my hand a quarter-turn, and let it rip,” Adams says. “That’s how I’ve always taught it. If you really throw it right, it goes across a little bit and then it goes down a little—just a little. And if you don’t throw it right, if you get around it, it might break too early and it just goes across and might hang a little bit. But the ones that really have that lateness to it, it goes across and down and you really get a good rip down through your middle finger.

  “Anyone can throw it—just off-center that son of a bitch, hook your hand, and let it fly, brother!”

  The cutter lends itself to such excitement. It is meant to be thrown aggressively, and to act out the verb in its name. It aims to inflict damage, to take something whole and chop it up: the wood in the hitter’s hands, yes, but also his confidence. A good inside cutter veers off course so late that the only way to hit it on the barrel is to pull it foul. The batter must guess where the pitch will end up; he does not have time to actually see its movement.

  Pitchers, and not just Fisher, knew of this weapon long ago. Without video, we’ll never know the exact movement on the extraordinary curveball of Hilton Smith, the Hall of Fame pitcher from the Negro Leagues in the 1930s and ’40s. But Smith could shape his breaking ball various ways; perhaps one moved like a cutter.

  “We had to have two curveballs, a big one and a small one,” Smith said in Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues. “Now they call it a slider, but those guys were throwing it years and years back.”

  Bob Shaw—who pitched for the White Sox in the 1959 World Series, their next after the Black Sox scandal—describes the cutter in his pitching manual as an offshoot of the slider, without using the term:

  When you don’t have to throw a strike, break the ball flat and inside, belt-high. Percentages are that the batter will hit the ball foul if he makes contact. This is a good way to jam the hitter.

  Billy Williams, the left-handed-hitting Hall of Famer who played most of his career for the Cubs in the 1960s, loved to drop his hands and attack the low slider. But just a slight adjustment, he said in 2015, turned that pitch into the toughest kind he faced: “It’s a slider, but not down—coming in from a right-hander. It’s belt-high, where you can’t get extended. It’s called a cutter now.”

  One of the most famous moments of baseball’s black-and-white TV age—Bill Mazeroski’s home run that won the 1960 World Series for the Pirates—came off a cutter.

  “It was a high fastball; high cutter, really,” says Ralph Terry, the Yankees pitcher who threw it. “It was moving a little.”

  The next Yankees pitcher to give up a World Series–ending hit also did it on a cutter. In Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, Luis Gonzalez floated a Rivera cutter into shallow left field for a single, winning the title for the Diamondbacks. By then, everyone knew what pitch Gonzalez had hit. Who knew they’d been throwing cutters so many decades before?

  “Well,” Terry says, smiling, “they just put a new name on it.”

  * * *

  ————

  Chili Davis came to bat about 10,000 times in the majors. As a coach, he has studied countless more at-bats by his hitters. The cutter, he insists, has been around forever.

  “Pitches have names now,” he says. “They didn’t have names back then. Back then it was fastball, breaking ball. You might have a curveball or a slider, some guys had better curveballs than others. You had the sinker guys, you knew the ball would sink and run away. And you had cutter guys—Dave Dravecky, Woodie Fryman, Jerry Reuss, Andy Pettitte, latter-day Mariano Rivera, even Jim Abbott threw a cutter.

  “But you didn’t walk out there and go, ‘Hey, this guy, he’s got a cutter, two-seamer, four-seamer, sinker. I mean, there’s too many names for one pitch. It’s a fastball—this guy can get into your kitchen if you let him, and he lives in there, because he’s trying to break your bat. He’s trying to crowd you, he’s trying to jam you, and you knew that they could go out there, too. So basically you picked a side that you wanted to beat them on.”

  A fun example of the cutter’s effectiveness was the pitch that ended the fourth game of the 2000 World Series. The Mets trailed the Yankees by one run, and with one more out they would fall behind three games to one. Matt Franco, a lefty, came up to pinch hit. He stood far from the plate, giving himself a little more room to clear his hands and connect with Rivera’s best pitch.

  The cutter would beat Franco, even though Rivera did not throw it. He and the catcher, Jorge Posada,
recognized that with Franco standing way out there, he could never reach a four-seam fastball on the outside corner. So that is where Rivera put it, and Franco went down looking in his only World Series at-bat.

  “I thought for sure he was going to come inside,’’ Franco reflected the next spring. “He’d done it to me before, and I’ve seen it on TV a thousand times, just breaking bats with that cutter in. I wasn’t going to get beat that way. He made two great pitches and there was basically no chance.”

  The cutter has that power. Nobody wants to face it, because it’s so hard to square up no matter which way you hit. Mark Teixeira, a switch-hitter for 14 seasons, calls the cutter the pitch that equalizes everything. Deception is critical to every pitch, but the cutter changes its form so late that the hitter can feel helpless. It looks like a ball and zips into the strike zone, or it looks like a strike and bends in toward your belt.

  “You almost have to commit and anticipate, but the problem with the cutter is you still have the velocity and it moves so late,” Cal Ripken Jr. says. “If a ball spins, or a curveball starts at your front left shoulder and you know it breaks off, you can kind of gauge where it’s gonna end up. But the cutter is more unpredictable in that it comes in like the fastball and sometimes it’s just a little movement, sometimes it’s bigger movement, sometimes it’s a little later. And does it come in or go away? The sweet spot’s only so wide, so you either hit on the end or you hit it in—but it hurts like hell either side.”

  For most pitchers, especially those who don’t throw very hard, that kind of weak, uncomfortable contact is the whole point. Even for a pitcher who relies on other stuff, it can be essential. Marco Estrada was basically a league-average pitcher for parts of seven seasons, getting by with a changeup, a curveball, and a fastball with a high spin rate. He added a cutter in 2015, with Toronto, and led the AL in fewest hits per nine innings in each of his first two seasons with it.

  “Back in the day when I’d fall behind, I’d have to go to a four-seam fastball that’s about 88 miles an hour,” Estrada said at the 2016 All-Star Game. “You’re not gonna get away with much; you have to make sure you locate that pitch. Nowadays, if I fall behind and throw a cutter, I don’t really have to be perfect with it, and I kind of want them to swing at it anyways. Maybe it’ll cause weak contact, maybe a ground ball or a pop fly. It’s just something with a little bit of movement that throws the hitters off.”

  Yet the hybrid nature of the pitch held back its spread for decades. It’s not quite a fastball or a slider, so when a pitcher relies too heavily on his cutter, which requires pressure on one finger, he might lose velocity on his fastball, which requires pressure on two. This happened to Dan Haren, but Haren didn’t mind; his fastballs at 90 and 91 were straight and hittable, and his cutters at 88 and 89 missed barrels. He loved the pitch, but for many, a slower, fastball-ish pitch is bound to be alarming.

  Another problem, some coaches fear, is the umpire. When a startled hitter gives a theatrical response to the cutter’s late action, the umpire might not call the pitch a strike. And because the cutter stays on or near the same plane as the fastball, without as much tilt as a slider, if it doesn’t have much movement it’s just an ordinary fastball begging to be crushed.

  Then again, any pitch in the wrong location is dangerous for a pitcher. The advantage of the cutter is the timing of the action. Mark Melancon, a three-time All-Star closer, says he thinks about “literally cutting through the right half of the ball,” and believes such conviction imparts the pitch with its ferocity. It’s as if the pitch is just so determined to be a fastball that it won’t give in and move until the very last moment.

  “When you spin a bowling ball, it goes straight for three-quarters of the lane, and then that last quarter of the lane, it cuts—and that’s when hitters’ eyes can’t actually catch up to the ball,” Melancon says. “They can’t see the last 13 to 15 feet. Hand-eye coordination isn’t that good when a ball’s coming in at that speed. They’re literally guessing where it’s going to end up, and not seeing where. They’re anticipating but they can’t physically see it.”

  Many pitchers find that their hand naturally finishes one way or the other, producing a cut or sink on their fastballs. Ron Darling, a righty, had no problem getting his fastball to run in on righties, but no matter what he tried, he could not get the opposite movement. Pitchers who mastered the sinker and cutter, like Halladay and Greg Maddux, conjured a delta effect in hitters’ minds: the pitch would look the same for a while, but they never knew if it would take a left or right exit from the tunnel.

  Before he learned to master the slider, perhaps as well as any pitcher ever, Steve Carlton threw a cutter. He thinks it’s an ideal pitch to teach kids, because it generates the movement they want without the strain.

  “All you do on the cutter is you load it up—say the top of the ball is 12 o’clock, you just load up your index finger and middle finger on the outside part of the ball, on the left or the right of what would be perceived as 12 o’clock—and throw it like your fastball, and it starts to cut on you,” Carlton says. “That’s fairly easy to do. That’s how I teach kids, so that way you don’t have to twist, because kids want to twist it to make it curve and dip and stuff like that.”

  When people ask Jon Lester about his cutter, they are often amazed by its simplicity. It is not what pitchers call a “feel pitch,” one that requires precise, almost delicate, execution. Lester, one of the best big-game pitchers of recent times, says his hand naturally finishes inward and finger pressure takes care of the rest.

  “I want to throw a fastball with my middle finger, basically; that’s the feeling I want to feel,” Lester says. “I don’t want to say it’s an easy pitch to learn—but it is.”

  * * *

  ————

  Jerry Reuss joined the Dodgers in a trade at the start of the 1979 season. The team had won the last two National League pennants, but stumbled to a losing record. Reuss went 7–14, turned 30, and lost his starting job.

  Banished to the bullpen, where he would need just two pitches, Reuss focused on his fastball and curve. While throwing in the bullpen, his fastball started slicing in, late. Mark Cresse, the bullpen catcher, asked Reuss what he was doing. Quite by accident, Reuss said, he had been holding the ball a bit off-center and could feel it coming off the inside of his middle finger. He was putting it right where he wanted, too, and Cresse suggested he use it in games.

  “I saw the reaction that the hitters gave,” Reuss says. “They looked at the pitch and they looked out at me and I could see them squint their eyes as if to say, ‘What was that?’ And then I said, ‘Whoa, we might have something here.’ ”

  Hitters couldn’t read the ball coming out of Reuss’s hand; would it run, like the two-seamer he’d always thrown, or cut? Larry Bowa, the veteran Phillies shortstop, confronted Reuss one day: “I know you’re cheating, and I’m gonna figure out how.” Reuss humored him. He wasn’t cheating, but he was glad to know he was in Bowa’s head. With the cutter working, he could pitch more confidently with his other stuff. Never much of a strikeout guy anyway, Reuss embraced a pitch intended for weak contact, scribbling all the benefits on a legal pad as an unofficial contract with himself.

  “It was one of those domino effect kinds of things,” Reuss says. “You don’t walk anybody if you get somebody out on three pitches. You’re throwing strikes, and then it went into what happened defensively. I had a good defense behind me; there were some flaws, but each of them was made better because they played on their toes, they never got back on their heels. They would make plays for me that they weren’t making for other pitchers that were going deeper into the count.”

  By shaving 10 or 20 pitches off each start, Reuss figured, he could be stronger later in the season and pitch a few more years. Both hunches were right. In 1980, Reuss would throw a no-hitter and win the Sporting News’ comeback player of the year award.
The next year he helped the Dodgers win a championship, shutting out Houston in the division series clincher and beating the Yankees’ Ron Guidry, 2–1, with a five-hitter in Game 5 of the World Series. His first few seasons with the cutter were the best of a 22-year career that spanned four decades.

  “I had a fabulous run, unlike anything else I had in my career,” Reuss says. “And it was all due to the cutter.”

  Yet the cutter did not catch on. Surely others were throwing it, Reuss says, but he could not think of anyone. Many pitchers, it seems, developed cutters without knowing what they were really trying.

  This is how it happened for a left-hander at the University of Michigan—what is it about that school and this pitch?—in the mid-1980s. The pitcher already had a natural cut to his fastball, and when he threw it with his index and middle fingers across the narrow seams, instead of with them, his middle finger caught the curve of a seam just as he finished, imparting more drastic inward movement.

  Most people did not think of this pitch when they considered the pitcher, Jim Abbott, who was born without a right hand. He balanced his glove on his right arm as he delivered the pitch, then switched it to his left hand in case he needed to make a play. There has never been a pitcher like him, but it was not just courage and will that made Abbott an Olympian, a first-round draft pick by the Angels, and a 10-year major leaguer. It was the cutter.

  “That little grip kind of became a pitch of its own,” Abbott says. “And when I got up to professional baseball I heard people start referring to it as a cutter. It wasn’t a slider, it wasn’t a fastball, it was a cutter. And I said, ‘Oh yeah, great—I have a cutter.’ ”