The Pitching Meta
Not every post is going to be about a shoot okay? If you know me irl you know that I love baseball. I watch it a lot. Like 200 games a year on tv. For a sport that’s hundreds of years old there have been some major changes to the idea of pitching in the last couple years.
More than most sports baseball has embraced a technological revolution in the past decade. Every professional ballpark and many college parks have full trackman systems telling nerds (complimentary) what rpms pitches have, what exit velocities batted balls have, and dozens of other data sets.
As a result we now know a lot more about what makes different pitches effective. One thing we’ve learned is that spin rate has as much if not more to do with a good fastball than velocity. The Bernoulli Effect means that the displacement of air caused by a fast spinning fastball will cause it to drop less than it “should”, making it more difficult to hit. A fastball cannot rise, gravity is too brolic to allow that. But the last 5 or so feet of movement on a pitch aren’t actually perceived by batters, the brain can’t work that fast. They swing based on what they think the ball will do based on experience. So a fastball that drops a centimeter less than expected becomes very effective.
Now recently they’ve discovered seam shifted wake as a new way to define movement. From my understanding, when the ball is thrown in a two seam manner it can accomplish more horizontal movement because the seams move through the air in a less predictable way. This has lead to the invention of the sweeper. Like a slider, but slippery.
A traditional slider is thrown similar to a football spiral, and will dart downwards but not move all that much horizontally. But when thrown from a two seam grip it can move over a foot side to side. Because wake. This is advantageous because if the batter hits it it’s likely to be off the end of the bat and not hit very hard. Whereas for a pitch that moves downwards the plane of the barrel remains the same, so if contact is made it’s often hard contact just at a more downward angle than the hitter is hoping for.
My good friend Shohei Ohtani came into the league throwing a splitter as his main off speed pitch, but since learning the sweeper has nearly abandoned it. This is in part because the splitter causes blisters, but also because the sweeper is so effective.
However it’s not a BRAND new pitch. It’s kind of been around forever, but it was called a no-dot slider. Meaning the seams didn’t create an identifiable dot on the way to the plate. Sergio Romo threw one with a lot of success. But now everyone is throwing one. If you found this interesting but confusing there is a video on YouTube from The Pitching Ninja that explains it better than I have.
This is similar to photography, kind of. Trends move as technology evolves, and there is a balance between staying true to yourself and your style and adopting to what’s working best now. My photos have changed over the years, but my approach is mostly the same. Make images that connect people.