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The Grip Of The Master
"I held the ball with my fingers across the seams," says Blyleven. "And my thumb as far under the ball as possible."
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05/18/09 - Sonny Fulks/1570wptw.com
They used to say that the curveball didn’t curve at all…that it was an optical illusion.
That is what they said…non-baseball people who pooh-poohed the notion that you could make a baseball break down and away from a hitter standing at the plate by imparting forward (instead of backward) spin on it.
As I sat in the dugout at Progressive Field last July with Bert Blyleven and reminded him of those days and those people he laughed. Widely acknowledged as having had one of the best curveballs in the history of the game during his years as a major league pitcher, Blyleven has heard it all.
He won 287 games during his 22-year major league career and struck out 3,701 hitters. And while Blyleven threw hard in the early days, he actually won 182 of his 287 games after he passed the age of 30…and after his best fastball was behind him. He did it by throwing the curve and retired after the ’92 season at the age of 41.
Today, he works as a TV analyst on the Minnesota Twins television network and talks pitching and throwing the curveball to anyone with a desire to learn more about it.
“No one who ever had to hit one (a curveball) for a living would tell you it’s an optical illusion,” he laughed. “In baseball terms the curve is the ‘equalizer’. It’s the pitch that separates a hitter from those who think they’re a hitter. Pitchers call it the ‘yellow hammer’, ‘Uncle Chuck’ and the ‘duece’. Hitters that can’t hit it call it a lot of other, not-so-complimentary names.”
When I was a college pitcher at Ohio State, I used to drive to Cleveland and sit in old Municipal Stadium to watch Blyleven (then with the Minnesota Twins) throw the curveball. It was wicked…a 12-to-5 breaker that looked like an egg falling off the stove. He laughed when I told him about shivering behind home plate on cold spring nights when no one came to the ballpark…for the sake of watching his curveball work.
“If you’d asked me then I would have told you you’re nuts,” he laughed. “You should have spent your time on more profitable endeavors…like paying attention to your date.”
Now 35 years later, I asked Bert Blyleven to show me the grip he used to throw the curve, and, the fine points that separate a good one from one that hangs and gets hammered.
Blyleven has huge hands, a distinct advantage in throwing the curve because it allows for imparting more rotation (spin) and a more over-the-top release of the ball.
“It doesn’t make any difference if you have your fingers across the laces or along the laces,” he explained. “But I always held the ball with my fingers across the laces and my thumb as far under the ball as I could get it. The farther you keep your thumb under the ball, the more spin you can generate.
“It’s important, too, to have a feel for a consistent release point,” he added. “And you only get that by throwing it, and throwing it a lot. You have to release the ball from in front, as your arm passes your chest. There’s a tendency with young pitchers to try to throw the curve too hard and their release point comes too soon. When you do that you get a ‘spinner’ instead of a pitch that bites and dives through the strike zone. ‘Spinners’ are ‘hangers’ and hangers get hammered.”
He made the point repeatedly…that a good curveball comes from constant practice and developing a feel for the pitch.
“Once you develop the feel you can make adjustments, and adjustments are necessary sometimes. You may not go out there on Friday with the same stuff you had on Monday and you have to figure it out quickly…what you need to do on a different mound or in different weather to make the pitch work effectively.”
I asked him the age-old question. Is it hard on young arms to try to throw the curve too soon?
“I think I learned to throw it the same day I learned to walk,” he laughed. “So I guess my answer would be learn to throw correctly and no one pitch is harder on your arm than another. If anything, throwing the slider puts more strain on the arm than the curve.”
As I got up to leave Blyleven reached in a ball bag on the Twins' bench and took out a baseball, on which he wrote the following and handed it to me: To Sonny…keep throwing the curve!
I thanked him for the keepsake, but Bert Blyleven thanked me in return. “For keepin’ the dream alive,” he said. “At your age you could be thinking about dying…but you’re still thinking about the curveball. One of these days we’ll make believers out of everybody!”
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