Screwball should return this season
New York sportswriters used to call Carl Hubbell “The Meal Ticket.” They also called him “The King of the Scroogie,” which was a reference to his personal meal ticket — the screwball.
The screwball is an unusual pitch and probably no one in history made better use of it than Hubbell, who won 253 games in his brilliant Hall of Fame career. Other Hall of Famers, including Cy Young, Christy Mathewson and Warren Spahn also used the screwball as an important part of their arsenals.
More recently Mike Cuellar, Fernando Valenzuela and Tug McGraw all carved out successful pitching careers based on their mastery of the screwball. However, when they faded from the scene, they were not replaced. Anyone who today is 35 years old or younger has probably never seen a screwball pitcher in action.
Maybe that’s about to change. Brent Honeywell is a 25-yearold rookie who is likely to be included on the Tampa Bay Rays
roster whenever baseball figures out how to relaunch itself. His breadand-butter pitch is a screwball.
In fact, his entrance onto the major league stage is overdue. Honeywell was scheduled to make his debut two years ago, but his career was interrupted when it was determined that he needed Tommy John surgery. Following that the Rays planned to promote him to the big league roster last year but an unrelated injury sidelined him for that season as well. Those of us anxious to see a true screwball pitcher in action can only hope nothing sidelines him this year.
The screwball is a pitch that is similar to a curveball except that it spins in the “wrong” direction and breaks the “wrong” way. A left-handed pitcher’s screwball and a righthander’s curve are identical pitches, but they don’t have identical impact on the game.
Most pitchers learn to throw a curve at an early age. They learn to snap their wrists as they release the pitch, causing the ball to spin. That spin creates a partial vacuum on one side of the ball, causing it to trace an arc-like path in flight. The more it spins, the more it breaks and the
more effective the pitch will probably be.
However, curve balls (and sliders as well) break in only one direction. A right-hander’s curve will break to his left, which means it sails away from a right-handed batter and towards a left-hander. Obviously, the exact opposite is true about a left-hander’s curve.
Most batters hit a breaking ball more effectively if the ball is breaking towards them. Statistics show that righthanded batters do better against left-handed pitchers and left-handed batters perform better against righties. That’s a fundamental part of the game.
That’s the reason why managers bring a lefthanded relief pitcher in to pitch to left-handed batter in a critical spot and why they platoon with their lineups according to who’s pitching for the other team. It is why switch hitters always choose to hit from the side of the plate that is the opposite of the pitcher’s throwing arm.
If a pitcher can throw a screwball, he can mess all this up. A pitcher who can deliver a screwball and a curve can throw a breaking pitch that tails away from any batter. Or, just when the batter is looking for one pitch, he can surprise him with the other one and leave the hitter perfectly bewildered.
McGraw was a relief pitcher who was the closer
for the Mets’ 1973 pennant winner and later for the Phillies’ 1980 world championship team. He was especially valuable to his manager because he could be brought into a game in any situation and asked to face any batter.
Valenzuela began his career as a reliever but was quickly converted into a starter. He was a left-hander, but some managers tried to stack their lineups with lefthanded hitters when he pitched. The theory was that by doing so they were taking his best pitch away from him.
Not that that worked very well. Valenzuela was a six-time all-star and even won one Cy Young Award.
So, if the screwball is such a great pitch, why don’t more pitchers learn to throw it?
Answer: Because most of them can’t.
The human wrist snaps forcefully in only one direction. It bends only slightly in the “wrong” direction and some pitchers utilize that reverse snap when they throw their changeup. They “turn the ball over” and cause it to move “with scroogie action.” That can be seen clearly when watching the game through the lens of the centerfield camera. But it happens only on a changeup.
A true screwball has considerably more movement and that can’t be attained by simply by snapping
the wrist in a direction that it won’t go. Or at least it won’t go very far or very hard.
Scroogie action on a pitch is attained primarily from a grip N]and delivery that most people find impossible.
A reverse wrist snap is part of the delivery but the ball must be gripped with the thumb pressed very hard against the seam on the ball. The other fingers are used only to guide the ball but they must grip it as loosely as possible. This causes the ball to leave the hand with the necessary reverse spin that creates a screwball.
If that sounds easy to you, I suggest you pick up an object — any object — and grip it tightly, Of course you can do that. Now grip it loosely. No problem. Now grip it tightly with the thumb and loosely with the rest of the hand.
Ah hah. You probably can’t do that. The muscles of the five fingers work in concert. It isn’t easy to flex the thumb muscle while relaxing those on the other fingers. But, unless you can do that, you can’t throw a screwball.
The pitchers who can do it are rare gems.
I, for one, can’t wait to watch Brent Honeywell in action.