Kelsie Whitmore & ‘The Thing’ take on the Atlantic League

NEW YORK » The first thing Atlantic League hitters notice about Kelsie Whitmore is the obvious: the Staten Island FerryHawks pitcher is the only woman in a league full of former major leaguers.

The surprises don’t stop there. The next thing they’re likely to see is a pretty big shocker, too.

“The Thing,” pitching coach Nelson Figueroa said with a smile. “It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Whitmore joined the FerryHawks last month and made her debut April 21, becoming the first woman ever to play in the Atlantic League. The former college softball outfielder is a two-way player for Staten Island, competing at a level akin to Triple-A, making her the most advanced women’s baseball player in decades. Her speed is an asset off the bench, and she’s connected at the plate off 93 mph fastballs, although she’s still seeking her first hit.

But the item in her scouting report most likely to help her compete with the men right now is The Thing, a pitch originating out of conversations with knuckleballers R.A. Dickey and Phil Niekro that morphed into a divebombing beast with the help of high-speed cameras and radar technology.

“It’s a knuckle-changeup,” Whitmore said. “I don’t try to get knuckleball movement out of it. I just want it to primarily get a lot of vertical break.”

Whereas knuckleball pitchers create unpredictable action on their pitches by eliminating spin altogether, The Thing comes out of Whitmore’s hand with just a little bit of top spin. She throws it as hard as she can, trying to get the pitch to look like a fastball at first. The rotations appears to slow as the pitch nears the plate, and that’s when the bottom falls out.

“It seems to just stop and then turn into a knuckleball,” Figueroa said.

The 5-foot-6 Whitmore won’t overpower hitters in any men’s pro league. Pitching in relief, her fastball currently tops out around 78 mph, and she and Figueroa are hoping she’ll tick up to 80 mph this season — still nearly 14 mph below the major league average.

Despite that, Figueroa and the FerryHawks think she can compete, and that’s all she wants. The 24-year-old Whitmore has been at the forefront of women’s baseball since she was 14 and played for the U.S. women’s national team. She got her first major chance at competing with the men in 2016, when she and Stacy Piagno played for the Sonoma Stompers of the independent Pacific Association, a league well down the pro baseball ladder from the Atlantic League.