Trevor Cahill And The Magic Pitch

Everybody loves a good fastball. When a scoreboard lights up with triple digits, the crowd goes nuts. People who don’t care about baseball take notice. It’s a nice bit of symmetry that the upper limit of how hard a baseball can be thrown happens to be a nice round number. It’s like the extra digit is the visual equivalent of a sonic boom.

Everybody loves a good curve ball. It’s deceptive, stealthy. It’s the athletic version of that thing where you put your pointer finger on someone’s chest, and when they look down, you bring the finger up and poke them in the face. Never gets old. Curve balls are awesome.

Sinkers are a pitch with downward and horizontal movement.

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That’s from the Wikipedia page, and it’s about as worked up as I’ve ever read anyone get about the sinker. It’s not just the most underrated pitch, it’s the most underrated anything in baseball right now. Maybe it’s easy to miss because it has a psuedonym -- the “two-seamer” -- that it can use when it’s checking into hotels and doesn’t want to be bothered. But try to rank the following pitchers by velocity:

Based on results, you might guess that Garcia throws the hardest, and that the list is in reverse order, but it’s actually already in order of velocity. Joe Saunders throws harder than Trevor Cahill and Jaime Garcia, but his ERA is higher than those two sinkerballers’ put together. Velocity doesn’t mean a thing when compare to good ol’ fashioned movement. As Orel Hershiser has observed, a major leaguer can hit a bullet if it’s straight.

When (Britton) was in Class A, futzing around with different grips like all inquisitive pitchers do, one of his coaches, Calvin Maduro, tried to teach him a cutter. He told Britton to dig his middle finger into the seams, rest his index finger alongside it and throw. The ball was supposed to move in against right-handed hitters. It dove a foot away.“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Maduro said. “Just keep doing it.”

And that might be why it’s the greatest pitch in baseball. It’s not something you teach; it’s something you have. Well, you can teach a sinker, but it’s not as simple as , “Put one finger here, the other one there, throw it from this arm slot, and now you’re Kevin Brown!” It takes a symphony of different things -- mechanics, hand size, grip -- to lead to this:

That pitch broke an insane amount while traveling 89 MPH. It’s one of the nastiest pitches you’ll ever see, and it wasn’t even the hardest-breaking sinker of the at-bat. It’s why Trevor Cahill is one of the best pitchers in baseball just a few years removed from his prom.

I’ve written before about the changeup being the greatest pitch in the world, which is something you’d expect from a Lincecumphile, but I’m starting to reconsider. There’s something about a sinker -- its ability to draw outs by enticing rather than preventing contact when it’s merely good, and its ability to miss bats as well when it’s great -- that has a workmanlike beauty to it.