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bktheirregularI remember 1996, when, for the first time since I'd become a serious baseball fan, the New York Yankees reached the World Series. Something to remember: back then, the Atlanta Braves were being touted as "America's Team", the "Team of the Nineties", a baseball team that had been steadily climbing to the apex of sports. The Braves were Baseball's Next Dynasty.
The first two games of the 1996 World Series, in Yankee Stadium, seemed to bear this out; the Braves beat the Yankees fairly convincingly in both games, and the Atlanta victory celebrations were already planned. One quote in the Atlanta papers said, roughly: "The Braves are no longer playing against the overmatched Yankees. They are playing against history itself."
That's right, dear readers: the New York Yankees were written off as hopelessly overmatched. The Evil Empire? The team that most fans want to dismantle, strip for parts, implode Yankee Stadium and sow the ground at the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue with salt? They were the underdogs.
Any good almanac will tell you how that World Series turned out; the Yankees came back from the dead. And they were no Evil Empire; they included David Cone, who'd come back from an aneurism in his pitching arm that might have killed some people; Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, two Mets' stars of the 1980's who'd fallen hard before before George Steinbrenner brought them on to help them recover, both of whom rewarded The Boss spectacularly (Gooden pitched the only no-hitter of his career in Yankee pinstripes that year); and at the helm was the man the New York tabloids had labeled "Clueless Joe" before the season even began, who lost one brother to heart disease before the season began, and who nearly lost another brother to cardiac problems before a successful heart transplant.
But they also had a couple of weapons in their bullpen - a pair of relief pitchers who could slam the door on an opposing team better than anybody in the game. The closer for the Yankees that year was John Wetteland, who had a habit of causing stomach cramps by putting runners on base before settling down and finishing the job.
The setup man was a lanky Panamanian with a blistering ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball that nobody could ever seem to adjust to. Maybe you've heard of him. Kid by the name of Mariano Rivera.
Rivera's signature in those days was to get batters to "climb the ladder" - swing at pitches that go higher and higher. To understand how he did that, it's important to remember what a baseball's like - the two pieces of hide that make up its cover are stitched together with fairly thick cord. Those stitches break up the roundness of the ball; when a good pitcher throws the ball, it spins ... and the air breaking off those stitches causes the ball to do crazy things. Get the right spin on a fastball, and the stitches will bite into the air in such a way that they'll work like an aircraft wing.
Mariano did that. A batter would see the pitch coming, swing for where his instincts told him it would go ... and the ball would pass cleanly over his swinging bat, missing by an inch at the most. A good batter would adjust for the next one, and when he saw the fastball coming again, he'd be ready ... except Mariano was aiming higher, and the swing would be under the ball again. Repeat the process once more, and the batter would be swinging and missing for strike three ... on a pitch almost over his head.
In 1997, Mariano became the Yankees' closer. And somewhere in the next couple of years, he started throwing what many call the nastiest pitch in baseball history: the cut fastball, thrown with a slightly off-center grip so it spins sideways.
Let's pause for a moment for a baseball truism: If one is facing a right-handed pitcher in a baseball game, one's best bet is to have a left-handed batter at the plate. Probably due to the angle that the batter faces the pitcher, a lefty batter can better see the ball as it coems from a pitcher's right hand.
Having said that, if that right-handed pitcher is Mariano Rivera, the last place on earth you want to be is in the left-handed batter's box. That ball is coming in on you at ninety to ninety-five miles an hour, remember. And the stitches are doing their airplane-wing thing from the way they spin. Except that for the cutter, it's an airplane wing in a steep bank. That ball isn't heading for the middle of the strike zone anymore. If you're a left-handed batter swinging for the fastball, it's coming 90 to 95 miles an hour right at your thumbs. People abort their swings, haul in their hands, and as often as not, crack or splinter their bats while hitting a weak grounder ... when they don't miss the ball entirely.
I've got a feeling that pitch will be seen a lot more this year...
The first two games of the 1996 World Series, in Yankee Stadium, seemed to bear this out; the Braves beat the Yankees fairly convincingly in both games, and the Atlanta victory celebrations were already planned. One quote in the Atlanta papers said, roughly: "The Braves are no longer playing against the overmatched Yankees. They are playing against history itself."
That's right, dear readers: the New York Yankees were written off as hopelessly overmatched. The Evil Empire? The team that most fans want to dismantle, strip for parts, implode Yankee Stadium and sow the ground at the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue with salt? They were the underdogs.
Any good almanac will tell you how that World Series turned out; the Yankees came back from the dead. And they were no Evil Empire; they included David Cone, who'd come back from an aneurism in his pitching arm that might have killed some people; Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, two Mets' stars of the 1980's who'd fallen hard before before George Steinbrenner brought them on to help them recover, both of whom rewarded The Boss spectacularly (Gooden pitched the only no-hitter of his career in Yankee pinstripes that year); and at the helm was the man the New York tabloids had labeled "Clueless Joe" before the season even began, who lost one brother to heart disease before the season began, and who nearly lost another brother to cardiac problems before a successful heart transplant.
But they also had a couple of weapons in their bullpen - a pair of relief pitchers who could slam the door on an opposing team better than anybody in the game. The closer for the Yankees that year was John Wetteland, who had a habit of causing stomach cramps by putting runners on base before settling down and finishing the job.
The setup man was a lanky Panamanian with a blistering ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball that nobody could ever seem to adjust to. Maybe you've heard of him. Kid by the name of Mariano Rivera.
Rivera's signature in those days was to get batters to "climb the ladder" - swing at pitches that go higher and higher. To understand how he did that, it's important to remember what a baseball's like - the two pieces of hide that make up its cover are stitched together with fairly thick cord. Those stitches break up the roundness of the ball; when a good pitcher throws the ball, it spins ... and the air breaking off those stitches causes the ball to do crazy things. Get the right spin on a fastball, and the stitches will bite into the air in such a way that they'll work like an aircraft wing.
Mariano did that. A batter would see the pitch coming, swing for where his instincts told him it would go ... and the ball would pass cleanly over his swinging bat, missing by an inch at the most. A good batter would adjust for the next one, and when he saw the fastball coming again, he'd be ready ... except Mariano was aiming higher, and the swing would be under the ball again. Repeat the process once more, and the batter would be swinging and missing for strike three ... on a pitch almost over his head.
In 1997, Mariano became the Yankees' closer. And somewhere in the next couple of years, he started throwing what many call the nastiest pitch in baseball history: the cut fastball, thrown with a slightly off-center grip so it spins sideways.
Let's pause for a moment for a baseball truism: If one is facing a right-handed pitcher in a baseball game, one's best bet is to have a left-handed batter at the plate. Probably due to the angle that the batter faces the pitcher, a lefty batter can better see the ball as it coems from a pitcher's right hand.
Having said that, if that right-handed pitcher is Mariano Rivera, the last place on earth you want to be is in the left-handed batter's box. That ball is coming in on you at ninety to ninety-five miles an hour, remember. And the stitches are doing their airplane-wing thing from the way they spin. Except that for the cutter, it's an airplane wing in a steep bank. That ball isn't heading for the middle of the strike zone anymore. If you're a left-handed batter swinging for the fastball, it's coming 90 to 95 miles an hour right at your thumbs. People abort their swings, haul in their hands, and as often as not, crack or splinter their bats while hitting a weak grounder ... when they don't miss the ball entirely.
I've got a feeling that pitch will be seen a lot more this year...