Hi. I’m new here and just wanted to offer a thought for what it is worth, especially to managers and coaches.
Although I never played high school ball per se as a kid, I did play in a very good 14-18 league as a relief pitcher. My regular style was sidearm after my boyhood idol (later Senator!) Jim Bunning. (That should give real baseball fans an idea of my age!) What the manager liked about me was that as a sidearm pitcher, although I lacked the power of the conventional overhand hurlers, I had really good control and rarely walked anyone, and he would use me in short relief situations with men already on base. As a rookie, age 14, I decided to experiment with submarine style pitching after a MLB reliever then prominent. I convinced the manager to give me a try as a starter. My manager had been a very conservative and conventional man in all aspects of his life and took the game very seriosuly, so it took some convincing.
In my experiment, I retired the first nine batters (including some really good hitters, some as much as four years older than me) I faced, striking out several. My control was even better than sidearm. But then, as soon as I faced the first batter again, I started to get whacked around really badly. After a few such hits, the manager had seen enough and pulled me. That was the end of the experiment, and I reverted to my sidearm delivery for the rest of my tenure on the team (constantly battling elbow pain with a tube of Ben-Gay omnipresent in the dugout!).
It has always been my theory that the reason why I had been so initially successful as a submariner was that the other team’s kids were so unfamiliar with this style that it took them an at bat to acclimate themselves to it. Once they did, due to the tepid, controlled pace of the delivery, they caught on with a vengeance. I would have dearly liked another try against another team, but it was not to be.
I thought if any managers/coaches were to read this, they might be more amenable to the idea of having a kid throw submarine and, if successful as I had been at first, pulling him after he faces the opposition’s entire lineup. This strategy could be used on a surprise basis in an important game in which the opposition never faced the submarine pitcher.
As I said, just a thought. Thank you.
