Yesterday, our school played its 1st 2 games of the season. Of course everyone was at best slightly “out of kilter”, but all in all things went fairly normally, that is until one particular P came in for his 2 inning stint.
I’d seen him warming up on the side and was struck by his very smooth delivery, but when I saw him warming up before his 1st inning, I commented that he was gonna give our guys all they could handle, and maybe a bit more.
Of course that brought out the comments from just about everyone around where I was at, including the HP ump. Evidently I was the only one in that group who noticed what the kid was doing, because everyone else thought we were gonna kill this kid. It seems that he was throwing the ball about 79-81 tops, and his FB ball was arrow straight, and everyone was lickin’ their chops for a good BP session.
But what I saw was, the kid had a decent FB, a decent CU, and he had what I consider the best hook a P can have. But the best thing was, it sure looked as though his arm speed for all 3 were as close to being the same as you could find. And here’s what happened, starting with the #2 batter in our line-up.
b-b-s-b-F8
s-s-backwards k
s-s-backwards k
next inning
s-s-s-b-s-backwards k
s-b-E-3
s-s-b-backwards k
s-b-s-s-s-backwards k
All those backwards ks came from his hook! Although it didn’t break a lot, he was throwing it pretty hard, and it just snapped down. The ump told us he was letting it go right where it looked like it was gonna be a high pitch, but dropped right in like it was on rails.
I had an ex-ml player sitting right next to me and he agreed that the way the kid was throwing that hook, even the very best HS players were gonna have a heck of a lot of trouble with it.
First of all, since he was throwing it so hard, it was almost impossible to pick it up until it was way too late, much like a medium hard great splitter. But more importantly, he wasn’t wasting a single pitch! The hitters were left standing there with bats on their shoulders and buckled knees.
I mean look at what he did! 7 balls and 23 strikes, only 5 of which were hit at all, only 2 hit fair, and 15 were called, and at least 5 of those were hooks.
