The Zong

Baseball season is upon us, and what better way to celebrate this great American tradition than to waste some more time talking about a new pitch that probably doesn’t exist.

Early in the afternoon, [Kazushi] Tezuka arrived with Masa Niwa, a journalist and his interpreter for the day, ready to explain the pitch. He had flown here from Tokushima Prefecture not just to meet with Texas Rangers reliever Akinori Otsuka – with whom he works as a performance coach, though Otsuka does not throw the gyroball – but, hopefully, to correct the fables of the gyroball.

Evidently, Tezuka “discovered” the gyroball, and according to Jeff Passan over at Yahoo!, he sells baseballs that teach you how to throw it for $25 a set. Before you go thinking that this whole thing sounds a little shady, you have to believe that this guy is 44 years old:

So, now that that’s over with, let’s delve into Master Passan’s grandiloquent observations about this “the gyroball.”

The theory behind the gyroball is this: When a baseball spins sideways, like a bullet, it should cut down on the amount of resistance on its path to the plate. Without the same amount of air resistance as a regular fastball, which rotates backward, the four-seam gyroball should not experience the same slowdown and look as if it’s exploding toward the plate.

A perfect gyroball should be straighter than the crease on a pair of slacks.

“It doesn’t move,” Tezuka said. “It doesn’t move at all.”

Turns out all the videos claiming to capture Matsuzaka’s gyroball were instead of his slider, a pitch that has confused gyrophiles since 1999. A television station in Japan tried to understand the dominance of Matsuzaka’s slider and noticed he pronated his wrist – or let it turn outward, like a screwball, except releasing the ball off the inside of his fingers rather than the outside – as Tezuka teaches practitioners of the gyroball.

For those of you pitching buffs, I probably don’t need to explain that this is all kind of hilarious. For those of you who aren’t, if you’re still reading, a lot of American pitchers pronate their wrists to throw some seriously nasty shit. Pedro Martinez, in his prime, threw his cut fastball like that. The slider that Robb Nen used to feature (everyone though it was a split-finger fastball) was also thrown like that. I’m not a very good pitcher, but I know that these are tried and true mechanics that are somewhat unnatural, but common amongst some of the more dominant pitchers of our time.

So is the gyrobal a cutter, a slider, a nasty changeup? Reading this article, it truly sounds to me like Passan met some Japanese guy who was selling his training balls, and wrote an article about him. As it turns out, Passan threw one himself using the training ball, and he seems to think that the gyroball is nothing more than a four-seam fastball.

“That’s the gyroball,” he said, and it was somewhat anticlimactic, the game’s purported great revolution looking in actuality like nothing more than a fastball.

Still, it was an explanation, something substantive, and something, too, that I could try. Tezuka has been teaching baseball for 15 years and has 1,300 students, from children to players in Nippon Professional Baseball. He gave me a short explanation, jogged behind the cage and told me to fire. On my fourth pitch, he jumped.

“Yes!” he said after I tossed the four-seamer. “You threw the perfect gyroball.”

Sounds great. So Jeff Passan, whom I hold in relatively high regard as far as Yahoo writers go, wrote an entire article about a guy who claims to have discovered the four-seam fastball. I can’t wait to see Matsuzaka throw one of those.

Update: As my more knowledgeable friend EZ hath pointed out, Pedro Martinez didn’t throw his cutter that way. He definitely threw some pitch like that, though, because I saw him demonstrating his grip on ESPN one time and I could have sworn it was a cutter. Perhaps it was simply a four-seamer, or a slider.

As requested, the gyroball video can be found here. That’s definitely a really dope slider.

- M.G.