April 12, 2013

Pebble Hunting

The Best Pitches Thrown This Week

by Sam Miller

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You could have an intro here, or we could go straight to the sweet and sexy pitches. Nobody pays for the intro (literally, in the case of BP's paywall), so forget the intro. To the pitches!

3. Matt Moore, fastball, against Asdrubal Cabrera, in which Moore eagerly unveils the new slider he's been working on; "guys," he tells everybody before he throws it, "it's such a swell slider, sliding all over the place and real hard like, so I can use it on two strikes and it'll break way out of the zone and batters will swing at it because they don't anticipate how much it's going to slide," upon which Moore proceeds to throw it and everybody tells him that, as far as sliders go, it actually breaks the wrong way, that clearly Moore is doing it wrong, sending Moore into a funk until he figures "ah shucks to it all, I'm going to throw it anyway."

Reviews of this pitch: 

"How... in the name of Zeus’ butthole?" —Nicolas Cage as Stanley Goodspeed, from The Rock

"I have an acronym for myself. Know what it is? B.A.D. B.A.D... Balls, Attitude, Direction." —Nicolas Cage as Little Junior Brown, from Kiss of Death

"You filthy, double crossing, little f****** filthy, double crossing, filthy, f****** goddamn f****** filthy little RAT!" —Nicolas Cage as Eddie, from Deadfall

2. Jose Fernandez, fastball, against Lucas Duda, in which Jose Fernandez throws a fastball that is in the catcher's glove before Duda can get a swing off, except literally this is true, rather than a figurative statement meant to convey hyperbole:  

LITERALLY TRUE

Reviews of this pitch: 

"Hey, have you ever been dragged to the sidewalk and beaten till you PISSED... BLOOD!" —Nicolas Cage as Roy Mercer, from Matchstick Men

"That was the plan. To give you a boner. And you got one." —Nicolas Cage as Rick Santoro, from Snake Eyes

"DIE! F***** DIE! DIE!" —Nicolas Cage as Tom Welles, from 8MM

1. Every pitch thrown against Brett Wallace thus far this year, in which pitchers, as a group, have made us question what we know about the delicate balance between offense and defense by so utterly dominating one very qualified major-league hitter over the course of an entire week, striking him out 17 times in 22 plate appearances, a rate that puts Kerry Wood's 20-strikeout game to shame, and a rate that has been carried out over a full (min. 20 PA) season by only two hitters in the history of the game (the pitcher Rick Vandenhurk, who struck out 17 times in 22 plate appearances, and the pitcher Bob Lee, who struck out 19 times in 24 plate appearances); the cumulative effect of which leaves open the question of whether the following 14 pitches are good pitches or whether they are merely bad swings, with the exception of the pitch that Yu Darvish throws (directly below) which carries no ambiguity whatsoever and which follows the jarring and propulsive geography of a young child's penmanship. 

Reviews of these 14 pitches: 

"On any other day, that might seem strange." —Nicolas Cage as Cameron Poe, from Con-Air

"I have always found something in life worth singing about and for that I cannot apologize." —Nicolas Cage as Captain Antonio Corelli, from Captain Corelli's Mandolin

"The best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see. Once, for a few weeks, I couldn't feel the earth - everything I touched became lighter. Horns played in my shoes. Flowers fell from my pockets. You wonder if you've become immortal. God has passed through you. Why deny it, that for a moment there - why deny that for a moment there, God was you?" —Nicolas Cage as Frank Pierce, from Bringing Out The Dead

Sam Miller is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @SamMillerBB
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