HItting Curves (of all sorts)

The New York Times

May 9, 2008

by Doug Glanville

So you want to learn how to hit a curveball?

As a hitter, you have about two-tenths of a second to decide what pitch you are actually seeing, all the while attempting to put a round bat on a ball that is bending and breaking in three dimensions. Needless to say, it took me my entire professional career to get a halfway decent approach to hitting a curveball. Give me a fastball every day of the week, and twice on Sundays.

The curveball reality hit me all at once. I thought I could race through the minor league system on quick hands and exceptional coordination. That was until I ran into Gregg Olson, a pitcher who at one time was a dominant force in the Baltimore Orioles bullpen. He was known for his knee-buckling curveball, and he didn’t disappoint. The first time I saw it, I thought, “This is not good.” That was the moment I became determined to learn how to hit a curveball for fear of ever again feeling like a frozen popsicle, the way I did when I first saw Olson’s Zeus-like hammer.

So, during an off-season instructional camp with the Chicago Cubs, I set up a pitching machine to send me the nastiest curveball it could throw. It took a while, but eventually I was able to carve the ball into right field and add to my skill set the ability to at least make decent contact with it.

What I found was that your approach doesn’t have to be any different from the one you use when dealing with — indulge me for a second — any other curveball life throws at you. We spend so much time cruising along, looking to hit the straight and dependable fastball, that the audacity of something different can cause us to forget any and every tactic that once gave us comfort and success.

In my 15 seasons of professional baseball, there were a lot of off-the-field curveballs to go with my game-time curveballs. On paper, a player’s ascension to the majors looks straightforward: you go from Single-A ball to Double-A ball to Triple-A ball to the big time. But in actuality, you can wake up and be traded away to another team at the drop of a hat, like I was once — two days before Christmas on the day my grandfather passed away.

Or you could actually go the wrong way on that highway. While I was in Double-A with the Cubs, my roommate got called into the office and demoted to a Single-A club. He was leading our team in home runs and runs batted in and was the best offensive player we had, but he had to go down a level. The powers that be had ordained someone else “the best offensive player we have,” so our actual batting leader’s success was somehow unacceptable.

The biggest curveball of my life came when my father began his descent into chronic illness one spring training while I was playing for Philadelphia. He remained sick and in and out of emergency rooms over the next three years. There was no machine I could set up to throw me that simulated nasty curveball; I had to learn to approach this one with no bat and with a blindfold on. This I accomplished by trying to focus on the few things I could control about getting my father healthier. I did what I could, and left the rest to forces bigger than myself. Even though I didn’t hit a home run on this Olson-esque curveball, at least — by recognizing that it was outside my power to do much else — I didn’t, in a sense, chase a bad pitch.

There is a constant debate among baseball hitters who deal with the question, “If you could know what pitch was coming, would you want to know?” Since there are all kinds of tricks to figuring that out, it is a very real possibility that you can, at times, know what is coming.

You could study a pitcher like Randy Johnson, who changed his glove position on certain pitches, or you could work out some secret key with a runner standing at second base who can see the catcher giving signs to the pitcher. Or maybe you’ll watch the catcher set up as he prepares for the pitch to come, and note that he doesn’t crouch quite as low when he is expecting a curveball.

But do you still want to know?

Many players don’t. Because as the hitter, you might try to hit the ball to the moon from the excitement of knowing what’s coming, and end up destroying your mechanically sound swing in the process. I guess some people would go to psychics to find out their fate; I’d rather let fate be just that — fate.

I preferred to react, adjust and trust my instincts at the plate. Besides, I wasn’t known for my strike-zone discipline; it’s one thing to know what’s coming, and another to “zone in” and make sure the pitch is in a good hitting location. Knowing doesn’t help you when you swing at something five feet out of the strike zone.

So, no curveball is easy to handle, not even when it is expected. We can practice all we want, but there will inevitably be times when it will shock us by its mere arrival. The curveball becomes that rude awakening that often derails us from our tried and true plan to go from A to B.

Even so, I kept on working on hitting that curveball. I finally figured out that most of the time it was better when I didn’t swing at it. Because, as in life, the curveball is often just a test — most times thrown to see if you will chase something out of your zone — and not the final pitch that’ll get you out. So take it from a dead-red fastball hitter: once you master your strike zone, you can win your battle with that curveball by just taking it in stride.

Republished from The NY Times