TORONTO — In Game 6 of the World Series on Friday, two of the foremost practitioners of the pitch that defined October will duel at Rogers Centre. los angeles dodgers right handed batsman yoshinobu yamamoto Trying to save his team’s season, and toronto blue jays right handed batsman kevin gosman Is trying to win his franchise’s first championship in more than 30 years, and both will rely heavily on the split-finger fastball, an offering that had been on the verge of extinction in Major League Baseball for nearly 20 years.
The rise of the splitter over the past half decade – driven by the emergence of elite pitching from Japan, where the offering is a standard part of almost every pitcher’s arsenal, and the leniency on its use by MLB teams, which at one point forbade the pitch out of fear that it would directly cause elbow injuries – has changed baseball even more than the cutter and sweeper. Because this is a better pitch than all of them.
“If you can throw it near the strike zone,” clayton kershaw Said, “This is the best pitch in the game.”
In recent years, Kershaw began throwing a split-change, finally finding a comfortable changeup after spending 18 years of his career looking for a future Hall of Fame career. He is far from alone. This postseason, 32 pitchers, representing nearly a quarter of playoff hurlers, have thrown splitters. Since the advent of pitch tracking in 2008, the highest percentage of splitters thrown in overall pitches was 3.2% last October. In most seasons, it was between 0.2% and 2%.
This October, 6.8% of all pitches have been splitters, a staggering number that reflects the wholesale embrace of the game. It’s not just Gausman (who has thrown pitches 41.4% of the time in the playoffs) and Yamamoto (24.7%). toronto newbie trey yesways Dominated the Dodgers with his splitter in Game 5. shohei ohtaniIf the Dodgers win the division battle on Friday, who will pitch in Game 7 is a vicious throwback. blue jays closer Jeff Hoffman Can celebrate with anyone. The same applies to the Dodgers’ closer roki sasakiWhose splitter dances in all directions with dangerously low spin, like a souped-up knuckleball.
Gausman said, “It’s one of the few pitches I truly believe that a hitter can know it’s coming and still get outs.” “I’ve always felt that the changeup is the best pitch in the game because it looks like a fastball, and anything that looks like a fastball and isn’t is really cool. So, I think you’re seeing a lot more guys doing it. I’m glad to see a lot more starters doing it because it was always like a reliever pitch. So, for me, it’s exciting to see guys like Yamamoto throwing it a lot.”
The splitter is an evolutionary descendant of the forkball, which dates back to the 1910s. Whereas a forkball was jammed as deep as possible between the index and middle fingers, the splitter provides more leeway for pitchers to find comfort. It’s not a discriminating pitch like the changeup, which requires pronation – internal rotation of the forearm that drops the thumb downward and the pinky upward after release – something with which Kershaw and others struggle. It’s really quite simple: Place the ball between two fingers, support it with the thumb, throw it with a fastball arm speed and let the grip do the work.
Closer Bruce Sutter learned the splitter in 1973 and carried it to the Hall of Fame, inspiring the next generation to throw a pitch that looked like a fastball, but was over as soon as it approached the plate. Mike Scott won the Cy Young with it. Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling and John Smoltz crossed the age of 40 thanks to it. However, as his career ended in the 2000s, Splitter was made a scapegoat for elbow ligament failure throughout the game. Some had the courage to keep throwing it. Most people became discouraged as they turned the splitter into a four-letter word.
Dodgers pitching coach Mark Pryor said, “And I don’t think a lot of people knew how to teach it. If you were around a guy who threw it, you probably messed with it. If you weren’t, I don’t even remember being around anybody who threw splits. So, it was something you didn’t even mess with.”
Arrival of Masahiro Tanaka New York Yankees A new generation of splitters was introduced in 2014. And technology aided its rebirth. Super-high-speed Edgertronic cameras allowed pitchers to see exactly how the ball left their hand. TrackMan, the radar-based system that measures the spin and speed of pitches, provided immediate feedback and a detailed look at pitch effectiveness.
Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker said, “Five, 10, 15 years ago, a guy would work on pitching all year and then he’d figure out.” “Looking back, that was pointless. It wasn’t going to happen. So, we wasted a year of somebody’s career working on a curveball, working on a slider or working on a split-finger fastball. I think that’s accelerated now. We can make that decision with more background on that and more validity.”
Combine the ability and willingness to learn new offerings with the sport-wide understanding that velocity is the biggest predictor of arm injuries, and teams’ stance on splitters softened. Pitchers took advantage of the opportunity to try out the splitter, and with good reason.
After this season, batters are hitting .154/.206/.250 against splitters – the lowest numbers in each triple-slash category for any pitch. In the World Series, the Dodgers are 1 for 22 on splitters with 14 strikeouts. Toronto has thrown splitters 13.7% of the time during the playoffs, a number comparable to the jump with Gausman in Game 6.
Splitter has saved careers – “Without it I would have been over a long time ago,” Dodgers reliever Kirby Yates Said – making them more often. This winter, there will be a buzz around the game about pitching laboratories, with hundreds of professional pitchers at all levels seeing if it works. Already, several front office executives said, teams are examining their pitchers’ movement patterns to see if a splitter would complement their current arsenal. And because of what they’ve learned designing other new pitches, they’ll have a good idea whether this one will work sooner rather than later.
“It could be a session,” Walker said. “To be honest, it might even happen before the season.”
The versatility of the splitter only adds to the allure. Pitchers can throw it extremely hard, e.g. Paul Skenes‘ And jhon duranSplinker, a splitter-sinker hybrid. They could target a forked, low-spin type like Sasaki, a devastating late-breaker like Yamamoto or someone like Gausman who he can command in and out of the strike zone. He can also use it as a show-me off-speed pitch like Kershaw.
Whatever be the form, the divider will remain here. As it spreads, perhaps its usefulness will reduce. After all, part of its effectiveness is its relative rarity. However, the pitch is still full of mystery – one second there, the next second there.
“You can’t kill it,” Kershaw said. “You can’t do good division.”
