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November 15, 2006

Under The Knife

Matsuzaka and the Gyroball

by Will Carroll

Blame Rob Neyer for sending me on this quest, and blame me for most of the confusion over the last few years regarding the gyroball. To answer the most popular questions: Yes, it exists; yes, Daisuke Matsuzaka throws it; yes, I can teach it. That's just half the story, and the rest is so much more interesting.

Since discovering the pitch back in 2003, I’ve been on something of a quest to figure it out. Guided by a Japanese text that I can only roughly translate as "The Secret of the Demon Pitch," and that I can't actually read, I have sought to both learn the pitch's nature and to understand the man who has come to embody the pitch, Matsuzaka.

Matsuzaka is well known by now, the $51.1 million man purchased from Japan, now the presumptive savior of the Red Sox rotation. Grainy videos of his gyroball have been passed around the Web for years. His unhittable stuff was mostly legend until Matsuzaka made the best in the world look bad on his way to being the MVP of the inaugural World Baseball Classic. Most of the video shown on YouTube is not of the gyroball; it's Matsuzaka's slider. The great diving slider you see isn't some secret pitch, it's just a really, REALLY good pitch.

After watching every game that Matsuzaka pitched in combination with discussions with some Japanese baseball men and scouts from both sides of the Pacific, it's pretty clear that Matsuzaka does throw the gyroball, but never, ever to a lefty. One of the best known gyroball videos shows Matsuzaka throwing a devastating slider to a lefty. Note that Matsuzaka’s wrist "snaps" at the end before pronating over after release. Simply put, that’s a very good slider in every way.

The wrist pronation is one of the more misunderstood parts of this delivery. In the book, the pronation of the wrist is never explicitly discussed, but is instead an assumed physical action. This is correct. Both Tom House and Mike Marshall--two guys not known to agree on much--do agree that proper pronation after the pitch is key to keeping the elbow healthy. For the gyro, the pronation comes after the pitch, as it does with most pitches; it comes before release on the screwball and the sinker. It also comes before release on the shuuto, a Japanese pitch that is the rough equivalent of the American sinker. If you remember your SATs, the analogy would go shuuto:sinker::slurve:slider. All breaking pitches are a matter of degree, so terms like these are all just for ease of description. In my initial article about the gyro, the pronation issue caused me to confuse the gyro and shuuto, which led me to then confuse thousands of readers.