FRIDAY 5: Fan's Guide to Spotting Baseball Pitches from Dan Conover on Vimeo.
This week's Top 5 grew out of my frustration at listening to Bob Brenly casually announce whatever pitch had just been thrown. Most looked pretty much alike to me. What was Bob seeing that I wasn't?
When I started asking around, it turned out I wasn't the only person befuddled by the pitching game. Lots of people love baseball, but an awful lot of average fans simply don't know how to identify basic pitches.
So I turned to Andy Solomon and asked him to set something up for me with the Riverdogs. He got me down on the field with pitching coach Jeff Ware for a typical warm-up sequence with right-hander Adam Olbrychowski as the team prepared for a 7:05 start. This is the result.
Can I spot every pitch now? Of course not. But thanks to Jeff and Adam I know that a curve has a hump in it, and when I see a fastball that drops into the catcher's mitt with a sly little last-millisecond wiggle, I've got a pretty good idea what just happened. See for yourself.
Here's a version for all you YouTube fans out there.
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