Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Working on a change-up

There was great glee and mirth this spring when Craig Calcaterra of Hardball Talk took an oft-heard phrase heard every spring ("In the best shape of his life") and made it legendary. The reason his series was so hysterical is because it played off of one of those cliches that are so common in baseball. After watching a couple of dozen spring baseball games, another cliche kept popping up. It was the old, "Pitcher X is working on a change-up." The interesting thing about all of this is that most pitchers go through several years in the minor leagues before making it to the big leagues. Either the pitchers didn't learn much in the minors or baseball writers really need something to write about every day. The latter is probably the closest to the truth.

To test this theory, a Google search was performed and sure enough, there are quite a few stories about pitchers working on their change-ups this spring. The search also pointed out that people have no idea of how to type the pitch. There are, "change ups," and "changeups," and "change-ups." The correct spelling is one of those mysteries in life like, "e-mail/email," and "interleague/inter-league/Interleague/Inter-league. But anyway, back to the search. These were just the ones that the search found. For every city paper, there must be dozens more. Here they are:

By now you've gotten the idea. And if you haven't had enough, there's always the movie, The Change-Up that was just released for home viewing. So you can work on your change-up too.



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