It is the unidentifiable flying object that’s impacting baseball like nothing quite else.
“It’s a curveball,” said Yankees catcher Brian McCann, who has seen more of it up close than anyone else.
“It’s a slider,” said Cardinals center fielder Peter Bourjos, who swung at three of them and missed all of them on Monday.
“I call it a cutter,” said Reds minor league pitcher Mikey O’Brien, who helped create it, “but that’s just for my mindset.”
MLB.com, in its “Game Day” feature that utilizes data from PITCHf/x, calls it a knuckle-curve.
“It’s a slurve,” Dellin Betances said, before rendering the discussion moot: “I just throw it, you know?”
If you have seen Betances pitch out of the Yankees’ bullpen this season, you know the pitch we’re discussing: The crazy, nasty breaking pitch that has elevated him into a trusted, valuable part of manager Joe Girardi’s bullpen.
That has him leading all major league relievers in strikeouts with 51, and has made him the first rookie relief pitcher in the game’s history to strike out at least 50 batters through his team’s first 50 games of the season (thanks, Elias Sports Bureau).
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It’s the pitch that just might have saved Betances’ career, and in turn just might save the 2014 Yankees’ season.
“This is a dream come true,” Betances said Wednesday. “I always wanted to be here. I always wanted to come and help the team in any way possible.”
An eighth-round selection in the amateur draft out of Brooklyn’s Grand Street Campus High School, the 6-foot-8, 260-pound Betances slowly worked his way up the Yankees’ farm system but hit a wall when he arrived with Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in 2012. He recorded a 6.39 ERA in 16 starts and walked 69 in 74²/₃ innings, and the Yankees sent him back down to Double-A Trenton, where he wasn’t much better (6.51 ERA and 30 walks in 56²/₃ innings).
The problems, Betances said, stemmed from his inability to throw a breaking ball for strikes. “I had problems with my hand,” he said. Specifically, his right index finger developed blisters, and the nail got black and blue.
So he turned to O’Brien, a teammate at Trenton, and asked him for advice. O’Brien told him to tilt his wrist a few degrees. That alleviated the pressure on his finger and produced the spectacular break we’re now seeing. The Yankees then made him a reliever in 2013.
“The key is being able to throw it for a strike,” O’Brien, whom the Reds took from the Yankees in the Triple-A portion of last winter’s Rule 5 draft, said in a telephone interview. “For him, he has that power fastball. If he throws [the pitch] on the same plane as the fastball, they’re just gearing up for that fastball.”
“The thing that makes it different is he throws 98, 99 [mph],” Bourjos said. “So I think it’s similar to a lot of pitches. It’s just that guys that have that pitch are throwing 91. So he’s throwing 98. So it makes it tough, especially with the difference in velocities — it’s 81 and he tops at 98. It’s a big gap.”
The website FanGraphs, which categorizes Betances’ pitch as a slider, calculates the average velocity of the pitch at 82.4 mph and his fastball at 95.6. FanGraphs assesses the “slider” as the third-best such pitch in baseball with a value of 6.7 runs above average, behind only Milwaukee’s Kyle Lohse (9.2) and Miami’s injured ace Jose Fernandez (6.8) — remarkable because Betances has thrown far fewer innings (30²/₃) than most starting pitchers.
Betances said he threw a similar pitch in high school, and Yankees scouting director Damon Oppenheimer recalls seeing that from the Washington Heights native.
A scout from another team who has seen Betances from his amateur days through the present considers the “magic pitch” theory to be a stretch.
“He’s able to repeat his arm action now,” the scout said on the condition of anonymity. “He’s a big kid. He had to grow into his body.”
At the least, however, the evolution of this special pitch has played an integral role in Betances’ development and confidence.
“It has the tightness and depth of a curveball,” Oppenheimer said. “People just aren’t used to a curveball being thrown in the 80s.”
“How about we just call it a breaking ball?” Girardi suggested.
“We should come up with a name for it,” said John Ryan Murphy, the Yankees’ catcher who has worked with Betances since their time together in the minors.
Any suggestions? Until we come up with a winner, Betances will just throw it, and the rest of the Yankees will just appreciate it.