Here comes the pitch, and … freeze it there. Pause for a second. At this instant, the moment a pitcher releases the baseball, a path has been chosen, and the ball is about to embark on it. The pitch could be a fastball. It could bean increasingly common breaking ball, such as a slider, a sweeper or a curveball. It could be a changeup. Or it could be a split-finger fastball, commonly known as a splitter.
Craig, the proselytizing Giants coach, used to claim that the splitter was better for the arm because it didn’t require twisting of the wrist and elbow. That’s not exactly true, either. The splitter doesn’t demand the same twisting, but it can put extra pressure on crucial muscle groups and ligaments because of how a pitcher must spread his fingers around the sides of the ball to achieve the desired effect.
The unusual nature of the grip also leads to another worry about the splitter: inherent inconsistency in terms of movement and command. And that can be true, especially for those deploying it sparingly, but others such as Gausman have found it possible to wrangle the splitter with repetition — “the more you do anything, the more you're gonna do better at it,” he said.
One other reason you might be seeing more splitters? Most pitchers throwing them today don't actually employ the most taxing form of grip — and no longer fear organizational backlash for declaring them splitters. Philadelphia Phillies right-hander Taijuan Walker, who has used the pitch throughout his career, said he considers his version a split-change hybrid, a type of grip plenty of
Forkball grips are the most extreme and least common in the majors. This is a version of the grip in which the pitcher totally lodges the ball into the pocket between his index and middle fingers and releases it with very little spin,. Only hurlers with particularly large hands are likely to pull this off, and even then, it can be difficult to control consistently.
What has become clear to Gausman — especially with Ohtani’s splitter popping up as a frequent star of strikeout GIFs — is the rising interest in giving the pitch a try.
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