Cough. They're (Cough) Learning How to Win

To say that the Rangers choked in the Oakland series would be unfair and a mean slam against a team that has exceeded expectations. And that has played through injuries and distractions and other obstacles all season. So everyone just expected that they'd play through losing Hamilton and Young for this series also. Or that the fatigue wouldn't be a factor for young players.

This week-end's series against the Angels is for all the marbles. Sweep and they've got a good shot at postseason play. Win the series and they're still in the hunt. Lose the series and it will take a Colorado Rockies type miracle. Get swept and they can spend the rest of the season polishing their golf clubs.

But, honestly, in hot stove league debates last winter who really believed that the Texas Rangers would be playing a series with major playoff implications with just slightly more than 2 weeks left in the regular season?

The losing streak of the last week is disappointing, but it is NOT a choke. It's good players who've never been here before -- and who have performed well all season -- learning that champions find that little something that somehow guts out a win when everything is falling apart and nothing is going right. It's comparable to the pitcher who learns how to keep his team in the game on the days he doesn't have his stuff.

The starters have done that. But it didn't magically happen. They had to push through a tough season last year, and some ugly starts early this year to get there. And now the position players are learning what it takes on their part.

I'm not writing off this team for this year. Yes, the postseason does look unlikely. But there's still a lot of exciting baseball ahead for the Rangers. And if they find that something that championship teams have in the next 2 weeks, oh baby, October baseball 2010 on Fox from the Ball Park in Arlington!

So it was The Gyroball I threw all those years!

Here in the Northeast all the baseball news is about Japanese pitching. And with Dice-K now a part of the Red Sox staff, the gyroball is a hot topic. Even the NYT sports section, the home of the hated/beloved Yankees, has an article about the most famous pitch Dice-K throws (or doesn't).

So what does all this have to do with the pitching career of my youth? Well, I never had a real fastball -- it was closer in speed to the big boys changeup. And I never could master the curve. So I was determined to learn to throw a screwball. And everything I read and heard said that to get the pitch to bend in the opposite direction of a curve you had to reverse the spin by reversing the motion of your arm and hand. The release point of a screwball, these instructions said, was exactly the opposite of a curves.

Sound confusing. That's because I never did understand any of it. But that never stopped me from trying. The result. I would grip the ball along the seams and as my arm came forward I would turn my arm outward and snap my wrist with a hard downward, and outward motion at the point of release.

The resulting pitch was a perfectly flat ball that would seemingly float to the plate where even hitters who had no hope of crossing the Mendoza line would wallop the hide right off the ball. Nobody ever saw anything so hit-able, even in batting practice. (Which I never pitched because I was too easy to hit!)

And in today's NYT, alongside the article on the myth of the gyroball, is a set of sidebar graphics and video that show how to throw the pitch. Which is thrown exactly like my old "screwball." And included is an explanation of what makes the pitch devasting in the hands of a good pitcher: it's deceptiveness. It looks like a slider but doesn't cut, it acts like a fastball but dips slightly more and is slower, it comes from the same arm motion as a change-up, but gets on the hitter faster, and can be mistaken for a curve, but then stays flat. Everything I had in the main pitch in my repertoire! The only thing missing from keeping me from having raised the scouts eyebrows was the other pitches to go with it -- the ones that make this homerun on a platter a strikeout waiting to happen.

Spring training has begun. The Rangers still have a shot at the World Series.