One of the charming/frustrating things about baseball is how often players succeed by failing badly enough. Imagine that 10 percent of made free throws in the NBA were accidentally banked in. That’s how baseball feels sometimes.
The best example of this is the swinging bunt1, where a ball is accidentally hit so poorly that the defense can’t turn it into an out. Another example is the so-called backup slider, where a pitcher accidentally throws a slider that doesn’t bite like a slider, and doesn’t end up anywhere close to the desired slider location, but—because it’s such an unusual pitch, because it’s a pitch that occurs almost randomly—it freezes the surprised batter.
Last night, the Giants’ closer Camilo Doval struck out the side in the ninth inning on three third-strike sliders. The first one was a swinging strike on a perfect pitch, slider of the year candidate right here:
The second one was a called strike on a mistake, which just happened to horseshoe its way back around to effectiveness:
The reason I’m spotlighting them here is that, by our great fortune, the Giants’ broadcast followed up each pitch with a slow-motion spin-cam replay. I’m not going to write many more words in this post. I just want you to see how incredibly beautiful a good slider is, thanks to modern broadcast technology.
This is the first Doval slider:
What a gorgeous thing! That tight spiral barely wobbles and never deviates, seeming almost to tighten further in on its dot as it closes in on the batter.
To appreciate that pitch’s natural beauty, compare it to a “bad” slider, the one that backed up on Doval and froze Jacob Young:
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