EP102 – What Does Hiding the Ball Mean for Pitchers? And, Is a Knuckle Curve Different?

Is a knuckle-curveball different than a regular curve? And, what does hiding the ball mean for pitchers? Should they try to do it? Should mechanics be taught so that hiding the ball happens?

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Transcript: EP102 – What Does Hiding the Ball Mean for Pitchers? And, Is a Knuckle Curve Different?

You’re listening to the Dear Baseball Gods podcast. In this show, I helped parents, players and coaches better navigate their baseball careers.

Hey, welcome back to Dear Baseball Gods. I’m Dan Blewett. And just as a little bit of housekeeping yet, again, be sure to check out the description here. Be sure to check out my email list, which is also there’s links in the descriptions podcast. Releasing a new online strength conditioning program called early work very soon.

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This was built by me and a fellow strength coach, a good friend. Mine named coach Andrew Sacks, who is an expert in baseball and softball training. So without further ado, let’s get into today’s episode. So today we have two topics. Number one, what is a knuckle curve? Is it different than a regular curve ball?

And number two also for pitchers, what’s the deal with hiding the baseball? So this is a common term where we say, Oh man, the guy hides the ball really well. But what does this mean? Is it important? Is it something you should try to do? We’re going to kind of demystify that whole bunch. Okay. So let’s talk about the knuckle curve, the knuckle on a knuckle curve.

And I’m going to do YouTube video on this because this is. Better shown than explained via audio. However, the, uh, the knuckle curve is just a placement from the index finger. So if you’ve watched any of my curve ball videos or taken my online pitching course called the pitch architect, then you’ll know that there’s a bunch of different placeholders for your index finger when you’re throwing a curve ball.

So the index finger. Is obviously going to rest on more the top of the ball, more in the center. So what we don’t want the index finger to do is to put pressure into the center of the ball, which is going to reduce spin. So the. Middle finger is going to be the pressure finger in the curve ball. That’s going to be slightly down the descending edge of the ball.

And so we want the middle finger to have pretty much all the pressure in contact with a baseball so that it can kind of catch and do its thing to apply as much spin as possible at the moment of release. So the index finger is along for the ride. There’s a bunch of. You know, different things it can do.

It can just sort of hang out and not put pressure. It can stick up straight in the air, like Adam Wainwright, he was famous for that. Uh, it can cross over the index finger and rest on top and it can also knuckle. So you could jab your fingernail into the ball, or you could pull your finger in even farther and rest sort of the.

The Cruck or the, not the Cruck, but the, you know, the, the, the bend, the outer digit of the top digit of the finger. Wow. I just described that terribly, but I don’t know what that’s called. So you look at your fingernail, the first crease right below it. You can rest that on top of the ball now. This is, here’s the key point here with the knuckle curve ball.

People talk about it when you know this, guy’s got a great, now he’s got a nasty knuckle curve, right? It’s a knuckle curve when it’s a knuckle curve, but it’s just a curve ball otherwise. Whereas it’s not like anyone’s ever said, Oh, he’s got a great finger stuck in the air curve. It’s like, no, that’s just a curve ball.

Like Adam Wainwright threw a curve ball with his finger sticking straight in the air. Um, But yeah, for some reason we call a knuckle curve, a knuckle curve and with all the other finger placements, which that’s all they are is just finger placement, variations. We don’t change the name of the curb while it doesn’t get a second name.

Like I said, there’s no stick the stuck curveball or the crossover. Oh, he’s got a great crossover curveball. Now he just throws a curve ball. So the point here is if you think about what the knuckle action is doing, like what the knuckle grip is doing. It’s not actually doing anything. It doesn’t, it doesn’t flick it.

Doesn’t add spin. Um, it might provide a little bit of like direction for the ball. I think that’s possible. But the reality is that doesn’t actually do much of anything. Um, yeah, really just again, the index fingers role is to get out of the way. And just sort of be an innocent bystander, not push into the top of the ball where it can’t help increase spin rate.

And so it’s really just one of those personal preferences, a comfort position where if you like learning or curve ball, uh, with the knuckle versus crossing it over versus sticking it up versus just laying your finger gently on the ball. That’s fine. So if you want to throw a quote unquote knuckle curve, instead of any of the other finger variations, go for it.

But you want to just make sure you understand that you’re not actually getting a different product. The knuckle Kerrville is not functionally different than any other curveball. There is. It’s not proven to increase spin rate or to be sharper or to be thrown harder. Any of those things. Cause again, there’s no functional difference in the way you hold the pitch.

It’s just a different place of putting your finger. So I think that’s really important to understand. I think a lot of parents get mixed up. A lot of players get mixed up and I had a teammate I’ve told this story a couple of different, different places. I had a teammate who was adamant. He did have a very good curve ball.

He was adamant that his, his index finger flicked and that it increased the spin rate of the ball. And to him, I said, sir, You an idiot because if your middle finger would have flick, it would be in the opposite direction. It’d be at a 90 degree angle from where the ball is going to spin. If you were to flick the ball, it would be spinning sideways as a fin, a bullet compared to the, the forward top spin that the ball is supposed to have.

I’m like, dude. That literally makes no sense if your finger would have flick it, wouldn’t be flicking it in the direction that the ball is actually spinning. When it comes out of your hand, like we know you have a good curve ball. That means your curve ball has topspin. Like it’s, it’s spinning forward towards the hitter and the finger placement that you will have upon release full, like extending your knuckle cannot possibly match that.

Angle of rotation. It just, it just can’t and he was insistent, but again, a lot of pro athletes are sometimes insistent that they do certain things in the game, the witch slow motion video now debunks, right? There’s a lot of players from the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, who will say that? Yeah, this is how you throw, this is what you do.

Like, this is what I do. And. We’ve gone to the video and gone to the tape of a lot of these players and said, I know you think that’s how you hit, but you actually video shows that you don’t video shows that your mechanics are this way or that way, or the other thing. So just something to keep in mind.

But again, the big thing, the big takeaway here is knuckle curve ball. I don’t know why it gets a different term, like it’s its own special term, but really it’s in the same class as every other finger variation of the regular curve ball.

all right. Second topic for today’s podcast, hiding the ball as a pitcher. Does it matter if you hide the ball? What does hiding the ball mean? All right. So first of all, let’s get this squared away, pretty quick, hiding the ball. It means whatever it means to that given person. So there’s no one unifying definition, but basically there are some pitchers that they can seal the wall behind their body longer than others.

And that just really comes down to mechanical factors. So it’s not like something any pitchers ever tried to do. But, you know, when you come to your leg kick, if your arm goes through, it’s, you know, it’s a little arm circle, you’re the F the early part of your arm action. If it goes pretty much in a straight line, like imagine right now, if you’re, if you put your back against a wall, if your hand swung through it’s, you know, your arm circle.

Against that wall, that arm is going to be pretty much in line with your torso, right? And so if someone was down the hall, looking at you, they wouldn’t really be able to see your arm because it’d be pretty much concealed behind your body. That in a nutshell is what hiding the ball looks like now, some pitchers, because of the way they turn, their body will break that earlier than others.

So, you know, if you tend to wrap, which means you turn your shoulder, where you, the hitter can see a little bit of your numbers, That will show the ball to them a little bit earlier as the ball sticks out behind your back a little sooner, whereas pictures that will stay upright a little bit better and not have that counter rotation or that, uh, yeah, that counter rotation, they will keep again, keep the ball in line with their body longer.

Uh, there’s also. Obviously different factors. So like when you do start to accelerate the ball, if you stride really far across your body, that’s going to conceal the ball at a little later point in the delivery, not so much in the early arm action, but later in the delivery, and then just different ways of contorting your body, different arm slots, all those different things, um, basically make it deceptive or the ball not really coming out of the typical window.

So. I think with hiding the ball, it can be sort of a catch all term for having an unorthodox delivery where they hit the ball. Doesn’t tend to come out of the typical slot that hitter’s looking for. So if you’re going to pick a very traditional pitcher to say, this is where like the ball is going to come out, you know, like Justin Verlander, I think is a good example that he’s got very good mechanics.

He has a pretty high leg kick and it kind of like weird. Like his leg is very fast up and down, but in general, he doesn’t have like a ton of extra twisting. He doesn’t have a crazy like hip bomb pill. Like he’s not, you know, Trevor Bauer who also has very good mechanics, but he’s looking slightly more on earth unorthodox.

I’d say used to have that really big hip lean out when he was younger. Um, you know, he’s not Madison Bumgarner where he’s striding way across his body and counter-rotating a ton, right? He’s not Chris sail doing a lot of, of that funky. Um, counter rotation as well. So, you know, like Justin Verlander, it looks very archetypical, right?

He’s like, uh, if an alien came down from outer space and said, show me a baseball pitcher, you might show him Justin Verlander, like he’s tall, he’s built like, you know, he’s built for the job. He’s got very normal looking mechanics, whatever you’d call that. So with. Any set of mechanics, obviously the arm and the baseball are going to be behind your body, where the hitter can’t see through your body at some point in the delivery.

So for more traditional mechanics, that’s going to be earlier in the delivery, right? So like Justin Verlander doesn’t have a ton of counter rotation. As his arm goes through its circle. It’s going to be concealed behind the body pretty early within, as he starts to rotate, you’re going to start to see it after that.

Right. Kind of in like the normal and I hate using the quote unquote normal, but that’s kind of like where a hitter would train his eye. If he wanted to train for the average pitcher. And then you’ll have other pitchers like Chris sail, Madison Bumgarner guys, the lower arm slots who step farther across their body, have a little funkier delivery, whatever, because of their arm action and some counter rotation, you’re going to see the ball stick behind their body early.

And then you’re going to lose it a lot, a little bit later, again, as they step across their body and the balls like stuck behind their chest, all that sort of stuff. So. Hiding the ball is going to vary from pitcher to pitcher and is a good thing, but really, I don’t think it’s so much hiding the ball.

Like there’s here’s well, here’s the takeaways. Number one, the first thing is you shouldn’t. Make your mechanics such that you’re hiding the ball. You shouldn’t build your mechanics saying I’m going to throw this way so that I ho I hide the ball better. That’s not a goal that you should have the way every athlete throws is unique to him.

Within reason. And then we want to refine and help his mechanics become, you know, more efficient. And I don’t like using that word, but what more efficient means here is you’re not leaking power by having a front side that opens up too early, or you fall forward down the mountain. So you’re on your front foot, things like that.

You don’t lose, you don’t lose and leak power. From your mechanics. Um, you know, that’s, that’s not part of being like a naturally good thrower. So you want to take like, every pitcher has sort of a natural arm slot that they’re probably best from, right. We wouldn’t change Chris sail into someone who throws higher up over top because Chris sail I’m sure.

Throws that way because. He just always through that way. And it works really well and his body moves really well like that. And so I think arm side is highly, highly unique. And a lot of the way you get on the mound is unique. The way you lift your leg is unique. Like pitchers would really highlight kicks.

They tend to just be more flexible. And that just really, it feels right to them. I was one of those pictures. I’d highlight, kick you. Can’t. Lower their leg kicks that well, without them starting to feel like they lose power or they lose, you know, they’re the dynamic part of their delivery. There’s a lot of things in, in pitching that are sort of intangible that still fall within the realm of good pitching, but can vary from one player to the next, right.

It’s the tolerances like you don’t have, you know, not every car has an engine and two axles and four tires. And, you know, a carburetor and whatever. Won’t do cars of carburetors anymore, anymore. I don’t know, but cars have all these core components, but then you have a body that’s a minivan body. That’s a pickup truck, right.

Different frame, different chassis. But the core components are still there. Same thing with pitchers. As long as you have the drive, train the wheels, the axles, then you can do some unique things and still be a, an elite pitcher. Right. So you, number one, you’d never build your mechanics saying I’m going to throw this way so that I hide the ball better.

You should build your mechanics so you can throw as hard as you possibly can with the least amount of stress on your arm and in the most repeatable way. So you have the best command possible. Those are the only real goals from mechanics. Secondly. Just being funky is just something that you smell fall into.

So if you, if you just happen to have some weirdness, like say you just, you, you throw well, like Jake Arietta who struck, who strides away across his body, Jake Arietta his body just moves that way. If you straightened his stride out, he might not be as good. Probably wouldn’t. So Jake Arietta strides way to the third base side.

And yet he still has the hip mobility and he just uses that torque. That would probably be bad for most pitchers, but he used it his advantage somehow because of just the unique anatomy of Jake Arietta. And so he just sort of wins a little bit of the lottery saying, Hey, I’m going to end up hiding the ball a little bit later and it’s going to be able to come out of a weirder arm slot compared to other pitchers, because I just so happened to step away across my body and still throw nasty stuff with it.

So that’s another, that’s another factor to consider that you might just have a little bit of funkiness to your delivery and you win just by accident. The fact that. Your pitches are going to come out of a very different window than other pitchers, right? That’s why side armors and submariners are so effective because not, not only do their balls spin differently, but they come out of a window.

The hitters have a very small sample size of seeing. So they’ve seen 80,000 fastballs come from a normal three-quarter arm slot. But they might’ve only seen a thousand fastballs come from a submarine arm slot, right. There’s kids in high school now who probably never faced a submarine pitcher. And those guys in college, who I guarantee you have never faced a submarine pitcher.

I can’t remember seeing a submarine pitcher on the travel ball circuit and the last couple of years. So they’re not very many of them developing to where, you know, it seems like most of those kids are turned into submariners in college and maybe in the pro ball. So you got to get pretty deep into baseball to find a submarine pitcher to hit off of.

And so then when you do see it, it could be the first time ever. And then if you see one in the big leagues, you, you probably still haven’t seen that many of them. So your, again, your sample size is very small. This is why when fast pitch softball players pitch against major league baseball players or college players, they strike them out usually on the first bunch of bats because they don’t know what the heck is going on because their brain has been trained for a.

You know, like seven foot arm slot. And, uh, they’ve been seeing pitches come out of that window at that trajectory for their entire lives. And now suddenly they see this fast pitch player throwing 62 miles per hour. At an arm slot, that’s one foot off the ground and their brain just doesn’t understand what to do yet.

And it takes a couple of bats before they start to get it. So the first couple of bats from this off the fast pitch pitcher, it’s all like, ha ha look, you know, we’re striking out the boys, but then as they start to say, okay, now my brain gets it. We know where that ball is coming from. Now we get our timing back then the, you know, the thing doesn’t work so well.

So, you know, with all this, you could essentially lump. Throwing a softball player to pitch against baseball. Guys. You could essentially say that she hides the ball. Well, um, I think it would probably fall into that catch all term, even though that’s definitely not what she’s actually trying to do, and there’s really not need sense of hiding it.

There, but it just sort of falls under this whole idea that when the ball comes out of an alternative window, that’s not normal. We kind of refer to it as hiding the ball, or when the pitcher has the ball physically stay behind his body longer than others. That also falls under the. Hiding the ball or having deception.

And really, I think the bigger term today is that he has deception. That’s really the term that Scouts use. And I have a couple of scout friends, you know, they don’t say he hides the ball. Well, as much as they say, he’s got some deceptions delivery, he’s got some deception. We don’t exactly understand what it is maybe about this picture, but he’s definitely got some deception because he only throws, you know, 86 individual won and he gets tons and tons of swings and misses.

So it tells us that there’s something deceptive going on because his fast ball plays up for not being all that fast. Right. That’s a good example of a conversation that I’ve had about pitchers that seem to do something funky and deceptive. Which again, may fall under hiding the ball or whatever. Uh, but deception is really, I think, more the, the modernized term for hiding the ball.

So hopefully that helps, obviously this is something I actually got a YouTube comment about this the other day said, Hey, could you, could you talk about hiding the ball? And I’ll probably do a video on this one as well, because. You know, to be perfectly honest, I just like duplicating my content. It’s it’s helpful to talk through some things it’s helpful to show some other things.

Um, but yeah, hiding the ball is, is somewhat misunderstood. And really, I think the biggest term to take away from this is deception. If you have deception in your delivery, it’s better than not having deception, but you really shouldn’t manufacture your delivery to try to get deception. If it’s not the way you naturally throw.

That’s it for today’s episode of dear baseball gods. I’d greatly appreciate it. If you’d subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget in the notes of this show, you’ll find links to my pitching manual pitching isn’t complicated. My memoir, dear baseball gods, my online video pitching courses and my new baseball strength training program called early work.

You can sign up right now for a free 14 day trial to early work. And if you’re interested in one of my online courses, you can save 20% on any one of them using the promo code baseball gods. Thanks again for listening and stay on your hustle. You never know, who’s watching. .