Friday Video Dump: The Eephus

Oddly enough, most people that either don't study the game of baseball from a historical perspective or haven't played All-Star Baseball 2005 for the X-Box don't know what the "eephus" pitch is. I'll steal a quick description from another site: Courtesy of http://www.thebaseballpage.com/:
"The purest junk -- the junkiest pitch in history -- is the Eephus pitch, invented by Rip Sewell of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the thirties. The Eephus pitch is a pitch with absolutely nothing on it -- no velocity, no fancy spin, and no break. No deception at all. And most of all, no SPEED. It’s an American Gothic, a true Mother-Hubbard’s-bare-cupboard of a pitch. Every once in a while, Sewell would just look at the plate, and lob the baseball up into a rainbow arc. There was no ulterior motive here. No trick. It’s the same pitch you see on a slow pitch softball field, only overhand, and higher, and, somehow, even slower. Sometimes, the ball dropped down into the strike zone while the suddenly emasculated hitter flailed. More often they managed some kind of contact, yet for some reason (perhaps arc of the pitch was too severe) they couldn’t knock it out of the park. And that’s all they wanted to do.
As a hitter, you don’t see an outrageous pitch like the Eephus and think, Single. The Eephus pitch was an insult: they wanted to pulverize it, kill it, crush it. They’d get so worked up waiting for it they couldn’t see it straight, and they’d ground out, or pop out, or miss altogether. They risked injury -- the swings they took where that hard. And then they were embarrassed, angry. Give it to me again, you son-of-a-bitch! But ... no. Probably not, not for you. Not any time soon. Batters would wish for another chance they might not get for a year, but the pitch would be in their minds every time they faced Sewell -- that big looping marshmallow of a pitch. It was galling, an itch they couldn’t reach, an ache. Sewell was careful not to throw the Eephus too much -- he tried to keep it around 10 times per game. He wanted hitters to hope for it, but he wanted its arrival to be unexpected, every time. This made all of Sewell’s other pitches look a little bit better, because any pitch, any pitch at all, looks fantastic when compared to to the Eephus."

I've seen some ridiculous pitches, even El Duque occassionally wil throw a lollipop 50 mph curveball, but at the very least check out the first of these videos, it's definitely worth it. Those Japanese are tricky bastards...







Pretty sweet stuff. I have only 1 pitch. The eephus. My fastball is a flat eephus. I'm headed straight to the majors.