Steve Christilaw: Avoid Uncle Charlie when you’re young

Baseball, like everything else in our society, is prone to fads.

There was that forgettable era where the game flirted heavily with polyester uniforms salvaged from a catalogue designed for softball teams. And there was that Oakland moustache fad in 1972 that gave us Rollie Fingers and his famous handlebar.

Nestled inside the current bushy beard fad is the rediscovery of the curveball.

There are scientists out there who insist that the curveball is an optical illusion, which is why there are few scientists winning 20 games in the major leagues.

The new phrase du jour is “spinning the ball,” and it was the talk of last fall’s World Series, especially the heavy reliance Cleveland placed on throwing breaking balls.

Uncle Charlie, the yakker, the hook and the bender – whatever nickname you use for the curveball, it has been around since the 19th century, so it’s definitely not a new invention. But it is a reclaimed fascination thanks to the ability of technology to quantify all of its glory digitally.

My introduction to the curveball came late in the season of my ninth-grade year.

I was catching during batting practice, and our team ace was on the mound.

He’d gotten to be the team ace by throwing an effective fastball at a variety of speeds and hitting his spots regularly.

But this was the day our coach decided to change things up. He walked slowly to the mound and had a quiet conversation with our pitcher, using the baseball as a centerpiece to the chat. After a few minutes, the coach sauntered back to the sideline, and the pitcher retook the mound to throw the first curveballs of his young career.

For a first-timer, he had decent break on his curve – not quite a 12-6 break like you see from a Major League breaking-ball artist. But for a kid in junior high the movement was impressive, and after a few pitches he came close to hitting the glove.

It just so happened that one of our best hitters was due up, and I distinctly remember grinning at the prospect of his at-bat.

As an occasional catcher, I have always believed in throwing strike one to start out an at-bat, so I called for a fastball and got it. Another fastball got a swinging strike for an 0-2 count.

And then I called for the curve.

Now, the concept of using signs is to avoid tipping off the batter to what’s coming, and normally that’s a good enough reason to stick with secrecy.

Except for the simple fact that our pitcher had the world’s worst poker face.

I put down two fingers for the sign and he broke out into the biggest grin I have ever seen from a pitcher save the time one of our teammates tore the seat out of his practice pants during a sliding drill. For the record, he wasn’t wearing sliding pads, or anything else for that matter, under his uniform.

The batter stepped out of the box and broke out a grin of his own while he shook his head at the prospect of the pitch he’d seen just a few minutes before.

And then he missed the pitch by about a foot.

For the longest time, the only things I knew about a curveball was that, 1, I could catch it, but 2, I couldn’t hit it. Today they can tell you how many revolutions the ball makes from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt. They can tell you how fast the ball went and how far, and in which directions, the ball moved.

A national magazine recently published a cover story on the pitch, documenting that the average Major League curveball spins at about 2,500 revolutions per minute and travels at 77.8 miles per hour.

There is a danger in giving Uncle Charlie this much attention, and it is a downstream problem for the game of baseball.

As attractive as it is to be able to make a batter look foolish with a pitch, it’s not something young arms should dabble with.

There’s a reason why Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest pitchers to ever play the game, retired at the tender age of 30, and it wasn’t from throwing too many fastballs over the course of his brilliant career.

The current wisdom suggests that young pitchers shouldn’t experiment with the curveball before they turn 14, but that’s a somewhat arbitrary age. You have to grow into it.

The key to it all is to learn proper form and mechanics for each and every pitch – even a poorly thrown fastball is dangerous to a young arm.

It’s a pitch you need to grow into.