The pitcher. Arguably the most important person in the game of baseball. Without a good pitcher, the opposing team's batters will be knocking those baseballs out of the stadium so fast you'll be out of the game before you can blink an eye. That's why some pitchers are earning in excess of $10 million per year. So just how do these pitchers strike fear into the hearts of the opposing team?

There are many ways to get a good hitter out. The old saying is that good pitching will beat good hitting. That may or may not be true but one thing is for certain, it can't hurt. The main pitch that most good pitchers use to get hitters out is the fastball. A fastball is really just a fancy name for a straight pitch thrown as fast as possible. The top pitchers in the game have fastballs that travel between 95 and 100 miles per hour. These pitchers are very hard, but not impossible to hit. The reason it isn't impossible is because major league hitters are very good. If they sit on a fastball, meaning wait for it to come, they can hit it no matter what the speed.

That's why good pitchers need to develop other pitches for their arsenal. A good pitch to mix in with a fastball is a pitch called the straight change or changeup. This is really just another ball thrown straight except the speed is drastically reduced. Your really good pitchers can throw a change around 70 miles per hour. The reason these pitches are so deceptive is because they are thrown with the same arm motion as a fastball. So the hitter can't tell the difference between the two. The change comes in so slow in comparison that the hitter is swinging before the ball ever gets to him.

If a pitcher can develop a third pitch, he becomes very hard to beat, especially if he can throw all three pitches for strikes. A common third pitch to develop is the curveball. A curveball is thrown in a manner that when the ball is about to reach home plate, the ball actually tails away from a right handed batter, if the pitcher is right handed, or into a left handed batter, thus tying him up. A curveball is very hard to hit because just as the batter is about to swing, the ball moves away from him. Batters who can hit curveballs are the ones who go on to become the most successful hitters in the game.

An alternative third pitch would be what is called a forkball or a split fingered fastball. This is where the baseball is held by the pitcher with the fingers spread apart across both sides of the ball. When the ball is released, as it is about to cross the plate, it takes a sudden dive, or drops out of the strike zone. This is a very difficult pitch to hit especially if thrown hard as it has the velocity of a fastball, requiring the batter to react quickly, but behaves nothing like it. The best split fingered pitchers in the game are almost impossible to hit when they are on the top of their game.

There are many other pitches such as the circle change, knuckleball, palm ball and a slew more. But the ones mentioned above are pretty much your basic pitches that the top pitchers in the game use.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Baseball