By Thom Henninger
Every baseball season produces its share of interesting stories, from Cinderella teams to players who persevere against great odds. The Milwaukee Brewers have one in reliever Mark DiFelice, a 32-year-old right-hander who would be a rookie if he had spent a few less days on the major league roster in 2008.
DiFelice surfaced briefly in the Brewers bullpen last May, a month into his 11th minor league campaign, and he secured a spot on the 25-man roster this spring. The Pennsylvania native took a circuitous route to Milwaukee after enduring rotator-cuff surgery several years, which took 10 mph off his low-90s fastball.
In a recent web post, Jeff Passan, a terrific writer for Yahoo! Sports, tells how DiFelice met a pitching coach named Adolfo Navarro while playing winter ball for the Obregon Yaquis in Mexico before the 2006 season. Navarro offered to teach DeFelice the cutter, and the pitch has given the veteran minor leaguer a big league opportunity.
It’s generally the only pitch DiFelice throws, and it’s working. The right-hander is 3-0 with a 1.42 ERA this spring. In 19.0 innings, he’s allowed just 13 hits and four walks while striking out 18. Hitters are batting .188/.233/.319 against him.
Most pitchers who throw a cutter, such as Toronto ace Roy Halladay and Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, use it as a power pitch. DiFelice’s offering is a steady 82 mph, though the movement is incredible.
Passan calls the pitch the “82-mph cotton ball that no one can solve.” In his feature, he provides an excellent description of how DiFelice throws the pitch:
“DiFelice grips the ball across the seams, like a four-seam fastball, and tilts it so his middle finger rests along the red stitching. He squeezes the ball with his middle finger, raises his index finger and throws it as he would a fastball. The result is confounding: The ball spins like a fastball and moves like a slider, and the optical illusion it plays on hitters allows him to get away with throwing an 82-mph pitch the batter knows is coming.”
In parts of two major league seasons, DiFelice has given up just eight walks and fanned 38 in 38.0 innings. Remarkably, hardly anyone has done anything with his cutter to this point, but that’s likely to change. Baseball is a game of adjustments, with hitters and pitchers constantly reacting to what’s happened before. It’s nearly impossible to survive with one pitch, especially one that’s always thrown at the same speed.
Maybe the last statement isn’t an absolute truth, but a myth of the game waiting to be disproved. After all, Rivera survives mostly throwing cutters, though it helps when you throw it in the low-to-mid 90s.
If you throw one pitch, though, is velocity really more important than movement? After all, the one pitch numerous hurlers have built a career around is the knuckleball. Deception kept guys like Hoyt Wilhelm, Phil Niekro and Tim Wakefield on the mound well into their 40s. Wilhelm, a Hall of Famer who didn’t reach the major leagues until he was 29, worked his last big league game two weeks before he turned 50. Niekro retired at 48 and also was enshrined in the Hall.
DiFelice is working on diversifying. He’s threatening to mix in a few curves and changeups, which sparks wonder as to what the radar reading on his change would be. Just maybe he won’t need those other pitches. Could he be throwing the new knuckleball, a deceptive pitch that can stand alone as a way to get hitters out? DiFelice will test that theory every time he takes the mound.
