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No baseball pitcher would be worth a darn without a catcher who could handle the hot fastball.
The reason I think I'm a good pitcher is I locate my fastball and I change speeds. Period. That's what you do to pitch. That's what pitchers have to do to win games.
I never knew how to throw a fastball, never learned how to throw a curveball, a slider, split-finger, whatever they're throwing nowadays. I was a one-pitch pitcher.
Later, I could take something off my slider and I could make my fastball sink, so I really had four pitches.
Most pitchers fear losing their fastball, but since I don't have one, I have nothing to fear but fear itself.
At 19, I was still figuring out how to throw a fastball.
Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.
I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.
I consciously memorized the speed at which every pitcher in the league threw his fastball, curve, and slider. Then, I'd pick up the speed of the ball in the first 30 feet of its flight and knew how it would move once it has crossed the plate.
I lost the good stuff on my fastball. I had to come up with something to keep me in the league. The knuckler rescued me then.
