PITTSBURGH — Maybe it’s me — it’s probably me — but this summer’s emergence of viable starting pitching, in Pittsburgh of all places, appears to have stirred a renewal of baseball chatter on exactly what it is that pitchers do.

When the Pirates can repeatedly deploy most of an accomplished rotation thanks to Mitch Keller and rookies Jared Jones and Paul Skenes, some renewed appreciation of the pitching arts is probably inevitable, and that’s all well and good.

But it might be useful to offer a bit of a reset on some of the terminology getting slung around, and, of course, it might not, but nobody’s going to stop me now.

If you’re in the habit of consuming baseball broadcasts, you’ve doubtless heard a pitcher described as “a sinker-slider guy,” meaning a guy who can get people out (that’s the job, after all) without having to rely on a classical fastball. A sinker-slider guy is an honored occupation, a worthy competitor and a useful broadcast label, but this spring, for the first time in too many decades to specify, I heard a pitcher described thusly:

“He’s a sinker-slider-sweeper-splitter guy.”

Ex-squeeze me?

There’s an antiquated term for whatever that is — junkballer, but the expansion of the typical pitching repertoire found another new dimension recently when Pirates announcers began crediting Skenes with the development of a “splinker.”

Not to be presumptuous, but I take this to mean Skenes has within his arsenal a pitch that is a cross between a splitter and a sinker. A splinker seems an entirely new kind of pitch, unless I’m unaware of some old baseball saying that goes, “Remember, a guy who throws a splinker can go home after the game and turn on the sprinkler, but only after he runs the sweeper.”

Probably not, I know.

I applaud Skenes’ innovation — and also the broadcasters who’ve introduced it into the pitching glossary — but I would further urge some caution because we might be going toward a place in the baseball nomenclature that requires the assistance of Satchel Paige, and he’s been dead for 42 years.

...continued

©2024 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.