Published: June 25, 2006 11:16 pm         

New pitch is all in the grip

The art of pitching has always had a mystique about it.

Making a ball dance through the air, sometimes rising, sometimes dropping or curving, is what every youngster dreams of doing.

Mountain State University softball pitching coach Gerald “Jerry” Johnson wondered if there was something else the ball might do. He began playing around with different grips and release points and came up with a new softball pitch.

“About a year ago, I was pitching in the pitching room at MSU,” Johnson said. “I wanted to come up with a different pitch. There are curveballs, drop balls and screwballs. I wanted to do something a little bit different and a little bit unique.

“After pitching practice with the university pitchers, I just stayed for about 45 minutes each day and worked on different grips, different releases and different strides.”

The result was a new pitch which Johnson dubbed the triple pitch. It didn’t come, though, without a lot of concentrated effort.

“Pitching in the backstop, you release the ball and kind of look at it,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to do but one night I noticed the ball had a different spin on it, a different rotation. One thing led to another and that was basically it. The following night when we had pitching practice, I asked Natalie (Hanson) to stay (and throw it) and Jennifer Sloan to catch the pitch.”

The triple pitch’s speed is somewhere between a fastball and a changeup. It does three things as it travels to the plate (hence the name “triple pitch”). It stays at knee-high level, slows down and has a very, very slight curve and drop to it.

Hanson is the first pitcher to try to throw the triple pitch with Sloan acting as catcher.

“I’ve never seen a pitch like it,” Hanson said. “I’ve never seen a pitch slow down, drop and curve at the same time.”

The returning senior from Williamsport, Ohio, mainly played first base and third base for the Cougars this past season but pitched in six contests.

That first night, though, didn’t go as smoothly as Johnson had hoped.

“Natalie, the first several pitches I was a little worried because she kept dropping the ball,” Johnson said. “It’s a difficult grip. It’s not a very easy grip. After about eight or nine pitches, it just went right in there and Sloan, the catcher, said, ‘What was that?’”

Hanson got a handle on the grip and the release quickly.

“The mechanics are pretty much the same,” she said. “Just the grip and the release are different. I mean, it’s not for a beginning pitcher. It’s for an intermediate or advanced pitcher.”

Hanson had to work up a little bit of courage to throw it for the first time in a game.

“I was nervous about throwing it in a game at first,” she said. “I wanted to throw it when I was ahead in the count and when we were ahead. I did and it worked really well.”

On the other end, Sloan was dealing with catching the triple pitch.

“Since I know what it’s going to do and where it should go, it’s not that hard to catch,” Sloan said. “You just have to follow it in. But, if I didn’t know it was coming, it would be hard to catch.”

Still, the junior from Mount Hope says it’s a tricky pitch.

“If I was a batter, I probably wouldn’t expect it to do what it does,” she said. “It would throw me off. It’s a good finesse pitch.”

Sloan adds that the rotation of the ball is key to how the pitch works

“It’s an 11-5 rotation, 11 and 5 o’clock,” she said. “That’s pretty much the curve part. It’s like it’s spinning on its axis.”

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The next step for Johnson was securing the rights to the triple pitch.

“I figured I had something here that was different and unique,” Johnson said. “I went to a patent attorney and had the pitch copyrighted.”

Before copyrighting the pitch though, Johnson sought out former softball pitching coach extraordinaire Ernie Parker, who worked with both Jennie Finch and Lisa Fernandez during their careers.

“I got on the Internet one night to Ernie Parker,” Johnson said. “I figured if that pitch was out there, he would know. I’ve been around softball for over 30 years and I’ve never seen a pitch like that.”

After Parker called him back, Johnson went to see Parker at his home in Tennessee in May and showed him the pitch.

“(Parker) looked at it for a few minutes,” Johnson said. “He had this look of amazement on his face, like what was that? We were there with him for four hours and he said, ‘Jerry, I’ve never seen a softball do that before. That’s a good pitch.’”

From there, it was just a matter of securing the rights and preparing an instructional video on how to throw the triple pitch.

Johnson hired Sweet Song Production of Parkersburg to produce the video and they spent Thursday and Friday filming footage at Woodrow Wilson.

“Hopefully, we’ll do a good, quality video and put it out to market,” Johnson said.

Hanson and Sloan demonstrated the art of throwing the unique pitch and Parker added an endorsement for Johnson’s video.

With Hanson returning as a senior next season, fans of the Cougars should get an opportunity to see the triple pitch first-hand.

— E-mail:

rjett@register-herald.com