This Yahoo! article reveals a very talented pro baseball player, Mariano Rivera currently of the New York Yankees, and his ability to break wooden bats with pitches. (Links do not work in quotes)
The best pitch ever notched four more kill shots Wednesday night. Mariano Rivera(notes) throws a cut fastball that at its 55th foot takes a hairpin turn into the fists of left-handed batters, and their feeble attempts to hit it end up reinforcing a long-held certitude: The only thing more dangerous to lumber than wood-boring beetles is the New York Yankees’ closer.The impressiveness of Rivera’s four-out, four-broken-bat save during the Yankees’ thievery of home-field advantage from the Minnesota Twins in a 6-4 victory in Game 1 of the American League Division Series wasn’t because he set some record. He once cracked five bats in an outing. Nor did he earn extra credit for turning baseballs into buzzsaws. An out is an out, shrapnel or not.
This is a significant amount of force to shatter bats. Broken bats are caused by fast balls at either the bat's end or near a player's hand during a jamb. I am guessing Rivera is the master of the jamb against left handed hitters. In this article, the majority of bats that shatter are actually made of maple wood and not the more traditional ash which just cracks. Maple bats have physical properties that encourage shattering in comparison to ash.
What is interesting about Rivera, is his single minded approach to pitching. He has one pitch, a cutter fast ball. To top it off, he has been doing this for 13 years now and is still effective at past 40.
What’s mystifying – what has mystified for more than a decade now and will continue to mystify until Rivera retires, which, even after his 40th birthday, remains a long way off – is that he throws a single pitch, a dirty bomb of a pitch, yes, but just one nonetheless. Not only can hitters damn near never make solid contact, they fare so poorly that the lone weapon at their disposal often turns into a useless recyclable.This is a demonstration of someone capitalizing a particular talent. Most pro pitchers can throw pitches that hard. It is just a handful who can routinely dominate batters.
As for the future of baseball, you think that getting away from wood might be in the works. There is something about hearing the crack of a wooden bat though to stir excitement into a fan's soul.
Next week is my honeymoon, thus, it will be two weeks before my next post. Cheers!
