Power of a breaking ball

Four years ago, a local LL team from here went all the way to Williamsport. They absolutely crushed every team they played all year long and in the finals except for two games. As it happens, my son threw against them in a TOC game as well as one of the All Star games.

I'll guarantee you that he never, and I mean never, threw a ball more than 55 until he was 13 years old and he never threw more and 3 or 4 curves in a game and they were dinky, nickel curves. But that team that just destroyed everyone else only scored 5 runs off him in 2 games and 3 of them were unearned!

He beat that same basic team 3 times out of 4 as a Junior, and this season he beat them when he faced them in the Big League, and each year they have gotten out of at least District and one year out of section.

Of course now he's a totally different pitcher, but in that year they went to Williamsport, all he threw was a FB and a change, and in the TOC game he had 10 Ks in 6 innings. Was he lucky? Probably so, but when the same thing happens year after year, there has to be something other than luck happening too!

If you look closely at most of the kids who throw a curve at that age, it isn't really curving as much as the pitcher is slowing up his arm and lobbing the ball, taking so much speed off of it that it looks like a curve. If the kid is throwing a curve that really curves, I'll bet that he can't get the ball in the strike zone more than 25% of the time and I'll win that bet 90% of the time.

I don't know how many times people have to be told that the curve in youth baseball is just not necessary and that its dangerous! Just because 9 out of 10 pitchers arms aren't affected badly, think about how many pitchers that leaves who do get hurt. And for what, a trophy?

If you have a kid who's getting really good private coaching, is really well developed, works very hard and throws a very high percentage of strikes with his FB, maybe then I'd let him mess around with the curve. But those kids are literally 1 in 1,000.