Off Speed: Baseball, Pitching, and the Art of Deception

Blending memoir with a baseball fan’s musings, McDermott (Perfect Soldiers) offers entertaining and wistful notes on the craft of pitching. Focusing on one pitcher, Seattle Mariners hurler Felix Hernandez, and one game between the Mariners and the Tampa Bay Rays on August 15, 2012, McDermott discusses various pitches—including the spitball, curveball, fastball, sinker, and knuckleball—and how they developed. He introduces pitchers who invented and excelled at certain pitches, such as Arthur “Candy” Cummings, who first developed the curveball, and R.A. Dickey, today’s most active knuckleball pitcher. McDermott deftly points out that the best pitchers are so practiced at the art of deception that they’re able to hide from a batter which pitch is coming even after the pitch has been released. He writes that the most common way for pitchers to throw a fastball that moves differently than the batter expects is to throw one that sinks. McDermott demystifies baseball, illustrating the game’s “secret beauty” from being built over a very long time. The chapters are sometimes repetitive and he refers to the New York Yankees as “Yankee.” These are enjoyable fan’s notes that might have been better published as a series of articles. (May)