The Slider

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I dunno about you guys, but just speaking generally as a fan, I have found myself becoming more interested as time goes on in how guys do what they did, especially those in my past who I didn't give a lot of thought to. I'm not a pitcher and haven't faced real pitching so I just sorta go on what the announcers or scoreboard tell me as to what these guys throw. Then I forget it and move on.

But wondered if we could spend an off-day assembling lists of guys based on what they threw best, and then maybe rank them later. (It is an off-day, innit?)

I'm not sure if there's a database out there for this stuff but there should be.

Give me Mets whose best pitch was the Slider, and/or those who might have a better pitch but who's who's slider would be in consideration among the team's best slider-throwers, past or present. Meantime I will start separate threads for other pitches. Let's see how this goes.

I will start:

Seaver

[Zvon]

I don't think I'd be any good at this unless I whip out a few yearbooks and reacquaint myself with the past. But I bet I'll learn a lot.

[Edgy MD]

I think "Mets" plus "slider" and I think Turk Wendell. I don't know if he threw anything else.

[Guest d'Kong76]

Zvon wrote: I don't think I'd be any good at this unless I whip out a few yearbooks and reacquaint myself with the past. But I bet I'll learn a lot.

I'm almost embarrassed that I can't tell you more about the arsenals
of, say, the Mets' top-ten pitchers of all time. (Except for Gooden)

[Edgy MD]

All of our current young guns throw effective sliders. None moreso than than Syndergaard.

I don't know if we call what Jeurys throws a slider or a cutter, but I think it's the former, and it's deadly on lefties.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

d'Kong76 wrote: Zvon wrote: I don't think I'd be any good at this unless I whip out a few yearbooks and reacquaint myself with the past. But I bet I'll learn a lot. I'm almost embarrassed that I can't tell you more about the arsenals of, say, the Mets' top-ten pitchers of all time. (Except for Gooden)

Right? That's why we're doing this a team

[Frayed Knot]

Part of the challenge of this exercise is that the definition of pitches has tended to morph over the eras.
The classic 'slider' was originally so named (at least in the stories I heard) because its break was horizontal, the pitcher would throw it with a stiff hand on one side of the ball so it 'slid' across the strike zone as opposed to the curve which was thrown with the snap of the hand causing it to break nearly straight down (go back far enough and the curve was often referred to as 'the drop'). But now-days everyone wants their slider to have 'tilt' to the point where it may still be harder and with less downward action than the curve, a 'flat' slider is derided as a meatball, particularly when thrown to a pitcher's opposite (LHP to RHB, etc). The old definition of slider probably fits 'cutters' best now, at which point I think of Rick Reed (but maybe that's a separate category).

[Edgy MD]

The slider was Seaver's other killer pitch, so much so that he named his dog Slider.

Writer and longtime Seaver friend and chronicler Pat Jordan would tease him that if he had another dog name Curveball, he'd have won another 100 games.

[ashie62]

Seaver and Leiter

[Centerfield]

Jesse.

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah Leiter used to call his signature pitch, that one that looked like a strike right up until it wound up bearing in on the toes of a RH batter, a 'cutter' but that thing had some serious downward movement and better fits the modern definition of a slider.