Here is something you will hear pitching coaches say rather often in my business: “You pitch with your fastball.”
Most fans seem to think a pitcher is made by one choice pitch or another, but really, they are all made by how well they use their fastball, or variations of it. It’s the one pitch everyone has, the one they’ll use the most (excluding knuckle ballers and relief specialists), and it’s also the one that sets up all the other pitches. Even Mariano Rivera, known for his legendary cut fastball still has a good, tailing two-seam fastball that helps keep hitters on their toes.
I like watching David Price pitch because he’s a guy who not only has a great fastball, but uses it well. He moves it around the zone; in out, left to right, and up and down. He’s not afraid to challenge hitters with it, or double and triple up on it. When you’ve got a power fastball that you can move around, you’re a force to be reckoned with. Price’s fastball, which lacks the action of, say, Roy Halladay’s front door sink, and back door cut, is overwhelming in it’s own right because it’s extra firm and well commanded to all four corners of the zone. Then, once you think you’ve got it figured out—pow, off-speed.
Younger pitchers, when they get into trouble, stray from fastball usage because they don’t trust they can beat a hitter with it. Instead of changing location, they change to an off-speed pitch. This may work early in the game when hitters haven’t seen your off-speed yet, but later in the game, when your off speed has lost it’s surprise factor, it will get hit because you’ve over exposed it by not trusting your fastball to do the bulk of the work. Price trust’s his fastball implicitly. Sure, it helps that he throws mid 90’s from the left side, but in the Bigs, this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.
A good recipe for success is to use your fastball to do as much work as you can. When you need to push a batter off the plate: fastball. Change his eye level: fastball. Something on the hands: fastball. Learning to cut and sink the fastball makes it even more versatile. This way, when you want action usually reserved for an off-speed pitch, you can still use the fastball and save the off speed goody bag for later in the game, when you need to pull out a different look to beat back trouble.
When you look at fastball usage this way, it makes you realize that even though Price’s fastball is magnificent and it certainly separates him from the pack, you don’t have to have his arm to mimic his pitching style, or even his success. There are plenty of guys with plus fastballs out there that don’t know how to use them. Conversely, there are plenty of guys out there with average ones that do.