Fastball Quotes

Pitching is what you have best on the day you work, and if you can’t get your fastball over the plate, then maybe you can win with your curve.

Later, I could take something off my slider and I could make my fastball sink, so I really had four pitches.

I consciously memorized the speed at which every pitcher in the league threw his fastball, curve, and slider. Then, I’d pick up the speed of the ball in the first 30 feet of its flight and knew how it would move once it has crossed the plate.

Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.

I’ve got a fastball, change-up, forkball, curve, slider, knuckle-slider, knuckle-curve, I had about seven pitches I could have used at any time.

I’m pretty proud of my fastball. I can throw a screwball. It’s not as accurate, and I don’t have the velocity like I do with my fastball, but I think my fastball is not too shabby.

At 19, I was still figuring out how to throw a fastball.

I feel like a pioneer with the split-fingered fastball. I was the first one to really throw it pretty much 100 percent of the time. It was a pitch that I had to have. If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have been in the big leagues.

I’m not executing my pitches. I’m not commanding my fastball, and I get behind in the count. When I try to throw strikes, I’m getting hurt. That’s not the way I pitch.

That’s when I’m at my best. When I can throw a fastball over in the count, just throw strikes both in and away, it just sets up all my stuff.

I think that is one thing I’ve picked up: follow a routine, be consistent, and everything is going to fall in place. If you are scrambling around, and you are late for stuff, that adds extra stress, and you have to go out there and hit a 97 mph fastball.

Fastball middle-middle. You can’t miss that pitch.

If you can constantly just put pressure on all four quadrants, it gives you a little more leverage to be able to fill the zone up with breaking balls and fastball counts – or with breaking balls when guys are maybe sitting on the fastball that you’ve established.

I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn’t throw it past me, none of them.

When you pinch-hit, you know you’re getting their best guys, and usually it’s a reliever and a guy that’s got a really good slider or a really good fastball.

I’ve got some good movement on my sinking fastball, and I rely on that.

I’m trying to throw more curves because I’m always throwing fastball, slider, fastball, slider.

I never knew how to throw a fastball, never learned how to throw a curveball, a slider, split-finger, whatever they’re throwing nowadays. I was a one-pitch pitcher.

My best pitch is my fastball. It’s probably the most difficult pitch to hit. In my case, batters have very little reaction time.

The foundation is spotting my fastball, early in counts and especially if I fall behind.

I want to throw a faster fastball. I want a sharper curve. I want to improve all my pitches.

The biggest thing was just working on fastball location and getting ahead of guys.

I was short with my fastball and breaking ball.

That’s why it’s so important to have that gap between your fastball and off-speed pitches: then, when you effectively locate your fastball, it plays at a higher velocity.

I know my fastball command will get even better.

The final release point for the fastball is the tips of your fingers.

Everyone wants to talk about my slider, and how effective it is, but it really can’t be without fastball command. It starts with my fastball, even if the slider is the pitch I want to get to.

I thought I had to show all my stuff and I almost tore the boards of the grandstand with my fastball.

I can maybe depend on my fastball a little more than some other pitchers.

Most pitchers fear losing their fastball, but since I don’t have one, I have nothing to fear but fear itself.

I kept listening in the minor leagues, and even earlier than that, people would say, ‘If you don’t hit the fastball, you’re not going to get to the big leagues.’ Every game, you’re going to get a fastball.

My dad played for a coal-mining team in eastern Ohio; he was a very good pitcher. If he hadn’t hurt his arm, he probably would have got a shot somewhere. He hurt his arm one spring, didn’t warm up good enough, couldn’t throw a fastball anymore. Another coal miner taught him how to throw the knuckleball.

I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun. I hit 70 one time on a radar guy at one of those pitch-and-throw kind of things. I have a pretty good arm for somebody who‘s not a baseball player.

Everybody here has the ability to throw a fastball down and away or throw a breaking ball in the dirt for a swing and a miss. But are we able to stay in that moment and understand what we’re trying to accomplish and see it in our mind before we execute and then make the pitch?

When Bryan Price taught me how to throw a changeup, he made me see myself. All my life, I’ve been the equivalent of a fastball pitcher – trying to use blazing speed and brute force to wow the people around me.

The reason I think I’m a good pitcher is I locate my fastball and I change speeds. Period. That’s what you do to pitch. That’s what pitchers have to do to win games.

No baseball pitcher would be worth a darn without a catcher who could handle the hot fastball.

Cleaning up that lack of the definition between the two, and then leaning on the four-seam, having it become my primary fastball over my two-seam, it’s just benefited me as a whole.

If you can’t see the rotation and tell if it’s a sink – a fastball, then you have to be able to tell whether that fastball is a two-seamer or a four-seamer. You have to be able to recognize if it’s a slider or a curveball. You have to be able to recognize if it’s a changeup or a split-finger.

I threw a good fastball and changeup, but a below-average curveball.