Curt Schilling has more opinions, this time about pitcher prep
If there’s one thing we know about Curt Schilling, it’s that he never runs out of things to say. On Wednesday morning, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher went on the Dan Patrick show to share his thoughts on a number of topics, including Aroldis Chapman, and not being asked to speak at the Republican National Convention.
Schilling also talked about Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Jameson Taillon and his unfortunate head injury. Taillon took a 105 mph line drive off the back of his head on Tuesday, and didn’t just live to tell the tale — he stayed in the game and is doing fine. But Schilling had some opinions to share about pitcher fundamentals, which he feels are lacking.
At no point in a pitcher’s life should the back of his head ever be to home plate when he’s throwing a pitch. It’s a combination of a couple different things. The first, and biggest thing, is the lack of minor-league innings these guys are getting. PFP — pitchers’ fundamental practice — is such that it’s not a two-week spring-training deal for guys that are serious about it. It’s something you do all spring training and kind of weekly during the season. Your body — I don’t know what the medical science is — but your body will prevent your face from being hit, for the most part, as an athlete, almost every single time. If you’re finishing wrong, if you’re unbalanced when you’re finished, you can’t move like an athlete.
Those are the things in the minor leagues, when you throw four or five hundred innings in the minor leagues, those are the little things you’re allowed to work on for a week or two and to understand them, and to understand — fielding your position is the difference between winning 17 and winning 20 games a year.
Schilling talks a lot, both into a microphone and on social media, about subjects in which he has zero expertise. But pitching, which Schilling was amazing at, isn’t one of them. And that’s why his comments on the Dan Patrick Show are so puzzling. It’s not like Jameson Taillon was plopped onto a major league mound last week and told “Figure it out, kid.” Taillon pitched 443 2/3 innings over five years in the minors before he made it up to the majors. He’s done the work that Schilling says pitchers should do. (Schilling, to be fair, did that work himself, pitching 429 innings in the minors.)
Plus, the only reason Taillon’s head was facing away from the batter was to protect his face, which Schilling himself said is a “medical science” thing. What he’s really talking about are reflexes. Taillon was reflexively protecting his face from being smashed by a flaming comebacker.
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Saying that a pitcher fielding their position well is worth three entire wins seems like a massive exaggeration, considering how often a pitcher actually has the opportunity to do it. That’s not to say that it isn’t a vital skill for pitchers to have. It definitely is. But even when they do field their position well, freak accidents happen. Pirates’ trainer Todd Tomczyk said as much when he spoke to ESPN on Wednesday.
“I’ve been in baseball 18 years — 10 in the majors — and it’s the first time I’ve seen a pitcher get hit in that particular place,” Todd Tomczyk told ESPN’s Outside the Lines on Wednesday.
The liner that Taillon was trying to avoid was traveling at 105 mph. You’d need to be the Road Runner to escape that. Taillon is just a mortal man. And unless Schilling can devise a way to teach young pitchers to avoid line drives using the Way of the Road Runner, we should recognize the incident as exactly what it is: a freak accident and not a failure of training.
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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher
