After showing video allegedly of the gyroball last week to Barry Bonds – he said it was a crappy slider – I heard from Masa Niwa, the Japanese journalist, that Jeff Weaver wanted to see it.
So I lugged the laptop into the Seattle Mariners' locker room Wednesday, plopped it on a coffee table, hit play and let Weaver make his own determination.
"Look at his arm," Weaver said about one of the first pitchers, a high school kid taught the pitch by gyroball guru Kazushi Tezuka and filmed by his cohort and co-author, Japanese scientist Ryutaro Himeno. "That doesn't look natural."
The video was in slow motion and captured the pronation – or turning over of the wrist, creating the football-like spin unique to the gyro – of the pitcher's arm. I pointed out that Tezuka actually thought Weaver and his brother, Los Angeles Angels pitcher Jered, would be perfect candidates to throw the gyro because of their free-and-easy three-quarters deliveries.
Weaver stepped back to give himself room, went into his pitching motion, flung his arm and realized that it did pronate naturally.
"Let's see more," he said.
Weaver wondered whether the gyro, which moves like a fastball, might spin similarly to a slider and produce the same red dot batters see, making the two pitches indistinguishable. And that really piqued his interest.
He asked for Masa to bring him the training balls that Tezuka produces, and Masa said he would when they returned to Seattle. Perhaps in a bullpen session, Weaver said, he would try throwing a gyro, much like his experiments with grips on familiar pitches.