LOS ANGELES — Final summer season in San Diego, with the Dodgers on the town for a collection, Brent Honeywell, then a Padres reliever, bought a heads up from pitching coach Ruben Niebla.
Fernando Valenzuela was on the warning monitor in entrance of the dugout.
“He mentioned: ‘Fernando’s outdoors,'” Honeywell recalled. “‘Go on the market, discuss to him, meet him.'”
There was no must ask twice. Honeywell had emulated Valenzuela for years as the one lively huge league pitcher who throws a screwball — a singular providing by which the pitcher pronates his hand and the pitch takes on the alternative spin to a typical breaking ball. It was Valenzuela who as soon as introduced the pitch again to prominence within the Eighties.
That afternoon at Petco Park, the 2 spoke for about quarter-hour, Honeywell recalled. Valenzuela confirmed Honeywell his screwball grip. Honeywell reciprocated. The dialog turned to different points of pitching, then life.
“It was an incredible dialog,” Honeywell mentioned. “It is one in all my fondest baseball recollections, for certain.”
The screwball was just one small a part of that legacy. Nevertheless it’s the half that ties Honeywell, a righty reliever with these Dodgers, to one of many best pitchers in franchise historical past.
“He type of paved the way in which for me,” Honeywell mentioned from Thursday’s World Sequence Media Day at Dodger Stadium. “At any time when I used to be throwing a screwball rising up, I might inform all my buddies, … ‘Fernando Valenzuela threw a pitch that I throw now.’
“It is type of a humorous approach to tie it in, as a result of Fernando is nicely greater than a screwballer. However I knew him because the pitcher. I did not essentially get to know him because the individual, however I heard he was an incredible man. In case you’re a screwballer, you are a screwballer. I nonetheless throw it. I am going to flip one free for him.”
Honeywell realized the screwball from his father, who was taught the pitch by his cousin — Mike Marshall, one other Dodgers Cy Younger Award winner. Marshall used the screwball to very large success throughout his 1974 season, by which he pitched 106 video games and 208 1/3 innings in reduction.
Fifty years later, it appears extra becoming than ever that one other Dodgers pitcher could possibly be throwing a screwball in one other World Sequence, particularly so quickly after Valenzuela’s passing.
“I hate that he is gone,” Honeywell mentioned. “I am enthusiastic about him and his household, praying for him and his household. I see [the tributes] driving in, what he meant to the Dodgers neighborhood and to Los Angeles itself.
“It is a horrible factor. I mentioned it earlier, I do know it is a bizarre means for me to tie myself to Fernando. However being a screwballer — I am going to throw one for him.”
When Los Angeles claimed Honeywell off waivers from the Pirates in mid-July, he upped his utilization of the screwball, which has paid dividends. He has served as a invaluable lengthy man out of the bullpen, posting a 2.62 ERA in 18 regular-season outings. He appeared twice within the NLCS, masking 7 2/3 reduction innings in these two video games.
Within the World Sequence towards the Yankees, Honeywell presumably would not cowl high-leverage innings for L.A. However he would possibly nonetheless cowl necessary innings, contemplating the Dodgers’ heavy reliance on their bullpen taking down outs.
Again then, Valenzuela was maybe the sport’s most distinguished screwballer. However he wasn’t the one one. Within the a long time since, nonetheless, screwball utilization has principally petered out. Since Statcast started monitoring in 2015, the pitch has been thrown solely 346 occasions, together with 217 by Honeywell (plus 113 by Héctor Santiago and 16 from Noah Davis).
“I want to see extra,” Honeywell mentioned. “I don’t throw it to be the one one which throws it.”
He added: “It’s one thing that also works in in the present day’s recreation that no one does. Fernando, Mike, all these guys again within the day, they threw it. You take a look at the blokes that threw screwballs, there is a bunch of Corridor of Famers. … Baseball will at all times change. However it can at all times return to what it was once.”
