And indeed, Mihashi manages to deliver exactly the ball Honest-Abe-kun asked him for – in spite not even understanding the question. And it works, just as Honest-Abe-kun planned – further cementing his reputation for tactical genius, I guess.
The slider, as demonstrated here, is a breaking ball that deviates from a straight trajectory in the horizontal plane. While breaking balls are usually hard to control, a slider offers an easy way to control a variable in a visually intuitive way, and in connection with a numeric value allows for very precise tuning. Imagine you had to control something like that using a keypad. Or, even worse, your grip on the ball and throwing technique.
So if the slider is so simply and powerful, why isn’t it used more in professional baseba…uh, cricket? Well, Mihashi demonstrates that quite clearly: when a pitcher throws a slider, there’s a likelihood the catcher will understand it as an invitation to slide into the pitcher’s DMs and start talking about his balls. And in many, many cases that’s actually something the pitcher wants to avoid.
More on Thursday.