According to pitch-classification data, only seven screwballs have been thrown this year, and they all belong to Noah Davis. There were 153 in 2024, most credited to Brent Honeywell, a modern outlier to throw the pitch.
Gone are the days of Carl Hubbell, whose screwball was the stuff of legend – a signature offering fueling a Hall of Fame career.
One of the reasons the pitch disappeared was perceived injury risk related to its usage, just like the splitter.
Due to unusual motion required to throw the screwball, the pitch that was said to have deformed Hubbell’s throwing arm. Hubbell and about everyone else blamed the screwball on an offseason surgery he endured in 1939 to remove loose bodies from his elbow. He felt it hastened the end of his career.
But SABR’s Warren Corbett challenged conventional thinking in a 2011 piece titled “Hubbell’s Elbow: Don’t Blame the Screwball”
Wrote Corbett:
“Although the American Sports Medicine Institute has no data on that rare bird, the screwballer, Glen Fleisig told me, ‘The screwball is harder [to throw] but I don’t think it’s more stressful.’ He acknowledges it may hurt more than throwing a curveball—that’s why most people think it’s more damaging—but pain does not necessarily equal injury.’
“(Mike) Marshall said: ‘Throwing screwballs is safer than throwing pitches that require baseball pitchers to supinate their pitching forearm through release.’ …. Marshall threw his screwball more than one-third of the time, far more often than Hubbell. He has never had arm surgery.”
Driveline pitching coordinator Matthew Kress shared a fascinating idea regarding the disappearances of the pitch: it might not be dead after all.
“It’s magically kind of disappeared. So, I had this theory in my head. I was like ‘Is it actually living among us and we just don’t know?’” Kress said.
A ghost pitch?
The thought arrived when Driveline opened its new training facility in Tampa, Fla. and former Driveline staffer David Howell, now a coordinator with the Phillies, toured the facility.
“We bonded quickly over a passion of pitch design,” Kress told me. “I asked (Howell) ‘What is the one thing that is really hard for somebody in my scenario, outside of a major league organization, to figure out? He got me on this seam orientation kick. Screwballs are mostly, in my opinion, probably changeups that fall below the zero VB line, and the scary thing is there are actually, like, a ton of them among us.”
In analyzing pitches with zero to negative vertical break and eight-plus inches of arm-side run – like Honeywell’s screwball – there have been more than 20,000 such pitches thrown in each of the last two seasons. There have been 124 individual pitcher to throw such a pitch this year alone.
Logan Webb’s seam-shifted changeup, for instance, meets such criteria.
“There are a ton of people, even (A’s first-round pick) Jamie Arnold, who technically speaking throws a changeup that would be in a category of like a right-handed curveball or slider,” Kress said. “If I were to start putting some classifications on things, (a screwball) is a changeup that is able to get negative VB or drop.
“And the more that people start to figure out how to affect seam-orientation changes, and actually get it to drop more, they are actually starting to flirt with what we thought was a screwball.”