In a recent Nippon Professional Baseball game in Japan, Kazuhito Tadano threw a slow, arcing pitch that caught the batter by surprise. Video of the play quickly went viral on the Internet, but the pitch has a history — and a name: the eephus pitch. Paul Dickson, author of the Dickson Baseball Dictionary, offers more details.
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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Now to the world of baseball and an off-speed pitch. And we mean really off-speed.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Japanese spoken).
CORNISH: This week, in Japan, right-hander Kazuhito Tadano of the Nippon-Ham Fighters threw a high and super-slow junk ball. It seemed to flow in the air, before falling sharply across the plate and into the catcher's mitt.
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MAN: (Japanese spoken).
(LAUGHTER)
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Not something you see very often, but it has a name in baseball. It's the Eephus pitch.
PAUL DICKSON: An Eephus pitch is a slowly thrown, high-arcing pitch, likely to reach an apex of 25 feet or more above the ground between the mound and the plate.
CORNISH: That's Paul Dickson, author of the "Dickson Baseball Dictionary."
DICKSON: It's a deception. It's like a change-up on steroids. You're sitting there waiting for a fastball or a curveball. You know, you're dazzled by this thing.
CORNISH: Paul Dickson says credit for the first Eephus pitch goes to Truett Rip Sewell, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates back in the 1940s.
DICKSON: He had gotten in a hunting accident over the winter, and it left some buckshot in his foot. So he started developing alternative pitches, and this was one of them.
SIEGEL: As to the name, Eephus - well, it might come from the Hebrew word, effess(ph), which means zero or nothing.
CORNISH: Dickson believes it was named by Rip Sewell's teammate, outfielder Maurice Van Robays. Of Sewell's pitch, he reportedly said, that's an eephus.
SIEGEL: And when asked what he meant by that, Van Robays said, eephus it ain't nothing, and that's a nothing pitch.
CORNISH: It's shown up periodically since then, often with other names. Yankee Steve Hamilton called it the folly floater.
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MAN: Oh, there's the folly floater. And listen to the crowd.
DICKSON: Sometimes it's called a gondola, parachute, balloon ball.
CORNISH: And the rainbow pitch, says Paul Dickson.
SIEGEL: Well, whatever you call it, the umpire in Japan this week called that Eephus pitch a ball.
CORNISH: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.