vulcan changeup






true story (brought to you by the société internationale de signes diacritique):

in this afternoon's tigers game, which i didn't watch as it aired, josé valverde threw his 38th consecutive save, tying josé mesa for the third most consecutive saves to start an mlb season since they began keeping the statistic in 1969. valverde trails only brad lidge's 41 and Éric serge gagné's 55. now we really shouldn't count gagné because he was juicing, but as it stands, it stands. so i took a quick look at gagné's wiki and it said one of his signature pitches was the vulcan changeup, a term i didn't recall hearing before. the wiki article says this pitch is rare and most pitchers use a 'circle changeup'.

i was already considering making this term of art entry and then i watched the replay of today's game. in the eighth inning, during reid brignac's at bat, announcer rod allen began discussing our setup man joaquín benoit's pitching repertoire. it included, he said, the vulcan changeup. benoit was good enough to throw a vulcan changeup to strike out brignac and they showed a replay so allen could illustrate the pitch. "[benoit said to me] that's the changeup he's been throwing for quite some time." he made a point to show another replay when benoit struck out evan longoria with the pitch, and then mentioned it again at the start of the ninth to point out that all three of benoit's strikeouts in the eighth ended with vulcan changeups.


so. yeah.