The good rising fastball is the best pitch in baseball.
I'm not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun. I hit 70 one time on a radar guy at one of those pitch-and-throw kind of things. I have a pretty good arm for somebody who's not a baseball player.
Cleaning up that lack of the definition between the two, and then leaning on the four-seam, having it become my primary fastball over my two-seam, it's just benefited me as a whole.
(Bob) Feller isn't quite as fast as I was.
I was never a strikeout pitcher. Why should I throw eight or nine balls to get a man out when I got away with three or four?
Verlander is a guy every right-handed power pitcher looks up to since the beginning of time.
I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.
The reason I think I'm a good pitcher is I locate my fastball and I change speeds. Period. That's what you do to pitch. That's what pitchers have to do to win games.
You continue to try to hammer out fastball command the best you can.
I threw a good fastball and changeup, but a below-average curveball.
I kept listening in the minor leagues, and even earlier than that, people would say, 'If you don't hit the fastball, you're not going to get to the big leagues.' Every game, you're going to get a fastball.
I've got some good movement on my sinking fastball, and I rely on that.
When you have these big, strong power hitters who can hit the ball a country mile, and they're strong for a reason and able to do that, as a pitcher you have to keep up.
I never knew how to throw a fastball, never learned how to throw a curveball, a slider, split-finger, whatever they're throwing nowadays. I was a one-pitch pitcher.
At 19, I was still figuring out how to throw a fastball.
That's why it's so important to have that gap between your fastball and off-speed pitches: then, when you effectively locate your fastball, it plays at a higher velocity.
I'm not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.
I know my fastball command will get even better.
We have to have great pitching performances from our guys, and we have to take it from there.
Most pitchers fear losing their fastball, but since I don't have one, I have nothing to fear but fear itself.
When you lose velocity off of your fastball, one thing that suffers is your off-speed pitches - the action on your off-speed pitches. Once you lose arm speed, it takes away rotation from your off-speed pitches. The rotation is what gives them the sharpness and the nastiness.
There is no future for me as a closing pitcher.
