With his team down to their last out in the deciding game of the 2012 World Series, and trailing by a run, Detroit Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera stepped into the batter’s box at Comerica Park to face pitcher Sergio Romo.
The signature pitch of the San Francisco Giants reliever was a slider, a sweeping breaking ball that moved from his right to left like a darting frisbee. Romo began the at-bat by throwing five straight sliders to Cabrera, an unusual sequence for most pitchers, but not Romo, who threw the pitch 77 percent of the time that season. The fifth slider started outside and broke away for a ball, evening the count at two balls and two strikes.
Watching from the bench, rookie San Francisco catcher Curt Casali noticed that Cabrera took the pitch with little interest in swinging.
“I swear, I was like, Just throw a fastball down the middle and he’s going to take it,” Casali says now, looking back at one of the most memorable pitch sequences of his career. “When he didn’t swing and didn’t foul it off, it was because he was doing an auto take.”
On the next pitch, starting Giants catcher Buster Posey made a gutsy decision, signaling Romo to throw a fastball right down the middle—gutsy because Romo’s fastball was below average by Major League standards, and Cabrera is a future Hall of Fame hitter. And yet, in the biggest moment of his career, Cabrera was caught off guard. He watched the perfect pitch go by without offering a swing, and the Giants mobbed Romo on the field in celebration of the team’s second championship in three seasons.
“Are they ansty at the plate? Are they not going to swing?” Casali says of observing batters’ reactions to fastballs, sliders, curveballs and changeups. “You just know in your gut it’s going to work.”
A lot goes into pitch calling, from game theory, scouting reports and data analysis to real-time, in-game observation. We were curious what a salesperson could learn from the art and science pitchers and catchers put into selecting which ball to throw in any given situation. What skills of that craft might be transferable to an actual business pitch? We talked to major league coaches and catchers to find out. Copy : success