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Ordinarily, though, Marichal is less concerned with pure speed than with delivery, direction and control. He throws the fastball with any one of three separate motions—straight overhand, three-quarters overhand and sidearm, making minute adjustments in his grip to control the direction of flight and produce a variety of optical illusions. The sidearm fastball may "tail" slightly away from a righthanded batter as it approaches home plate; the overhand and three-quarters only appear to. The idea, always, is to clip the corners of the plate—never to split the center. "Any batter can hit a ball over the middle of the plate," chuckles Juan. "Even me. A good pitcher tries for only that much"—holding his thumb and forefinger 2 in. apart. Says Giants Pitching Coach Larry Jansen: "If you put up a 6-in. target 60 ft. away, Juan would hit it nine out of ten times."
"Man, It Breaks." Marichal's curve ball can be pretty illusory too. When he pitches overhand, it does not curve at all. It sinks. To compound the confusion, Juan's sidearm curve does not sink. It curves away from a righthanded batter, in toward a lefthander—and that's no illusion. Back in 1959, Dr. Lyman Briggs, a scientist at the National Bureau of Standards, worked out a set of conditions for the maximum possible sideways "break" of a curve ball. Explained Dr. Briggs: if a ball spinning at 1,800 r.p.m. is thrown from the pitcher's mound to home plate (60 ft. 6 in.) at a speed of 100 ft. per second, the path of its flight will curve 17 inches. Marichal's sidearm curve may not depart from the straight and narrow quite that much—but, says Coach Fox: "It breaks, man, it breaks."
Juan's slider is a cross between a fastball and a curve—and fast is a key adjective, because a slow slider is the classic "hanging curve" that gives .200 hitters their moments of glory. The change-up is baseball's answer to the old shell game: lots of motion followed by a "slow" fastball or curve aimed at duping overeager batters into whiffing at empty air. When it comes to the screwball, it takes one to throw one. Basically a reverse curve, it is thrown regularly by only two pitchers in the National League besides Marichal—Cincinnati's Jack Baldschun and Atlanta's Chi-Chi Olivo. Reason: it is perfectly possible to dislocate an arm throwing a screwball. At the moment of release, the wrist, elbow and shoulder all must be rotated dramatically, in a direction opposite to nature's intention. To lefthanded hitters, Juan's screwball is dramatic indeed.