THT: Fast: Jack Cust eats fastballs for lunch

“Yeah wall to wall
Door to door
Hall to hall
He’s gonna eat ‘em all”

Why pitchers didn’t throw Jack Cust more curveballs, I don’t know. It’s true that a curveball is among the hardest pitches to throw for a strike, and that’s doubly true against a hitter like Cust who doesn’t chase many bad pitches at all, but he seems to have plenty of weaknesses against the curve.

Left-handed pitchers appear to have tried to throw the curveball down and away, missing the strike zone for a ball 62 percent of the time. However, when they got the curve in the zone, Cust almost always took it for a called strike. He watched fully six out of every seven curveballs from lefties spin to the catcher’s mitt with the bat on his shoulder.

Right-handed pitchers threw the curveball both up and away and down and in and had more success throwing it for strikes, 47 percent of the time. Most of the curveballs up and away were taken for called strikes. When the curve was down in the zone, Cust was more willing to offer at the pitch, but when he made contact, he hit a lot of ground balls to the right side of the infield and managed only two singles in 11 balls in play.