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" American baseball fans are preparing to finally get a closer look at the &amp;quot;gyroball,&amp;quot; a pitch that may or may not really exist, but one that has been steadily gaining notoriety over the past year. The pitcher most often associated with the gyroball, which was designed in a computer lab and breaks like a slider ignoring gravity, is Daisuke Matsuzaka. The 26-year-old Seibu Lions phenomenon recently led Japan to the World Baseball Classic championship but now finds himself at the center of a feverish silent auction: Major League Baseball clubs will submit sealed bids to the Lions by 5 p.m. Wednesday simply to secure negotiating rights with Matsuzaka. The New York Yankees, New York Mets and Boston Red Sox are among the leading large-market candidates to win that auction\u2014then shell out as much as $20 million a year to sign the right-hander to a contract. Matsuzaka&amp;#039;s initial outings will attract fans who simply want to catch a glimpse of the pitch whose name roughly translates to &amp;quot;Demon Sphere Gyro Ball.&amp;quot; But teams that can&amp;#039;t sign him shouldn&amp;#039;t fear: The man who created the pitch, Japanese computer scientist Ryutaro Himeno, emphasizes that Matsuzaka is hardly the only person to throw the pitch. &amp;quot;I do not know much about pitchers playing in either Japan and the U.S., but at least Mr. Matsuzaka (with the Lions) and Shunsuke Watanabe (of the Chiba Lotte Marines) pitches the gyroball,&amp;quot; Himeno tells PM. In reporting our piece for the November issue of the magazine, PM secured copies of elusive Japanese books that detail both Himeno&amp;#039;s findings and the pitching mechanics to throw the gyroball. While some of Himeno&amp;#039;s work as director of the Advanced Center for Computing and Communication in Japan can be found online, he recently offered us more information: &amp;quot;As I describe in the attached file,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;some sorts of slider or cut [fast]balls are considered as one variation of the gyroball. In that sense, many pitchers are actually pitching it.&amp;quot; In fact, there&amp;#039;s one a lot closer to home. Joey Niezer, a 19-year-old in Indiana, has thrown the gyroball. The 6-ft.-4 pitcher is now a sophomore at Wabash College\u2014but his name has been attached to the pitch since high school, when he overpowered all comers from the small-school division in which his Oldenburg Academy Twisters competed. He learned the pitch from Will Carroll, a writer for Baseball Prospectus and something of a freelance mechanics expert, the summer before his junior year. Then again, Niezer was already throwing nearly 90 mph; six times his senior season, the Twister struck out at least 12 batters in a game. He needed a new pitch like Goliath needed a sharper sword. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d never heard of it, but, at practice one afternoon, Will said, &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s try something,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Niezer remembers. &amp;quot;They said to throw it like a football\u2014to bring it past my ear and push down with my fingers when I release it.&amp;quot; The pitching coach at Oldenburg Academy, William Burke, says he had Niezer throw the gyroball only a handful of times in high school games, and that no one ever hit it. &amp;quot;It breaks really hard, and virtually flat,&amp;quot; Burke says. &amp;quot;People talk about a 12-6 curve; this would be 9-3. And it can be thrown with relative ease, compared to snapping off a hard slider. &amp;quot;I called for one in a game Joey&amp;#039;s junior year, and he threw a pitch for strike three that started behind the right-handed batter\u2014so the kid jumped toward the plate\u2014and then broke far enough across the plate to catch the outside corner,&amp;quot; the coach continues. &amp;quot;The only question was whether the ump could tell what just happened.&amp;quot; Niezer says he struggled to control the pitch, and, because it was similar to his slider, he never worried much about reining it in. He says he&amp;#039;s since stopped throwing it. Home video of a Niezer warmup pitch first surfaced on Carroll&amp;#039;s blog years ago\u2014but even with that, things aren&amp;#039;t entirely clear. &amp;quot;Joey&amp;#039;s pitch in that video looks like a curve,&amp;quot; says Cory Stevens, Niezer&amp;#039;s coach at Wabash and a man who&amp;#039;d never heard of the gyroball until I began asking questions about his relief pitcher. &amp;quot;And that Japanese video [of Matsuzaka] looked like a slider to me.&amp;quot; \u2013Davin Coburn In theory, the gyroball uses a twisting release to put counter-clockwise spin on the ball (from the batter&amp;#039;s view), making it break much flatter than other pitches. ILLUSTRATION BY DOGO (CLICK TO ENLARGE) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a4593/4201430/>