What's up baseball players in today's video.
I'm going to teach you how to throw a cutter
and I'm going to talk about the mindset and who it's right for
and who it's wrong for.
All right.
So every new here, I'm Coach Dan Blewett.
I'm a former pro pitcher and I threw a cutter for a couple of years, my last
three years in Pro ball And this is a really hard pitch to throw
and it's a pitch that I do not recommend you throw unless you're in college.
But I'm going to teach you it anyway
because, you know, you can do what you want to do.
But I'll talk more about the difficulties of throwing a good cutter
towards the end of this video.
But first, let's cover the grips All right.
So basic cutter grips.
You're going to take a four seamer
and you're going to
offset it about one degree or one.
No, on the clock.
So if I had a clock here
and this was 12, I'm going to take my fingers essentially to 11.
If I'm a righty, I could go it with this way on the Horseshoe
or I can take the ball this way and go this way on the horseshoe.
For me personally, I found this way to be more comfortable.
So I threw my cutter from this grip here.
I put my two fingers right there on the descending edge of this horseshoe.
And that was where I released it because the goal and what a cutter does
is basically if a four seamer was flying this direction, it would spin like that.
A cutter is going to have gyro spin.
Pure gyro spin means it's spinning like this in the direction that it's traveling.
All right.
So that's pure bullet spin or gyro spin.
This would be dead straight if it was shot out of a gun.
Four seamer is going to resist gravity.
The cutter is going to introduce slight gyro spin.
So it's basically if we tilted the axis this way as it's flying straight.
So it's not going directly to my target.
It's got this slight angle as it's going straight.
It's a little bit hard to understand.
But basically all our goal is, is to throw a four seamer
that instead of spinning in the direction that it's going like perpendicular to it,
it's going to have a slight tilt.
So it tilts like this as it flies straight.
That's the goal. Of a cutter.
And this is important to understand because this is not a slider.
And that's why I want to stress it's not a slider.
So typically a cutter is going to be two to four miles
per hour slower than your fastball if you're throwing around 90 or more.
So if you throw 95 and your cutters 91 92, that's going to be really,
really effective.
And the reason cutters are so hard to hit is because essentially
they look like a fastball the entire way they're going to follow the same
a normal fastballs path the entire way out of hand until the very end
when it breaks only about four inches, three or four inches, a very small amount.
And because it breaks so little it looks exactly like a fastball to the
hitter's brain basically the entire time it's flying towards the plate.
This is why Mariano Rivera, Kenley Jansen, and these other pitchers that throw
cutters in the nineties are so hard to hit because the hitter's brain
physically cannot figure out where the pitch is going to end up
because it's it's dead straight all the way through their decision point.
And by time, the hitter has decided to swing.
He's still thinking this is a straight fastball.
And so his barrel goes to the location he thinks it's going to be
if it's a straight fastball.
And then the last couple, you know, last 15 feet it cuts a couple inches
and he can't possibly change where his barrel is going.
That's why cutters are so hard to hit or hit.
Well, and so when you hear it explain that way, you're like, great, sign me up.
I throw a pitch that a hitter can't possibly barrel up very well.
Yeah, it does sound great in theory.
But here's the thing.
Young pitchers especially, and I'm really lumping
all amateur pitchers in your even a lot of college pitchers,
you don't have the dexterity in your fingers like you don't have
the fine tuned control of the baseball the way pros do.
It's really hard to manipulate the ball so subtly that you only tilt it
the amount from here to here, because that's all you're doing
is you're tilting the ball as it spins to get here instead of flying like this.
This to that.
It's a very subtle, very difficult thing to do to tilt the ball perfectly.
And so when I started learning a cutter as a pro, what happened
was I get around it slightly too much and then it would get some sort
of cement mixer spin to it and it wouldn't break at all.
So I threw a 94 mile per hour fastball, then I would throw a 90 mile power cutter
that didn't actually cut and they would destroy it
because it didn't have any of the benefits of a cutter.
And it was basically just a slower version of my fastball.
So that's what one of the things that's really hard about learning a cutter
is that if you're any tiny little bit off,
you usually don't get the benefit of it actually becoming a slider.
It just becomes a cement mixer where it spins, but doesn't really break,
and that's a really bad place to be because you basically just throw them
discounted fastballs where they're slower,
but they don't have any beneficial movement.
The other thing that's really hard about learning a cutter
and this is it's an impossible problem to solve
is that very few people have thrown a cutter at a high level.
So if you're playing catch with your catch partner, they can't give you feedback
because they don't know what a good cutter looks like.
And the really hard thing about this is that when you throw
a cutter in practice, it will not move.
And what I mean by
that is when I'm playing catch, you know, throwing 60 miles per hour to my partner,
throwing a cutter, it'll spin correctly if I've thrown it correctly.
But because the movement is so subtle, even at full speed,
it won't break when my partner catches it.
And to me it will look like it's dead straight.
So I don't get any visual feedback of whether I'm actually throwing
good cutters.
And so really, I have to totally rely on my partner to tell me, yeah, that one.
It was dead straight with the spin was correct.
So when I learned my cutter, I learned it from a pitcher in the who used to be
in the New York Mets Minor League system, and he threw a really, really good one.
So he was explaining all this means like, Hey, I'm going to give you feedback,
because when you throw these to me in practice, even in the bullpen,
they're not going to break
because if they do break in practice, they're going to be sliders in the game.
That's not what you want.
And so this is in stark contrast with throwing a curveball or throwing a slider.
If I throw a curveball,
I can see the shape of it and my partner can say, Yeah, that was really sharp.
Or That one was kind of soft,
or You're mechanically weird, and the spin was different. And
those things are important.
Playing catch and getting feedback,
both your own visual feedback and your partner feedback.
You get zero of that when you throw a cutter in practice.
It will not break if you throw it properly.
So you're totally relying on your partner now The problem is
I see lots of young pitchers
who think that a cutter is a good substitute for like a two seamer sinker.
Like they just want something that that moves.
That's pretty much a fastball.
And when they throw it, they see it moved to their partner.
If you can see it move,
especially when you're young pitcher throwing 50, 60 miles per hour.
If you see it move, it's a slider it's not a cutter.
You've gotten too much on the side of it.
And that's why it actually will break and you can see the break.
And so this is a really important thing to understand until you throw
a really hard, it's not going to move at all.
And then the other thing is what is the use case for your cutter?
If you look at most major league pitchers, you throw a cutter they're in two bins.
They're either relievers, you throw it almost exclusively because it's just nasty
or they're a starter who's taken on a cutter as their fourth pitch.
And so the cutter is a pitch they throw into lefties.
If they're a righty to like jam a guy or they maybe they're like
Iowa's where they don't get ground balls very easily on their four seamer.
So they throw a cutter when they need a groundball double play.
That's kind of a use case for a cutter.
It's not really a swing and miss pitch.
So if he need something to get batters to strike out to get out of a jam,
the cutter is genuinely not the right pitch for that scenario
because it only moves a little bit.
They're usually going to make contact, but just put it in play with weak,
you know, with weak authority rather than being a swing and miss pitch
with bigger break, like a slider or a curveball or a really good changeup.
So the cutter, it's really a contact pitch for most players.
And when you're an amateur you're typically
you don't have three great pitches.
You don't have a nasty fastball, nasty slider, a nasty changeup
where you have three really good pitches and they're very well commanded
and now you're just looking for an extra thing to bolster your repertoire.
That's not most amateur pitchers.
So the question is, why do you even want to add this to your repertoire?
Because you see a guy on TV throw it because your coach says
it might be good to get ground balls with.
Well, really, as a young pitcher, you should focus on your fastball,
developing your change up and throwing a good slider or curveball
and if you throw three of those, if you throw that arsenal,
you're going to be wildly successful if they're quality pitches
and you can locate them, which makes the change.
The cutter pretty much a useless pitch at that level.
I used it to get ground balls and I use it to jam lefties.
That's the only places I use it.
And the last thing I want to tell you is that you have to throw them
in games for them to get better
because of the problem with them not breaking in practice.
So basically you have to say, All right, I'm going to throw this
brand new pitch in a game and I'm going to ride or die with it.
That's what I had to do.
And it was scary.
And I threw a lot of cement mixer cutters.
I got beat up with it a lot of times, but it did get better
the more I threw it in games.
And that's a tough place
to be learning a new pitch in a game, which goes back to the difficulty
of just barely manipulating the baseball to get that slight amount of tilt.
So you get that slight amount of gyro spin.
It's a really hard pitch to throw.
I found it to be the hardest pitch I'd ever tried to learn by far.
And this was me learning it at age 26.
So take that for what it's worth.
Obviously your career is your own,
so do the things that you feel you need to do to be successful.
But if you're an amateur pitcher,
I highly recommend you put all of your eggs in the fastball.
Great changeup, great command, and a great breaking ball.
Slider or curveball.
And don't worry about the cutter until you're into very high level
D1 baseball or pro ball.
All right. So hopefully this video is helpful.
If any questions leave in the comment below.
Check out my other pitch grip tutorials.
I have a ton of them here on YouTube.
Subscribe to my channel, check out my books
and I'll see you here in the next video.