'I'll turn one loose for him': Honeywell, Valenzuela bonded by screwball
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LOS ANGELES -- Last summer in San Diego, with the Dodgers in town for a series, Brent Honeywell, then a Padres reliever, got a heads up from pitching coach Ruben Niebla.
Fernando Valenzuela was on the warning track in front of the dugout.
"He said: 'Fernando's outside,'" Honeywell recalled. "'Go out there, talk to him, meet him.'"
There was no need to ask twice. Honeywell had emulated Valenzuela for years as the only active big league pitcher who throws a screwball -- a unique offering in which the pitcher pronates his hand and the pitch takes on the opposite spin to a typical breaking ball. It was Valenzuela who once brought the pitch back to prominence in the 1980s.
That afternoon at Petco Park, the two spoke for about 15 minutes, Honeywell recalled. Valenzuela showed Honeywell his screwball grip. Honeywell reciprocated. The conversation turned to other aspects of pitching, then life.
"It was a great conversation," Honeywell said. "It's one of my fondest baseball memories, for sure."
Valenzuela, the legendary Dodgers left-hander and an international icon, passed away on Tuesday at 63. His legacy was immense -- and will be honored in a major way during the forthcoming World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees, which begins Friday night.
The screwball was only one small part of that legacy. But it's the part that ties Honeywell, a righty reliever with these Dodgers, to one of the greatest pitchers in franchise history.
"He kind of paved the way for me," Honeywell said from Thursday's World Series Media Day at Dodger Stadium. "Whenever I was throwing a screwball growing up, I could tell all my buddies, ... 'Fernando Valenzuela threw a pitch that I throw now.'
“It's kind of a funny way to tie it in, because Fernando is well more than a screwballer. But I knew him as the pitcher. I didn't necessarily get to know him as the person, but I heard he was a great guy. If you're a screwballer, you're a screwballer. I still throw it. I'll turn one loose for him."
Honeywell learned the screwball from his father, who was taught the pitch by his cousin -- Mike Marshall, another Dodgers Cy Young Award winner. Marshall used the screwball to huge success during his 1974 season, in which he pitched 106 games and 208 1/3 innings in relief.
Fifty years later, it seems more fitting than ever that another Dodgers pitcher could be throwing a screwball in another World Series, especially so soon after Valenzuela’s passing.
"I hate that he's gone," Honeywell said. "I'm thinking about him and his family, praying for him and his family. I see [the tributes] driving in, what he meant to the Dodgers community and to Los Angeles itself.
"It's a terrible thing. I said it earlier, I know it's a weird way for me to tie myself to Fernando. But being a screwballer -- I'll throw one for him."
When Los Angeles claimed Honeywell off waivers from the Pirates in mid-July, he upped his usage of the screwball, which has paid dividends. He has served as a valuable long man out of the bullpen, posting a 2.62 ERA in 18 regular-season outings. He appeared twice in the NLCS, covering 7 2/3 relief innings in those two games.
In the World Series against the Yankees, Honeywell presumably wouldn't cover high-leverage innings for L.A. But he might still cover important innings, considering the Dodgers’ heavy reliance on their bullpen taking down outs.
If he pitches, Honeywell’s first screwball will be a fitting tribute to Valenzuela, who used it the last time the Dodgers and Yankees met in the Fall Classic in 1981.
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Back then, Valenzuela was perhaps the game’s most prominent screwballer. But he wasn’t the only one. In the decades since, however, screwball usage has mostly petered out. Since Statcast began tracking in 2015, the pitch has been thrown only 346 times, including 217 by Honeywell (plus 113 by Héctor Santiago and 16 from Noah Davis).
“I would like to see more,” Honeywell said. “I don’t throw it to be the only one that throws it.”
He added: “It’s something that still works in today’s game that nobody does. Fernando, Mike, all these guys back in the day, they threw it. You look at the guys that threw screwballs, there's a bunch of Hall of Famers. … Baseball will always change. But it will always go back to what it used to be.”