The rainbow pitch – moon ball – parachute – skyscraper - but most famously known as the Eephus Pitch – it is a rare but effective pitch that can catch even the greatest MLB hitters off guard and make them look completely foolish. If you’ve ever played slowpitch softball, you’ve faced a similar pitch and likely weren’t overly challenged by its high arc and extremely low velocity. However, when accustomed to triple-digit blazing fastballs, 90 mile per hour changeups and devastating sliders, an unexpected 35 mile per hour blooping rainbow can be quite challenging – and even if a hitter does hit it well, they have to provide all the power.
Rip Sewell
The pitch was first popularized by Rip Sewell, who played mostly for the Pittsburgh Pirates during the 30’s and 40’s. Earlier in his career, Sewell had a wide variety of pitches he threw ¾ armslot including a sinker and sharp slider, most effective against lefties. After a hunting accident in 1941, Sewell had to alter his pitching motion. He was forced to pitch straight overhand. While working on this new motion, he began experimenting with a new pitch – a tantalizing high arcing slow ball that rises as high as 20 feet and descents over the plate on a downward slant. Sewell unveiled it during an exhibition game against Detroit Tigers hitter Dick Wakefield. According to Sewell, Wakfield “started to swing, he stopped, he started again, he stopped, and then he swung and missed it by a mile. I thought every one was going to fall off the bench; they were laughing so hard.” Sewell knew he had a found a new weapon.
Sewell had great control of the pitch but umpires had trouble with it. Umpire Lee Ballanfant said
“Now that damned blooper pitch Rip Sewell used to throw was the hardest thing to judge. You’re supposed to call the ball as it comes over the plate, but what do you do if it comes straight down? He just pushed it up there; wasn’t hard enough to break a pane of glass. It was the damnedest thing you ever saw; I missed a lot of calls. It sure looked big coming up there, and sometimes they’d pop it up because their timing was off.”
The most impressive thing about the way Sewell threw the pitch is that he used the same motion as if he were throwing his fastball. He put three fingers on the ball instead of four and let it come off his fingertips with an extremely massive amount of backspin. Sewell’s teammate Maurice Van Robays came up with the name “Eephus pitch,” and it stuck.
Although Sewell is credited with popularizing the pitch, an earlier pitcher who was known to use it was Bill Phillips, a Reds pitcher whose repertoire included the blooper ball from 1890 to 1903. Another pitcher, Bobo Newsom, one of only 29 players to play Major League Baseball during four different decades, began experimenting with the pitch and starting to throw it in games around 1945, although he mostly threw it to entertain himself and the fans. Sewell, on the other hand, used it frequently – sometimes up to 20 times during a single start.
His most famous use of the pitch came during the 1946 All Star Game. At the plate was perhaps the greatest hitter of all time, Ted Williams. Williams challenged Sewell to throw in the Eeephus pitch. Sewell obliged and Williams fouled it off. Even knowing it was coming, the best he could do – at least on the first one – is foul it off. However, Sewell motioned to Williams that he would give him one more shot at the pitch. On the second Eephus of the at bat – something Sewell would not normally do but this was an exhibition game – Ted Williams smoked one over the right field wall for a home run. It was the only home run Sewell ever game up using the Eephus Pitch.
From the 1940’s onward, the Eephus pitch became part of baseball lingo and although extremely rare, it’s always exciting to see how a hitter will handle the pitch. In the 1970’s, pitcher Steve Hamilton, a side-arming relief pitcher started to throw an occasional Eephus, which got dubbed the “Folly Floater.” In a 1970 game, he threw one to Tony Horton of the Cleveland Indians and the pitch was fouled off. Horton dared Hamilton to give him one more and Hamilton agreed. Horton still couldn’t do much with it, popping it up. He crawled back to the dugout in shame.
However, it is a pitch that must be used rarely – and it’s probably best, especially if a power hitter is at the plate, not to use it in the most critical situations. That brings us to the Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitched in the big leagues from 1969 to 1982 and is still pitching today at 76 years old for the famous Savannah Bananas. He had always been a finesse pitcher who induced soft contact and groundballs, but after a shoulder injury during a Red Sox-Yankees brawl in 1976, he had to rely on the slow stuff even more. He developed an Eephus pitch that had various nicknames including “Spaceball” and “Leephus” pitch. Lee was pitching during a game that can’t get more critical – Game 7 of the World Series. It was 1975 and the Red Sox had a 3-0 lead over the Reds with a runner on and Tony Perez at the plate. Lee threw his famous moon ball and it was absolutely blasted over the green monster to put the Reds within a run. Later, the Reds scored two more runs and won the game 4-3.
Another pitcher from the 70’s and early 80s, Dave LaRoche, who mostly threw a fastball and slider, would mix in a high blooper Eephus that became as La Lob. He usually found success with it but there were plenty of exceptions. It is definitely a pitch that flirts with disaster. During the 1980’s, Pascual Perez, who pitched mostly for the Braves and Expos, was known to throw an Eeephus pitch once or twice per game. It almost always caught batters by surprise, but on July 19th, 1988, Astros slugger Glenn Davis may have had the pitch in the back of his mind. When Pascual threw it to him, Davis double-clutched and blasted it out of the ballpark.
Dave LaRoche
A more recent pitcher who had his own version of the Eephus pitch was Orlando Hernandez, known as “El Duque,” who pitched from 1998 to 2007, for the Yankees, White Sox, D-Backs and Mets. He started to throw the pitch at around 50 MPH in 2002, though he had trouble getting the strike call. On August 26th, he tried the pitch against the powerful Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod took it for a ball. Then, Hernandez made a huge mistake by attempting to throw it again. Rodriguez was expecting it, waited on it and obliterated it for a tape-measure home run.
There have also been incidental incidents where the Eephus pitch was accidentally thrown. The Big Unit Randy Johnson, the hard-throwing Hall of Fame lefty, would be the last pitcher you would expect to unleash an Eephus pitch. But in July of 2008, facing San Francisco Giants outfielder Fred Lewis, Johnson was distracted by a loud horn that went off in McCovey Cove just as he was preparing to release the pitch. The result was a beautiful, high arcing Eephus pitch that dropped in for a strike.
Many knuckleballers like R.A. Dickey would inadvertently throw an occasional Eephus when their knuckler doesn’t move and dance around like its supposed to.
Bill “Spaceman” Lee
In even more recent years, seeing some version of an Eephus pitch is becoming somewhat common due to the more frequent use of position players coming in to pitch during the late innings of blowout games. The position players are likely instructed to avoid injury by not throwing too hard, not doing anything fancy and just getting the ball over the plate. The result is some of the most entertaining Eephus pitches in history, such this one by Brock Holt which was clocked at 31.1 miles per hour, the slowest pitch ever officially recorded in the pitch-tracking era. It does seem, from a fan’s perspective without digging into the advanced stats, that position players who are lobbing in slow pitches have more success than would be expected and usually complete innings without too much damage. This tells me again that hitters have trouble quickly adapting to extremely slow pitches.
Even now however, it’s not only position players who use the Eephus. Other active pitchers known to have thrown the pitch include Fernando Abad, Yu Darvish, Rich Hill, and even Clayton Kershaw.
Another occasional Eephus thrower is Zack Greinke. During a 2023 Spring Training game, Zack Greinke threw an Eephus pitch when he and his catcher were having trouble communicating pitch selection because of technical issues with the pitchcom system. Instead of letting time run out, Greinke threw an Eephus pitch, which ended up being a ball anyway. The Eephus pitch is always fun to see and you never know when one is coming. And despite a few massive bombs off it, it can be very effective. It also sets up a followup fastball which in theory would be very tough to hit due to the extreme difference in velocity.
According to sabermetrician James LeDoux, whose study on the success of the Eephus pitch I will link in the description,
batters make contact with this pitch about as often as every other pitch, making contact with the eephus just 0.33 percentage points more often than an average pitch. The quality of this contact, however, tends to be lower. Despite making contact with this slightly more often, for example, it becomes a hit almost 11% less often. Despite its slow speed, the Eeephus pitch manages to hold its own.
The study does seem to debunk the theory that fastballs thrown after an Eephus are more effective than a typical fastball. This, in my mind, would be due to the fact that an Eeephus pitch is so incredibly slow that it has no effect on a hitter’s frame of reference in terms of velocity. Nevertheless, the pitch itself has been thrown occasionally since the 1940’s and is the only pitch where the baseball fan who is watching has time to gasp, process that an Eephus pitch was thrown, wonder what is going to happen, enjoying the suspense, all as the ball makes its long journey into the sky then down towards the plate.