Phillies' Oswalt strives for command of fastball

TAMPA, Fla. - Do not be fooled. Roy Oswalt might be a 33-year-old man who has not publicly ruled out retirement at the end of this season, but he still has the same gunslinger mentality that carried him into the big leagues 10 years ago.

"You gotta pitch off your fastball,'' the veteran righthander said yesterday as he stood in the visitors' clubhouse at Steinbrenner Field.

The only member of the Phillies' rotation who did it more often last season was Cliff Lee. Roy Halladay has his cutter. Cole Hamels has his changeup. Joe Blanton has a little bit of everything. But Oswalt's identity will always lie in his four-seamer.

"The biggest thing down here is to get command of it,'' he said. "You've got to get command before you get into the season. If you can get command of that, then your other pitches work a lot better. If you're not throwing your fastball to spots, you are going to have trouble with your other pitches also.''

Yesterday marked another step in that process. In his second outing of the spring, Oswalt struggled at times to locate his fastball, allowing a three-run home run to Eduardo Nunez in the second and a two-run home run to Curtis Granderson in the third before exiting the Phillies' 7-1 loss after 2 2/3 innings.

"That's to be expected when he's out there getting his work in,'' manager Charlie Manuel said, shrugging off the ugly line score.

Oswalt's velocity looked to be at its regular-season levels. In fact, he said afterward that he felt capable of throwing 70 pitches thanks to the dry, crisp weather.

Command of the pitch remains a work in progress.

"Two or three times I can throw it where I want to, and then I kind of jerk it,'' Oswalt said. "But it's coming around.''

If yesterday was any indication, opposing hitters will be in trouble once it does come around. That's because Oswalt's changeup, a pitch he leaned on last season for the first time in his career, looked completely bedeviling to the Yankees. He used the pitch to strike out Nick Swisher and Jorge Vazquez and coax several ground balls.

Last spring, Oswalt began gripping his changeup in between his middle and ring fingers, a grip that is known as the "Vulcan'' because of its similarity to Spock's "Live long and prosper'' hand signal in "Star Trek.'' He liked the results, and ended up throwing the pitch twice as often as he had at any point in his career. According to data from Major League Baseball's pitch-tracking application, he threw his changeup 15 percent of the time, compared with a career average of about 6.5 percent.

"The biggest thing is just to get it to look like your fastball,'' Oswalt said. "I had a tendency a couple years back to try to create movement instead of just throw it and trust your grip. Last year I just trusted the grip, threw it and got some good results with it.''

Just don't expect him to turn into Hamels, who during the course of his career has thrown his power changeup on roughly 30 percent of his pitches. Or Halladay, who uses his cutter at about the same rate.

For Oswalt, the fastball always will be king.

For more Phillies coverage and opinion, read David Murphy's blog, High Cheese, at www.philly.com/HighCheese. Follow him on Twitter at

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