The A’s will be playing game two of their spring training series against the Brewers today, at 12:05pm, and or very own Diamond Dallas Braden, the king of the screwball, will be throwing pitches for the green and gold crew.

Braden has been in and out of the Majors over the last two years, but it was in 2004 that he was the talk of the minor league, stomping the living crap out of the NWL’s best hitters when, as a reliever for the C’s, he decided to bring his screwball out of mothballs and suddenly found it was unhittable.

7, 8 and 10-strikeout games were common from there on, while base hits were as scarce as Roger Clemens believers, and as Braden jumped up the system, the nasty results just kept coming… until his arm started getting tired around the AA level.

Suddenly, in the Texas League, he was hittable again, and before long he was REALLY hittable, and then the A’s shut him down for surgery and rehabbing.

Since then, he’s rarely shown the screwball, and the A’s seem intent on not only keeping him from throwing it, but refusing to admit it ever existed.

To be fair to the A’s, the screwball is a pitcher-killer if thrown incorrectly. From Wikipedia:

The difficulty in mastering the screwball, and the unusual stress it can place on the pitching-arm — throwing the screwball requires that the forearm be powerfully pronated as the ball is released — has made the pitch an increasingly-rare part of the modern pitcher’s pitching arsenal. Christy Mathewson said of the screwball: "It is a very hard ball to deliver. Pitching it ten or twelve times a game kills my arm, so I save it for the pinches." Carl Hubbell, who threw the screwball much more often than did Mathewson, twisted his left arm so severely from years of throwing the pitch that his left palm eventually faced outward when the arm was at rest. In general, the pitch is seldom recommended to young pitchers because of the potential harm it can do to their arms.

So which Dallas Braden will be on the mound today? The unhittable prince of the trick pitch from 2004-5, or the upper-80’s fastball-throwing delicate flower of 2006-7?

Sadly, we won’t know until after the game, since it isn’t being covered on radio. Hopefully Jeremy is there with his notebook and will witness the renaissance of Dallas Braden firsthand.