Higgy

(#3)

Here’s an old baseball adage…

“Hitting is timing and timing means getting the barrel of the bat in the right place at the right time.“

Pitching, on the other hand, is screwing up the hitter’s timing. There are, of course, more colorful ways to describe this technique and I must admit I used them quite often.

Glen Higdon was a disrupter of timing in the spring of 1983. He was a breaking ball specialist from Jackson St. Joseph High School where he (and his brothers) played for the legendary D.M. Howie…. and survived!

Glen was a workhorse, who pitched in 25 of 37 games during the 1983 season at Hinds for another coaching legend, Bill Marchant. He posted 13 wins, 5 saves, and an incredible ERA (earned run average) of 0.95. That’s just 15 earned runs in 110 innings pitched, both equally incredible numbers. And that’s after being the team manager in 1982.

Glen often started and finished both games of a doubleheader.

After all these years, the 13 wins in a season is still a Hinds record and is shared with former major leaguer Chad Bradford who did it in 1995. The 0.95 ERA (based on 7 inning games), is almost unbelievable for a starting pitcher with so many innings pitched. It is also still a record at Hinds after all these years.

Bradford was a sidewinder who broke aluminum bats in JUCO. Then he became a submariner for 12 seasons in the big leagues, and pitched in the MLB World Series for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2008.

Higgy’s best pitch was the curveball and he used it a lot. So the lesson here is that there is more than one way to screw up the timing of a hitter and subtract from 21.

If my team was facing Higgy, our hitters would sit on that breaking ball before two strikes and perhaps inflate those numbers a little bit… maybe.

Based on the data, many tried to do just that and failed miserably.