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 (disrupting, or other colorful, descriptive terms, which I must admit I used occasionally when promoting this adage), thus keeping the hitter from getting the barrel in the right place at the right time.
Glen Higdon was a great 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, the Dean of Mississippi high school baseball coaches…. and survived!
Glen pitched in 25 of 37 games during the 1983 season for another coaching legend, Bill Marchant, at Hinds and posted 13 wins, 5 saves, and an incredible 0.95 ERA. That’s just 15 earned runs in 110 innings pitched, both equally incredible numbers. And that’s after being the team manager in 1982.
He often started and finished both games of a doubleheader.
After all these years, the 13 wins in a season is still a Hinds Junior/Community College record and is shared with former major leaguer Chad Bradford who won 13 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, one perhaps, that most probably will never be broken.
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. So the lesson here is that there is more than one way to screw up the timing of a hitter and subtract outs. Subtracting from 21 (or 27) was the goal of our pitching and defense.
If my team was facing Higgy, I would have had my hitter 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.
Record-setting Hinds pitcher Glenn Higdon (Note- That’s probably the worst Hinds jersey of all time).
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