When considering a name for the pitch he rescued from extinction, Los Angeles Angels reliever Robert Coello at first settled on its historic label: a forkball, jammed deep between his index and middle fingers and released, amazingly, with next to no spin, like a knuckleball. Such an incredible pitch, of course, deserves a far greater name, so Coello has settled on the three-letter acronym that ballplayers blurt when he unleashes it.

"The WTF," Coello said. "Catchers call it that. Hitters say it."

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Any other reaction would not do justice to this freakish marriage of grip-fiddling, arm speed and inexplicable physics. Baseballs are capable of miraculous feats: sizzling on a line at 100 mph, dive-bombing when held along the seams, jutting a foot in 10 feet. Now, as the 28-year-old Coello is showing, one need not grip a ball using finely manicured fingernails to make it dance like Beyonce, a thing of beauty going in whichever direction nature desires.

The WTF is not the gyroball. It does not exist in theory. It is not some trick pitch, either, held differently than all the others. Plenty of pitchers around baseball use some sort of a split-fingered fastball grip – the split-change, favored by Tim Lincecum and Ubaldo Jimenez, is the most popular – and some even jam it deep between their fingers like the right-handed Coello. The difference comes when they throw it.





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Whereas other pitchers impart backspin on their splitters and the traditional forkball from masters such as old-style fireman Elroy Face had a tumbling effect, a la curveball, Coello's finds a happy medium: When he throws it right, it doesn't spin at all.

Physicist Alan Nathan, a professor at the University of Illinois who studies baseball and has a particular interest in the knuckleball, hadn't ever seen a pitch like Coello's. His preliminary theory on the pitch: His thumb on the underside of the ball exerts backspin, counteracting the tumbling effect his top fingers put on the ball and balancing the torque so perfectly that the pitch has a knuckleball effect with superior speed (around 80 mph).

"A lot of people like to classify pitches by how they're gripped or released as opposed to what they do," Nathan said. "It's a matter of taste, but whatever you call it, this pitch does look like a knuckleball.

"Maybe he's discovered a new way to throw a knuckleball-type pitch."

The discovery first came more than a decade ago at Lake Region High in Eagle Lake, Fla. Coello and his friends always were messing around with knuckleballs. No matter how hard he tried, Coello couldn't throw one. So he tried different grips until he found the forkball and its mystical spin.

One problem: Coello wasn't a pitcher. He caught in high school, at junior college and with Cincinnati, which drafted him in the 20th round of the 2004 draft. The Angels acquired him in 2007 with a better idea: Let the 6-foot-5, 250-pound Coello put his big arm to better use.

"When they converted me to a pitcher in 2007, they wanted me to stick to fastball, curveball, changeup," Coello said. "And I said, 'Well, I have something else.'"





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