Bullpen Dictionary: Thumber
The world of baseball has a language all its own to describe, compliment, and complain in equal measure. To an outsider observer, the vocabulary of ballplayers can be impenetrable. That’s why we want to decipher the code, and let everyone in on the linguistic shenanigans. -T
THUMBER, noun.
(thumb-er) (thUHm-uhr)
Definition — A pitcher who manages to get outs without the use of top tier velo or “stuff.” Someone who uses pinpoint accuracy, change of speed, a pitch mix that relies heavily on breaking balls, and, even, timing, such as a quick pitch, or arm slot to befuddle batters. They rarely get strike outs, and lean on their team’s defense, especially for the turning of double plays to get out of jams. These pitchers tend to have a high variance of effectiveness from outing to outing, and can sustain long careers, while enraging their opponents, leaving them to shake their heads on the way back to the dugout and ask things like, “How did I miss that,” “Where did the ball go,” and “What the fuck?”
Synonyms — crafty (lefty), junk artist
Antonyms — fireballer, flamethrower
Etymology — Quick note: You might want to enter private browsing mode for the borderline NSFW beginnings of this term. You’ve been warned.
The origin of this slang can be traced all the way back to a very different children’s game using spherical objects as equipment, Marbles. A straight line can be drawn from “thumber” to its vernacular forbearer, the nearly explicit, “cunny-thumb,” which refers to shooting little glass orbs in a more feminine way. (By all estimations, “cunny” seems to mean exactly what you think it means.) Shockingly, there was a time in history when marbles and baseball were neck-and-neck, as pastimes for American children, speaking to just how few options there were as a youth in the early 20th Century to, in fact, pass the time. Soon, these marble-crazed kids grew up into professional baseball-playing adults and they brought the locution out of the ring and onto the diamond. It officially joined the diamond’s written lexicon in 1937 when Edward J. Nichols, an absolute freak, wrote the idiom into the NY Daily News because it was a time when you could, apparently, print anything in the newspaper you felt like.
The most notable use of this verbiage in mixed company was, perhaps, by Marty “Mr. Shortstop” Marion, who was in his final season for the St. Louis Browns at the time. He was quoted, “It’s a crime to get beat by the cunny-thumb pitching they have. Brother, I’d like to be playing them during the regular season.” It’s not too surprising that a man born in 1916 or 1917 (there’s some debate) would use that antiquated language in the ’50s, since he matured during the Golden Age of shooting toebreakers into bumboozers. As the world kept on slipping into the future and new, more interesting things were invented, adolescents’ fascination with marbles was left behind, while baseball continued to thrive amongst them. (One game embraced analytics, the other died!) Coinciding with this precipitous drop in interest, we, as a culture said, “See you next, Tuesday,” and dropped “cunny” from the phrase. Leaving it to exist no longer tethered to such an outdated and unpleasant word choice.
As time went on, thumber took on a new meaning, which actually makes way more sense. The thumb is an integral appendage for tossing deceptive pitches with movement and break. When a pitcher lacks velocity, these become a more prominent part of their arsenal, taking up a greater percentage of their mix. Regularly seeing a four seam fastball around 90 mph would usually make it as easy to hit as a beach ball at a Jimmy Buffet concert. However, that pitch at that speed can still be effective when consistently played off of a curve or breaking ball that’s in the low 80s. That amount of deviation in speed from one pitch to another still creates a fair amount of confusion, even though it should seem that slower pitches sould be easier to mash. This juxtaposition forces the batter to adjust, accordingly, and when they consistently can’t? That’s how a thumber is born.
Use in a Sentence — “That thumber got me to ground into a double play on some junk pitch to wiggle out of a jam.”
Examples — Yusmeiro Petit, Nestor Cortes, Oliver Perez
