all i gotta say is wow! just a bit of the article, full article at the link

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slu...yhoo&type=lgns

The radar gun tells a pitcher certain truths, and every time Mark DiFelice(notes) throws a baseball, it says the same thing: You should not be here.

Pitchers do not survive throwing 82 mph. There are exceptions, the wizened and gray-templed Jamie Moyer(notes) and Tom Glavine(notes) and Livan Hernandez(notes), who throw an array of junk, their arms undone by tens of thousands of pitches. DiFelice isn’t old, there’s no sign of salt in his hair, he throws one pitch and he’s working on reaching his 50th major league inning.

So DiFelice doesn’t have an excuse for who or what he is, and by putting up numbers for the Milwaukee Brewers almost unparalleled among relief pitchers this season, he doesn’t bother searching for one.

The formula is rather simple: DiFelice throws a cut fastball almost all the time. It doesn’t sizzle across the plate, like Mariano Rivera’s.(notes) It doesn’t even whoosh toward hitters, like Joakim Soria’s.(notes) If there’s an appropriate onomatopoeia for DiFelice’s cutter, that 82-mph cotton ball that no one can solve, it’s more like the air seeping from a balloon: Pfffffft, it goes, landing in the catcher’s mitt not with a pop so much as a plop.
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“There’s something to say for how slow I throw,” DiFelice said. “Guys hate hitting against me, because they wonder if I’m going to throw anything else, if I’ve got something up my sleeve. Nope. Sorry.

“Guys tell me it’s a nasty pitch, but still. I mean, it’s 82.”

Even the 32-year-old DiFelice has trouble comprehending how he got here, not just to the major leagues but to a 3-0 record with a 0.98 ERA and opponents batting .169 against him. For more than 10 years, DiFelice toiled in the minor leagues. He bounced around. He spent two seasons in independent ball, generally a death sentence for major league aspirations.

It was there, in hopeless Camden, N.J., that DiFelice found hope. Before that 2006 season, he played for the Obregon Yaquis in Mexico during the winter and met a pitching coach named Adolfo Navarro, who offered to teach him the cutter. DiFelice’s fastball sat around 92 mph before rotator-cuff surgery earlier in the decade, and he never found that velocity again, so Navarro urged him to try something new.

DiFelice grips the ball across the seams, like a four-seam fastball, and tilts it so his middle finger rests along the red stitching. He squeezes the ball with his middle finger, raises his index finger and throws it as he would a fastball. The result is confounding: The ball spins like a fastball and moves like a slider, and the optical illusion it plays on hitters allows him to get away with throwing an 82-mph pitch the batter knows is coming.