A few offseasons ago I was in a Quonset hut in Montgomery, Texas, talking to Trevor Bauer about how a pitched baseball spins. As he had done since he was an adolescent, the Cleveland Indians pitcher was training at the Texas Baseball Ranch, a state-of-the-art training facility to improve throwing mechanics, velocity and arm health.
Bauer might know more about how a baseball spins than any person in uniform today. Such a student of spin is Bauer that he bought himself a Trackman system and high speed cameras to create his own pitching lab at home. In that lab Bauer was able to as closely as possible duplicate the two-seam fastball of Corey Kluber, in terms of how it came out of his hand and the axis on which it spun.