Carter Capps of the Miami Marlins delivers a pitch in the ninth inning against the Washington Nationals at Marlins Park on September 20, 2014 in Miami, Florida.Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images
You have your submariners, your sidearm guys and the more traditional pitchers who come straight over the top when they deliver the ball to home plate.
Then you've got Carter Capps, who quite possibly possesses the funkiest delivery in Major League Baseball.
Just don't call it a hop when the Miami Marlins reliever unleashes the ball to home plate.
Capps doesn't, or won't, call it that, and he seems to take umbrage with anybody who does.
But ask the 24-year-old to provide his own description of the unorthodox delivery, which he said he fell into naturally while attending Mount Olive College in North Carolina, and he doesn't really provide have an answer.
"I don't know; it was a small college," Capps said during an interview in the Marlins' visitor's clubhouse at Rogers Centre on Monday before Miami's game against the Toronto Blue Jays. "It's not like we had a video guy or anything – didn't have game films. I can't even tell I'm doing it."
Capps is a solidly constructed 6-foot-5 specimen who is still trying to establish his MLB career after getting drafted in the third round by the Seattle Mariners in 2011. He was traded to the Marlins prior to the 2014 MLB season.
A right-handed thrower, Capps pushes off the rubber with his right pivot foot as he goes into his delivery, as all right-handed pitchers do. With his hand still at his side with the ball, Capps then propels himself forward and his right foot lifts up and lands a good foot or so in front of the rubber before he completes his throwing motion.
By the time all the gyrations have been completed, Capps is unleashing the ball considerably closer to home plate than most of your more conventional hurlers.
Some would have you believe that this gives Capps – who already possesses a heavy fastball that can run into the high 90s – an unfair advantage as he is delivering the ball closer to home plate. Whatever it is, it's working: Capps is 1-0 in nine appearances with a sparkling 1.50 earned-run average, striking out 21 batters in just 12 innings pitched.
At least one umpire at the Triple-A level earlier this year felt something was askew with it all.
Capps started the season off with the New Orleans Zephyrs in the Pacific Coast League, the Marlins' Triple-A affiliate.
In his regular-season debut on April 9 against Omaha, Capps entered the game in the ninth inning with the score tied. The first pitch he threw was a swinging strike, but home-plate umpire Greg Stanzak begged to differ.
Stanzak waived the pitch off as illegal, deeming that Capps had disengaged from the pitching rubber too soon, awarding the batter a ball. Capps threw his second pitch, another strike, and once again Stanzak did not like what he saw and ruled another ball.
This brought Zephyrs manager Andy Haines out onto the field in protest, and he was quickly ejected.
Not wanting to risk an injury to his pitcher by telling him to alter his delivery, Haines instructed Capps before he left to walk the batter and sent in another reliever.
"We bring in another guy out of the bullpen, and that runner I walked ended up scoring and we lost the game," Capps said.
Capps said he has never run into any problems before with his unusual style. And the Marlins contacted MLB for its opinion on the matter; it was reviewed by the umpiring department and the rules committee.
While admitting "there was confusion about a delivery not commonly seen in the game," MLB essentially gave Capps's throwing motion a clean bill of health, with this caveat. "We informed clubs that a pitcher is not permitted to jump or push forward off the pitcher's plate with his pivot foot and then bring this foot to the ground and make a second push off prior to delivering the pitch," is how one MLB official put it in an e-mail.
"They just said I had to remain in contact with the dirt," Capps said of his pivot foot, "and it does that. So they don't have any problems with it."
Just don't call it a hop.