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Perhaps I should have said that it is harder to see the size of the spot early from the hand the greater the height difference. The ball gets on you fast, so any difference is important. And it is harder for the batter looking at it from the same side (righty-righty or lefty-lefty) to catch it early.
In any case, I learned baseball in the 50's from a relative, Lester Stevenson, who'd been a pitcher in the minors in the 1910's. He was still coaching kids from time to time by the time I came around, spending summers in Wisconsin with my grandparents. I wanted to be a catcher, so I caught while he taught older kids how to pitch, with he and my grandfather giving me tips on my catching technique. Lester's specialty was the "nickel curve" (now called the slider) which he threw from exactly the same (lefty) release point as his fastball. He maintained that all pitchers move their hand away from their ears to throw a curve, so smart batters would pick it up. He considered his nickel curve to be the answer. His solution for this for kids throwing the curve, interestingly, was to turn in the windup, so the batter couldn't see your arm position 'till the release (Vargas's new "twist and shoot" motion, or, more famously, Warren Spahn's motion). We attended a lot of Milwaukee Brave's games (my grandparents and the Stevensons had a season box near the 1st base end of the Brave's dugout) with Lester giving an almost non-stop analysis of technique and strategy. When he died in 1959, I felt like I lost a friend, even though I was just a little kid.
I never became a real good ballplayer, partly cause I was small and had poor eyesight that required glasses, but I enjoyed playing and coaching through school and a Navy career and a second career as a school district technology geek. But I still remember summers long ago listening to why "Burdette had to be loading that ball" and why Warren Spahn was the greatest lefty of his (all) time.

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