Daniel Bard’s Filthy Whiffmaker

The pitch you see here was (a) thrown by Daniel Bard to Nick Swisher last year and (b) appears to possess changeup-type (or at least two-seam fastball-type) movement while also traveling at 99 mph.

Sean Murphy, who’s preserved the above-embedded GIF at his site, refers to the sequence as “baseball porn” — and for good reason, too: there’s something equal parts filthy, captivating, and primeval about what Bard’s able to do with/to/all up on a baseball.

Yesternight, Oakland starters Brett Anderson and Brandon McCarthy got to tweeting about this pitch — a conversation to which Man About the Internet @BigMike05 alerted me. Mr. Big Mike was also curious about how we might accurately characterize this pitch which, it must be said, defies superlatives.

As I say, filth is the definitive quality of the offering. Watching this pitch is like watching Christina Aguilera give a lap dance to a side of beef — i.e. both disgusting and impossible to look away from.

The question is, what ought we to call such a pitch?

Some ideas, from the dirtiest part of Dirtville:

• The Slavic Tongue Kiss — Tongue-kissing can be romantic, but not the way they do it in Eastern Europe.
• The Pantless Velociraptor — A velociraptor with pants is bad enough.
• The Well-Oiled Ambassador — Oiled with what, exactly?
• Hepatitis K — The filthiest possible virus.
• The Moist Handshake — Ick. Not so nice to meet you, actually.