Here's the pitch...

It must be tough to be a sports reporter during the first two weeks of Spring Training. The Super Bowl is over, March Madness is a month away, and nobody gives a crap about regular season hockey or basketball. Everyone is hungry for baseball, but there's not even any real spring training games yet, just pitchers and catchers reporting. So you write the annual Spring Training stories about who is in "the best shape of his life" and who looks fat, which player can't get a visa and which player is rehabbing ahead of schedule. And then you go play golf and complain that it's a little overcast and only 70 degrees.

Then there's another annual spring story: The pitch! Every pitcher comes to camp talking about how he's going to throw a certain pitch more. Or less. Or earlier in the count. Or when he's ahead on strikes. He's trying a new grip. Or a different arm angle. Maybe he's going to start dropping down. He's learned a new pitch this off-season. He's going to go back to using an old pitch.

And every spring it seems there's a pitch that's suddenly in vogue. Some years it's the four-seamer, other years it's the two-seamer. Some years it's the cutter and some years it's the splitter. One spring every pitching coach wants to bring back the big 12-to-6 overhand curve and then the next spring every camp has somebody toying with a knuckler.

I thought this year's pitch was going to be the mysterious gyroball, but that disappeared faster than Toe Nash. No, this year's pitch is... the humble changeup.

I've never seen the changeup get as much press as it has gotten over the last few weeks. Chris Reitsma wowed J.J. Putz with one. Greg Maddux worked on one with Clay Hensley. It's going to be used more this year by Josh Beckett, Jeremy Bonderman, A.J. Burnett, Ben Sheets, Brandon McCarthy... and that's just the Bs. If you thought Chris Carpenter, Billy Wagner and Mariano Rivera were good before, wait 'til you see them throwing changeups.

Why the changeup?

If you're a graduate student desperate for a thesis for your Master of Sports Science Degree Program, here you go: The "in" pitch of each year's spring training is a reflection on society at that moment in time.

The pitch in Spring 2000, with the stock market soaring on the soon-to-burst dot.com bubble, was the illusionary rising fastball.

Spring 2001, as the nation spirals into recession? Time to get stingy with pitch counts and start throwing the GIDP-inducing sinker.

Two years later, at war and with our president strutting around in a stuffed flightsuit, we turned to the ultra-macho triple-digit fastball.

And now, with a newly elected Democratic majority in the House and Senate and more and more Americans saying they don't want to "stay the course" in Iraq, it's no surprise this spring's pitch du jour is the changeup. Add about 5,000 words of academic goobly-gook and there you go, one master's degree.

You're welcome.