Cannibal LHP Rich Hill went 18-9 for the Lake Champlain Cannibals back in 2008, then disappeared from competitive baseball for nearly a decade.
Asked what he had been doing for the past 8 years, Hill glanced over his shoulder, then lowered his voice and whispered "MOABB. I've been working on the MOABB."
But what is a MOABB?
"Mother of All Breaking Balls," said Hill. "At first I was going to call it the Mother of All Curve Balls, but I could never find the tongue control to pronounce MOACB. It's the terminal diphthong that gets you. Very tough to control a diphthong with a centrally located glottal stop."
"But like a rose, a MOACB by another name is just as sweet."
"The MOABB is by far the most effective pitch in my arsenal. Every other thing I tried failed in one way or another. Probably the worst was when I tried flinging a filthy slider. The biggest lesson I learned from that was that pretty much the best result you can get from an uncontrolled filthy slider is E-COLI (Extraneous Collateral Incidents.) You know, like hitting the Bull."
"Plus gripping a filthy slider too much resulted in this nasty infected blister on my middle finger" said Hill, as he presented the offending digit for a photo-op.
When asked if any other LCC pitchers intended to drop a MOABB in live action, Hill said "Oh, no. It's a one of a kind."
"But some of the boys are working on their own acronym-stuff."
"For example, Junior Guerra is out there throwing total MOSS (Mother of Slow-ish Splitters.)"
"Roberto Osuna throws SSMOKE (Sexy Soccer Mom of Strikeout Evisceration.)"
"And Pat Neshek is sending hitters a continuous string of EMOJIS (Eccentric Mother of Junky Inbound Slop.)"
