Piedmont Pride side-winding pitcher mowing down SCBL batters

After switching to the bullpen and becoming the East Mississippi Community College closer as a freshman, Ryan Rigby had to grow his hair out. It seems like an almost requisite for relief pitchers to have a gnarly mane of hair.

Rigby also had to shift exclusively to throwing side-arm, something he’s continued to do this summer for the Rock Hill-based Piedmont Pride, the Southern Collegiate Baseball League outfit playing home games at Winthrop. Rigby, a right-hander who signed with Mississippi State and will play for the SEC powerhouse next spring, is succeeding this summer with a devastating fastball, consistently clocked at around 90 miles per hour.

Rigby landed with the Pride on the recommendation of Mississippi State pitching coach Butch Thompson, an old friend of Pride coach Joe Hudak.

“(Rigby) had some good numbers at the junior college level, and Butch thought he could pitch for him next year,” said Hudak, the former longtime Winthrop baseball skipper. “So I didn’t know a lot about him, other than Butch said he threw from the side, and 90 (miles per hour).”

That last bit caught Hudak’s attention.

“Somebody throws from the side and 90, I’ll take him right now,” he said Wednesday in the Winthrop Ballpark dugout.

Rigby is from Kosciusko, a tiny town smack in the middle of Mississippi with, by his count, “seven or eight stoplights,” and “a lot of backwoods and dirt roads. What you would think.” He drives a Ford truck and talks with a country lilt. Again, what you would think.

Rigby was a starting pitcher that threw over-hand in high school, and he would mix in some side-arm angles to finish off batters that had fouled off a number of his pitches consecutively. He was lightly recruited by small Division I colleges but opted to go to East Mississippi Community College. EMCC’s pitching coach, Anthony Izzio, suggested Rigby could play at a higher level and possibly make some money playing ball one day if he switched solely to throwing side-arm out of the bullpen.

That decision necessitated a change in mindset – and hairstyle – for Rigby.

“When you’re closing, you never know when you’re gonna pitch,” he said. “So you just generally throw the crap out of it all the time.”

That simple philosophy worked this past spring. As a freshman, Rigby was named to the Mississippi Association of Community and Junior Colleges All-State first team after producing a 1.80 ERA and allowing just eight hits in 20 innings of work as a reliever. A Scout.com article mentioned that he didn’t allow a single flyball during that span.

After qualifying academically, Rigby opted for Mississippi State over Southern Miss, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt and Florida State.

While headed to the highest reaches of college baseball, Rigby is still mastering the side-arm delivery.

One of the challenges of side-arm pitching is maintaining the proper arm slot. Rigby throws just below a typical side-armer, and above the submarine guys that throw nearly underhanded.

But when Rigby dips his arm too far down, his pitches rise and miss the strike zone. He’s struck out 15 batters in 19 innings of work for the Pride, but has walked 13. Eleven of those 13 bases-on-balls came in three outings, games when Rigby struggled to keep his delivery in the right slot.

Playing with the Pride has helped Rigby add to his side-arm arsenal. He already was throwing a fastball that tailed away from left-handed hitters, and into the mid-section of right-handers. And within three days of arriving in Rock Hill, Hudak was teaching the long-haired country boy how to throw a change-up. It’s a devastating pitch against left-handed batters, the hardest hitters for side-arm pitchers to get out since most of the breaking balls curl right into their wheelhouse.

“He’s gotten by primarily with his fastball and his slider, and his change-up, he didn’t really throw a lot of them until he got here,” said Hudak, whose team is 29-6 and leads the league with one week left in the regular season. “He has a good feel for it, he just hasn’t had to use it too much. At Mississippi State he’ll need to develop that to be successful there, and I think he will be.”

Sidearm pitchers may lose a bit of velocity compared to overhand throwers, but they gain advantages with their weird release point and also pitch movement. Those advantages are exacerbated in Rigby’s case when he enters a game in the eighth or ninth inning and opposing batters have been facing a traditional overhand pitcher the entire game.

“Not only does he throw hard, but his ball really moves,” said Hudak. “When we did intersquads our hitters hated to face him.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2015 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Piedmont Pride side-winding pitcher mowing down SCBL batters."