We’ve seen incredible pitches across the baseball season, and you’ve been voting every day for your favorite pitches. We held the Nastiest Pitching GIFs of the First Quarter and Second Quarter tournaments, and it’s time to crown another king of pitching GIFs with the Nastiest Pitching GIF of the Third Quarter. Sixteen pitches will enter, who will win?
Check out the results from Round 1 and Round 2.
Here are the rules:
- All GIFs were pulled from the six GIF of the Week competitions across weeks 13 and 18 of the baseball season.
- Every winner was granted an automatic bid, with the extra slots being hand selected by the staff across all Nastiest Pitches articles.
- There was one instance of a pitcher having two eligible pitches of the same type (Jakob Junis‘ slider) and we held a vote on Twitter to determine the pitch’s champion for the tournament.
- Votes will last until 12:00am EST the following morning, with the next round starting at 9:00am every morning and final round beginning on Monday morning.
- The excellent Michael Haas has created a gorgeous bracket of all 16 pitches, with secondary pitches and fastballs each receiving #1-#8 seeds.
Here were the results from Round #2:
Fastballs
#1 Masahiro Tanaka’s Fastball defeated #5 Chris Sale’s Fastball
#3 Blake Treinen’s Fastball defeated #2 Jordan Hicks‘ Fastball
Secondary Pitches
#1 Chris Sale’s Slider defeated #4 Miles Mikolas‘ Curveball
#3 Blake Treinen’s Slider defeated #2 Jakob Junis‘ Slider
Here’s the bracket for Round #3:
Vote Below!
Masahiro Tanaka’s Fastball vs. Blake Treinen’s Fastball
With Jordan Hicks out of the way, it’s up now to Masahiro Tanaka to take down the beast that is Blake Treinen’s fastball, a pitch that has already earned a GIF Tournament crown and has a good chance at another. Does its 99mph overcome Tanaka’s wicked deception and break?
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Which was the better pitch? Vote to decide which pitch advances to the next round!
[polldaddy poll=10094772]
Chris Sale’s Slider vs. Blake Treinen’s Slider
We could be seeing another Blake Treinen victory if he manages to win both of these votes, but he could be eliminated on both fronts as well. This slide piece does fall a ton, but it may be exaggerated by the low camera angle. Meanwhile, there is no denying the lateral movement on Chris Sale’s slider and while his heater has been defeated, there’s still a chance to add to his trophy case.
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Which was the better pitch? Vote to decide which pitch advances to the next round!
[polldaddy poll=10094770]