Great lede/good lede/average lede/poor lede, Part 1

Hey all...

I want to try something, mostly because I'm interested, and mostly because I asked two different people what they thought of this lede and got two different answers.

What do you think of this lede? Does it work? Does it make you want to read more?

I'll do this from time to time, just when it interests me. Anybody else can, too. In this case, this is an extended lede from a Sports Illustrated story on the curveball by Tom Verducci. Here it is:

****

Terrifyingly beautiful, like summer thunderstorms and whitewater rapids, the curveball of Astros pitcher Lance McCullers can be found at the intersection of violence and wonder. It is a demon he unleashes on hitters, especially with two strikes, when he throws it 68% of the time.

He takes the nail of his right index finger and places it into the seam of the baseball where it curves around the MLB logo. He places his middle finger directly over the long seam. He places his thumb on the bottom of the ball, over another seam.

Seams are held in triplicate. Seams beget grip. Grip begets force.

“I just try to rip over it and throw it as hard as I can,” McCullers says. “It’s an aggression pitch for me. It’s called an off-speed pitch, but I don’t view it that way.”

The middle finger applies tremendous pressure on its seam, the nail of the index finger applies only a bit of pressure, and the thumb, a lazy hitchhiker along for the ride, applies none. When the process works perfectly, it takes only the split second when the ball has just left McCullers’s hand—as his head snaps to the side, as the ball starts to spin at 2,850 revolutions per minute and as the fastest curveball in the majors among starters flies up to 88 miles per hour—for McCullers to know the poor batter is toast.

“I feel it come off my hand and I know it’s most likely going to result in a punch-out,” he says. “A hitter knows off the hands when the ball hits his sweet spot and it’s going to be a homer. I have that feeling when it comes out of my hand. Like, This is a really quality pitch.”

He smiles fiendishly.

“And then I start fading toward the dugout sometimes,” he says.

Even as the ball leaves his hand, even before it completes its 55-foot thrill ride, the last 10 of which are a stomach-turning, Coney Island drop, even before the doomed batter swings at where the demon used to be—McCullers knows how it will end.

****

 

I think the second graf should have been the first. The demon stuff felt forced.

 

For a magazine story it's fine. The 68 percent stat in the first paragraph bothers me for a reason I can't quite put my finger on. Feels shoved in there. But the rest of it, I enjoyed.

 

I agree that the second graf is a better opener. It's good. Has the right info. Take a machete to it and it would be great. The quotes, especially, can use some trimming. I want to read more but if it continues like this, I probably won't finish the story.

Could be a lot more powerful if made simpler. Keep the focus on the curveball for a bit. I want to know about it. It gives me something "terrifyingly beautiful" to imagine and then keeps asking me to turn away for just a sec.

Also, I hate when songs have a bridge crowbarred in before the third chorus with no particular purpose, and that's how I feel about most sentences like this: When the process works perfectly, it takes only the split second when the ball has just left McCullers’s hand—as his head snaps to the side, as the ball starts to spin at 2,850 revolutions per minute and as the fastest curveball in the majors among starters flies up to 88 miles per hour—for McCullers to know the poor batter is toast.

I had to read that sentence three times to get everything it was trying to tell me.

 

I think the flowery language works against the technical details set out. If the writer described the pitch's effect on hitters with the flowery language, but kept it out of the details, it would be more effective. 'Lazy hitchhiker' was the just about my breaking point.

 

I think this is really interesting stuff, and I like how much reporting has gone into it, the detail of it. We can each pick apart every sentence and I'm guessing we'd each make different calls about them. That's one of the cool things about writing. Every story is the sum of a thousand different decisions, and there's no way we'd all make the same ones.

For me, the first sentence, I'd probably cut the opening clause. Just: "The curveball of Astros pitcher Lance McCullers can be found at the intersection of violence and wonder."

I think that's a pretty goddamn strong lede and a nice collection of syllables, too.

 

It would be even better if it referred to Lance McCullers' RAW.

 

It's funny, the first time I read through that, I read straight through the mention of McCullers' curveball in the first graf. I thought he hadn't identified it until the fifth. I don't know if that's just the way it hit one individual, but ...

 

I voted "good" because I loved so much of the detail - I can picture the logo, the placement, all of it - and didn't care for the comparisons.

"Intersection of Violence and wonder" - great.

"Terrifyingly beautiful." - Meh.

But I appreciated a lot of it. And I appreciated having McCullers in the lede and not Kershaw.

Second McCullers quote is longish but I get it, so as to set up the punchline without using "..."

The full story is kind of a short-but-thorough history of the curve.

 

I loved the detail but hated how it opened. Why have that much detail and make it hard for the readers to imagine?

 

Agree with those who said second paragraph should be the first. If the bulk of the article is tradecraft information, and it seems that it is, lose the purple prose. Better to start with tradecraft and it's an effective short paragraph.

 

... is the best part of that.

And I don't mind the 68% being up in the first graf.