Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/658783
32 PLAY BALL BAY AREA NEWS GROUP ohnnyCueto,oneoftheGiants' pricey new starters, sometimes uses an absurdly twisting delivery. He' ll rot at e so d ra ma tic all y during his windup that hitters will glimpse the back of his No. 47 jersey just before he uncoils and releases the pitch. When Cueto does that, he looks just like … "Yeah, he reminds me of me a little," said Luis Tiant, the Boston Red Sox legend. "But he doesn't do it as much as I did. He needs to do it more." Tiant, like Cueto, was part pitch - er, part roulette wheel. Hitters not only had to guess what pitch was coming, but also from which angle and which release point. And in case that was too simple for hitters to decode, both Tiant and Cueto have been known to employ a mid-delivery pause. El Tiante and Johnny Beisbol are so stylistically similar that when writer Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports set out this past summer to catalog Cueto's many windups, he narrowed the list to four: The Traditional, The Quick Pitch, The Rocking Chair — and The Tiant. Not surprisingly, Tiant thinks Cueto should use The Tiant more often. "He can do it every pitch," said the right-hander who pitched from 1964 to '82. "The more he does it, the better control he'll have, and I think he's going to fool the hitter more. "He has to be more consistent with it. You can't do it once in a while — here and there. When you do it that way, you're losing your point of release, and that's a problem." Tiant, 75, went 229-172 with a 3.30 ERA over his 19 seasons in the majors. The Cuba native twice led the American League in ERA and eight times ranked among the league leaders in strikeout-to- walk ratio. Tiant knows Cueto well enough to call him "my friend." He said he's chatted with his delivery doppelganger a few times over the THE GIANTS J