baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...

, a brushback pitch is a pitch–usually a

fastball The fastball is the most common type of pitch thrown by pitchers in baseball and softball. "Power pitchers," such as former American major leaguers Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens, rely on speed to prevent the ball from being hit, and have thro ...

–thrown high and inside the

strike zone In baseball, the strike zone is the volume of space through which a pitch must pass in order to be called a strike even if the batter does not swing. The strike zone is defined as the volume of space above home plate and between the batter's k ...

to intimidate the batter away from the plate on subsequent pitches. It differs from the

beanball "Beanball" is a colloquialism used in baseball, for a ball thrown at an opposing player with the intention of striking them such as to cause harm, often connoting a throw at the player's head (or "bean" in old-fashioned slang). A pitcher who thro ...

in that the intent is not to hit the batter, nor does it target the batter's head. Hitters will often crowd the plate in order to have a better swing at pitches on the outside half of the plate. The hitters hope that the pitcher will be scared to throw inside because they might hit the batter. The brushback helps a

pitcher In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throws ("pitches") the baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of retiring a batter, who attempts to either make contact with the pitched ball or draw ...

to "reclaim" the corners of the strike zone by forcing the batter to stand farther away. Play-by-play announcers sometimes call a high brushback pitch as being "high and tight." It is also referred to as

chin music ''Chin music'' is a slang term with several different meanings. Street slang In American slang, ''chin music'' is a term for idle talk. In the US it dates back at least a century — "There's too much chin music an' too little fightin' in this wa ...

. While the brushback can be an effective part of pitching, the home-plate umpire may warn or eject a pitcher he feels is intentionally trying to hit a batter.

References

Baseball pitches {{baseball-stub