Finger and Wrist: The Two Families

Every spinner in the history of the game is one of two kinds, and the difference between them is a single joint. When the ball leaves the hand, the spin on it has been put there either by the fingers or by the wrist. That one choice — made in a fraction of a second, invisible from the boundary — settles how much a spinner turns the ball, what tricks are open to him, and how often he sends down something a batter can put away.

In the last part we saw that a spinner's threat is built entirely on the revolutions he puts on the ball. This part is about the two ways he puts them there, and why choosing one of them quietly closes the door on the other.

Two ways to spin a ball#

The first way is to spin it with the fingers. The bowler holds the ball across his top two fingers and, as he releases, rolls them down and across it — something like flicking a marble, or turning a doorknob sharply. The ball comes out spinning. This is finger spin, and it is the more natural of the two: hand most people a ball and ask them to spin it, and they do roughly this.

The second way is stranger. The bowler cocks his wrist right back and, at the last instant, snaps it through, so the ball is flicked out over the little-finger side of the hand — spun not by the fingers rolling but by the whole wrist turning over. This is wrist spin, and it is genuinely hard. It can take years to control a ball that starts behind the back of the hand and comes out going the other way.

Control against turn#

Here is the bargain each family strikes. The fingers are the reliable joint. A finger-spinner can land the ball on the same worn patch over after over, because the action repeats easily — which is why he is the bowler a captain turns to when he wants an end shut down, the runs choked off, one spot hit for two hours. What he gives up is turn: fingers simply cannot rip the ball as hard.

The wrist strikes the opposite bargain. It turns the ball far more — the wrist-spinner is the one who rips it square and beats the bat by a foot — but it is treacherous to control. The same action that produces the unplayable delivery also produces the long-hop and the full toss that vanish to the boundary. So the wrist-spinner is a strike bowler: you put up with the occasional bad ball for the wickets he buys.

The fingers are the safe hand and the wrist the dangerous one — the whole difference between a bowler who ties you down and one who bowls you out.

Four spinners, not two#

Combine the joint with the bowling hand and you get four kinds of spinner, not two. A right-armer spinning with his fingers bowls off spin. A left-armer spinning with his fingers bowls what is called left-arm orthodox. A right-armer spinning with his wrist bowls leg spin. And a left-armer spinning with his wrist — the rarest bird in the game — bowls left-arm wrist spin, long known by the now-retired name chinaman.

Two of those four you will meet far more often than the others, and they are the two we follow through the rest of this series: off spin, the common finger spin, and leg spin, the classic wrist spin. They turn the ball in opposite directions, and between them they account for almost all the spin bowling you will ever watch.

Which leaves the real question: how does a spinner actually make the ball deviate? There are two answers, because it deviates twice — once in the air, once off the pitch. We start with the one almost nobody credits: the curve the ball makes before it has even landed.