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The man who saw the origin of baseball’s 2 most stupefying cutters

LOS ANGELES — Imagine you were there when Julius Erving made his first dunk and then for Michael Jordan’s, too.

More than that, you grasped quickly the implications of how defining and transformational it would be if they just kept on dunking, and you told them not to stop.

Mike Borzello, working in the bullpen for first the Yankees and then the Dodgers, was on the ground floor when first Mariano Rivera and then Kenley Jansen learned they had cutters. “Learned” being the key word. Neither initially knew he literally had greatness in his hands.

I asked six scouts/personnel people via text if these were the best cutters they had ever seen.