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As Major League Baseball prepares to open its season Sunday, high-octane
pitching is dominating the game as never before. One day it's the Cincinnati
Reds' Aroldis Chapman, the"Cuban Missile," firing 103-mile-per-hour fastballs
out of the bullpen. The next, starters like the Washington Nationals' Stephen
Strasburg and the Tampa Bay Rays' David Price are clocking triple digits deep
into games when they should be tiring.
In the 2003 season, there was only one pitcher who threw at least 25 pitches
100 mph or faster (Billy Wagner). In 2012, there were seven, according to
Baseball Info Solutions.
In 2003, there were only three pitchers who threw at least 700 pitches 95 mph
or better. In 2012, there were 17. There were 20 pitchers a decade ago who
threw at least 25% of their fastballs 96 mph or faster. Last year there were
62, including Carter Capps, the Seattle Mariners' 22-year-old right-hander,
whose average fastball travels 98.3 mph, tying him with the Royals' Kelvin
Herrera for the top spot in the game.
At the same time, just a decade after performance-enhancing drugs helped
power an unprecedented boom in offense, hitters are spiraling into
ineptitude. Last season the game's batters struck out 36,426 times, an 18.3%
increase over 2003.
"It's pretty simple," said Rick Peterson, director of pitching development
for the Baltimore Orioles, who sees a direct link between strikeouts and the
increase in velocity. "The harder you throw, the less time the batter has to
swing and the harder it is to make contact. Everybody can square up a
slow-pitch softball. A 95-mile per hour fastball is a little different."
Nearly 20% of all plate appearances last season resulted in a strikeout. In
1968, just 15.8% of plate appearances resulted in strikeouts. And that was
the so-called "year of the pitcher," when the dominance of the likes of Bob
Gibson and Denny McLain caused baseball to lower the mound and begin
experimenting with a designated hitter.
Baseball's speed revolution is an outgrowth of a series of radical—and
sometimes surprising— shifts in the way both children and adults approach
the game at every level.
This isn't just about bigger, stronger athletes. In terms of the stress
placed on a human body part, nothing in sports compares with what the
shoulder undergoes when a top pitcher throws a fastball. The joint can rotate
at roughly 7,000 degrees per second. Since a full rotation equals 360
degrees, the arm would complete nearly 20 full rotations in a single second
if it were physically able.
"That's about as fast as a human joint can move, so pitchers probably won't
ever throw much faster than they do now," said Glenn Fleisig, a biomedical
engineer at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Alabama and one of the
leading researchers in the science of pitching. "But now you're seeing more
and more pitchers every year getting close to the ceiling, so the question
becomes, why?"
Part of the flamethrowing trend is a function of simple economics. The best
pitchers now command some of the game's highest salaries. Being merely
average is worth $11.5 million a year (Bronson Arroyo, 12-10, 3.74 earned-run
average). As a result, the game's biggest and best young athletes are
gravitating toward the pitching mound.
On average, the game's pitchers have gained about a half-inch in height since
2000, according to Adrian Bejan, an engineering professor at Duke University,
who studies sports evolution and wrote a recent study of body size in
baseball.
That makes sense, Bejan reasons, because the pitching motion mimics the
action of a trebuchet, the medieval weapon for throwing stones against heavy
fortifications. Early designers of trebuchets figured out the key to flinging
a stone faster was increasing the height of the body and the length of the
arm and rope, which together function like the pitcher's body and arm. A
longer rope just required more weight to propel it forward. Baseball scouts
have essentially come to the same conclusion. Think Randy Johnson, who is
6-foot-10, or even Capps, who is 6-foot-5.
Then there's technology. Twenty years ago, the actual speed of a pitch was
information usually reserved for scouts with clunky radar guns. Now, with
more accurate laser technology, that information is on the scoreboard in
every stadium and noted pitch by pitch on nearly every telecast. A decent gun
can be had for less than $200 and is about the size of a hair dryer. There
are iPhone apps, too: Little League dads track how hard their 9-year-olds
throw. Today's flamethrowers are the first generation to be raised in a
baseball culture obsessed with velocity.
It's easy to understand why. In a data-crazed era when franchises demand
their scouts and executives back up every strategy and draft pick with
numbers, velocity stands alone as the only statistical characteristic that
doesn't depend on the quality of the opponent—as do hitting and other
pitching stats. That makes it the logical place to begin any evaluation, said
John Mozeliak, general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.
"At a certain speed, you're able to get away with more mistakes," Mozeliak
says.
Chris Holt, a former major-leaguer who now coaches prospects at Pro Bound
USA, a Florida baseball academy, says young pitchers who can't hit 90 on the
radar gun don't get a serious look. "Ninety-two is the new 88," he says. "The
cutoff is 90, 91 minimum."
Well aware of this obsession with measurement and velocity, young pitchers
and their coaches began about 15 years ago to approach the game with a
singular goal: figuring out how to throw the ball as hard as they can.
"The main reason people are throwing hard is because they see the value of
getting noticed throwing harder," said Ron Wolforth, whose Texas Baseball
Ranch has become one of the top destinations for aspiring fireballers.
Wolforth is one of the leaders of what is fast becoming a dominant school of
pitching thought. He and his disciples, who are sprinkled throughout the
baseball-talent hotbeds in the American South and West, stress a free and
athletic-style throwing motion that harnesses the power of the entire body,
but especially the legs and core muscles. It's based partly on what Dominican
and Venezuelan pitchers have been practicing for years. ("You don't get off
the 'island' throwing curveballs," the saying goes; Venezuelan Bruce Rondon,
a Tigers prospect, throws 104.) The philosophy puts far less emphasis,
especially at the beginning, on controlled mechanics and more on learning and
practicing what Holt refers to as "throwing the heck out of the baseball."
Capps, the Seattle Mariners' rising star, is a prime example of this
approach. He was a catcher until his freshman year at Mount Olive College in
North Carolina. He had a decent arm but wasn't much of a hitter, and the team
already had an All-American catcher. Head coach Carl Lancaster suggested he
try to pitch.
Capps hit the weight room to add muscle to his 170-pound frame. He started
long-tossing, that is, playing catch at more than 250 feet, and he began to
work on his mechanics so he could use his long legs to extend his stride and
leverage his height. By the beginning of his sophomore year he was
registering 93 to 95 miles per hour on the radar gun. The following summer,
he hit 97 during the All-Star Game of the Coastal Plains League, a
summer-league for college players. "After that he never touched the rubber at
our place without a crowd of scouts watching," Lancaster said.
"The harder you throw, the cleaner it feels," Capps said during a recent
interview from spring training. "It's actually less stress on the arm,
because when I'm throwing my hardest, my legs are doing all the work and my
upper body is coming right through."
Although pitchers last year spent 29.1% more days on the disabled list than
they did in 2003, most orthopedists blame that on overwork, not rising
velocity.
At laboratories at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Alabama and the
Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, orthopedists and biomechanists
place dozens of sensors on pitchers and have them throw in front of a series
of infrared cameras that measure their motions and turn the windup into a
three-dimensional computer graphic. Then they analyze the data to try to see
if all the parts of the body are synchronizing, with each of the six separate
actions of the motion flowing methodically from one into the next.
"It's a kinetic chain," Fleisig said. "You rotate the hips at the right time,
and then the torso and then the shoulders and then the arm and elbow."
It follows that the stronger the links of the chain are, the faster the
pitch, which has led to a sea change in the way pitchers train. Gone are the
days when strength and conditioning meant visiting the weight room a few days
a week with an assistant football coach.
"It's about being strong in the core, the glutes [rear end], the hips and the
obliques, and that's what everyone is working on," said Stephen Fealy, an
orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery and a pitching
consultant to the Major League Baseball Players Association.
Consider Dylan Bundy, the Baltimore Orioles' 20-year-old, white-hot prospect.
Bundy started lifting weights when he was 10, and he threw in the high 80s in
middle school. He broke 90 as a freshman in high school and had hit 100
before graduation. To build up his legs, core, arm and hands, he and his
brother and father would toss tires, dig holes and refill them, push
wheelbarrows full of dirt, cut down trees with an ax and split wood. He also
long-tossed up to 350 feet, and still does, all in pursuit of getting
stronger and maximizing velocity.
"The velocity allows you to get away with some mess-ups," Bundy says. "Who
knows? I may still have a few miles per hour left in the tank."
That will likely mean more bad news for opposing hitters. To be sure,
velocity isn't the only cause for their mounting futility. A recent
statistical analysis of velocity and effectiveness by Frangraphs.com
suggested that increased velocity may explain as little as 25% of overall
pitching success. Pitchers have become better at mixing speeds and locations,
too.
Sabermetrics, the data-centric approach that prizes doubles and home runs
over singles and stolen bases, hasn't done hitters any favors either. It
encourages them to keep swinging for the fences, even with two strikes. And
just as this generation of pitchers grew up hooked on velocity, hitters in
their prime today came of age in the homer-happy steroid era. The game's
prevailing economic model continues to deliver that message. Prince Fielder
makes nearly $24 million a year for averaging 36 home runs and 33 doubles,
even though he also strikes out 121 times over 162 games.
The problem for baseball over the long term is that the strikeout is the one
offensive event that hardly ever sets into motion an unpredictable result.
The batter generally mopes back to the dugout. Some fans find it boring, and
some purists find it lame.
"Guys don't seem to care about striking out anymore, but when you strike out,
you're not putting the ball in play, and when you don't do that, nothing can
happen," said Keith Hernandez, the former batting champion who is now a
television analyst for the Mets. Even the National League is no longer home
to a style of baseball that values speed and contact hitting over hacking and
hoping for the long ball, he says.
For now though, Major League Baseball isn't inclined to tinker with the
balance and cut down on strikeouts. Tony La Russa, the former manager who has
served as a consultant to Commissioner Bud Selig, said the sport isn't
necessarily about what's most exciting.
"It's about how you can win games," La Russa said. "That should mean with two
strikes you have to fight to put the ball in play. But," he admits, "that's
easier said than done because of these pitchers."