V-Lo & radar guns

I've had a sneaking suspicion that there was something off about the plethora of 100mph hurlers (esp at the college level). Your post seems to indicate only a marginal increase in pitching velocity since the early 1990's which doesn't surprise me at all.

 

Pitchers pitch. Hitters hit. Other than some training regime upgrades, baseball is baseball through the ages (except for the aluminum bats and maybe jazzed up baseballs). If a pitcher can legitimately get it into the middle 90s to the low 100s, not many hitters are going to touch them at the college level. And they would be like gold: highly desirous and damn rare.

I would concur that something does not add up.

 

I remember Mike Scott throwing the slower velo tumbling/diving fork ball at the MLB level with success. To me anyway, same action pitch as the splitter just not as much velo or abrupt change of direction.

 

Velocity on a fastball is very overrated. A 90 mph fastball down in the zone located well with movement is a much better pitch than a 98 mph fastball with no movement belt high over the middle.

But I hear you about speed measurements over the years. I knew some old timers that saw Feller, Ryan and Walter Johnson all pitch. They all said that they were all very fast but who knows which one was the fastest. They all had their own opinion. We have some data on Feller and Ryan but no data on Walter Johnson. Walter Johnson was pretty much just a fastball pitcher in a era where not that many players were looking to go yard. Certainly a lot fewer than the more modern pitchers.

 

I like to think of it as a high tech knuckleball: Low spin rate and devilish final movement. A good knuckler has some "jitter" before its final movement and a much slower spin rate. The huge advantage of the splitter is that it can look like a fastball when it is delivered. No way to throw a knuckler and have it look like a fastball coming out of your hand.

 

Watched a documentary of the fastball today on Amazon Prime. I learned that they did have some data on Walter Johnson but effectively it was at a distance of about 68 feet. Making "corrections" for where the pitch was measured showed that Ryan and Feller and Chapman are all about the same. I have serious concerns about the corrections. First of all the drag force varies with the velocity squared so a faster pitch slows down faster and they just assumed that all of these pitchers' pitches slow down the same amount per foot.

And we have no idea about wind on the days the measuements were taken let alone temperature and humidity.

One thing lost in the discussion is that in Walter Johnson's day he was allowed to throw "dark" baseballs. Balls were not tossed out if they got dirty and pitchers were even allowed to throw "shine" balls that were intentionally darkened. Not throwing pristine white baseballs must have made it a lot harder to pick up the pitch.

 

Being from birth a White Sox fan I had to learn a lot about the early days of baseball because there wasn't much after 1919.

1959 World Series.


Added in edit:

After the 2005 World Series I heard from many of my Southside friends that many graves were decorated with White Sox pennants.

I was no longer an MLB fan but I watched that series and cried because I knew so many fans that never got to see that.

 

But I doubt that home runs are down.

 

Fastballs don't rise. Not even the very best four seamers have enough lift due to rotation to make that happen. Even with high seams on the ball to generate more lift. What they can do is "ride" and by that I mean that they don't fall as much as would be expected. Really good ones do not fall very much but don't rise.

Is it possible that a four seamer could rise? Technically yes, but I don't think anybody that has thrown a baseball has actually done it. If anybody did my money would be on Steve Dalkowski.


I get what those great hitters were saying but the fact is that the ball just didn't drop as much as they expected so it looked to them like they were rising. They were moving in a direction that was higher than they expected and it happens so fast that it looks like the ball jumps up.

The Dock Ellis no-hitter was a story that could not be made up.

 

And Luke Appling, Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox, Hoyt Wilhelm, Harold Baines and for a few years the one guy that should be in the HOF but isn't mostly because he pissed off sports writers Dick Allen.

I know that a lot of folks were pissed off when Harold Baines was named to the HOF based on career numbers but they probably never saw him play before his knee injuries. OMG he was incredible but played on a really crappy team so very few got to know how awesome he was.

 

So, if you use other sports to compare skills and other metrics like this to say college or NFL football, the players back then with half the science in sports medicine and training... those NFL players were also as good or better, like that might have been in baseball? I know different sports and different metrics...

That would not change the fact that Nolan Ryan was one the best fastball pitchers in the history of the sport. He was good/great, but was his fast ball comparable to 110 mph measured in today's timed pitching rules/technique? That would be amazing to see. I'll bet we can see a video comparison to prove Ben McDonald's point... or not.

Maybe Ben is right about how much slower our pitching is today than in Ryan's day. But I have to think the baseballs are smother now than they were when Ryan was pitching, and that might skew the difference in speed. Meaning maybe today's balls might NOT slowdown 10 full mph but maybe more like 5 mph.

It's something to consider, becasue the baseballs today are NOT the same as they were in Ryan's time. The stitching is not the same.

 

Ben is a gem.
I've know Kyle since we were both on HS camp circuit, his personality hasn't changed much. It's an 'acquired taste'.