Is it possible for big league pitchers to bump up the top speed of a fast ball or have we reached the top of what a human arm can do? For the past 60 years or so there have been a couple of pitchers who hit the 100mph mark. Most power pitchers only make it up to around 96mph. Most big league pitchers seem to live in the 88-92mph range. The number of pitcher that can throw that hard seems to have gone up over the years (I’m sure due to training and conditioning) but the top speed has not gone up. Is it possible to train someone (or breed, maybe grow… Get working on that Steinbrenner) to throw significantly faster than 100mph or can the human arm only do so much?
As an aside I remember reading the Steve Nebraska article by Roger Angell. It was about a kid the Mets found pitching in Mexico who could throw 125mph. It was an April Fools joke that fooled a bunch of people. Yes it was made into that horrible Albert Brooks movie. One thing that they changed that made it not work for me, in the movie he throws 109mph. Only about 8mph faster than Bob Feller. That alone would not make him completely unhitable.
Basically, there’s only so much ligaments and bones can take. I, too, always found it curious that a big, strong pitcher couldn’t eke out a few more MPH compared to smaller guys (Tim Lincecum comes to mind in the latter category).
One thing to remember is that speed along won’t get a pitcher to the big leagues - he’ll also need excellent control and the ability to disguise pitches (e.g. to throw a decent curve that starts out looking like his fastball).
I knew a guy who had pitched in AA (Mets farm system). He told stories of a teammate who had an insane fastball - basically unhittable. But he always struggled with his control - a typical inning was three strikeouts and four walks. The coaches tried hard to bring him up to an acceptable level, but they couldn’t, and he had to give it up.
So there may be guys out there who can throw harder than the best major league pitchers (though probably not by much) but who lack other skills that would allow them to hold down a pitching job.
I believe that’s Sidd Finch, by George Plimpton, that you’re thinking of.
In real life, there’s the notorious case of Steve Dalkowski, who had incredible power in his arm but terrible control and because of the control problems, never made the major leagues. The speed of his pitches is not known with any degree of certainty, but some estimates (presumably based on the objects he broke with his fastballs) are that he reached 110 MPH.
In truth, it may well be the need for control that limits the speed that baseball pitchers can effectively display. While there are obviously limits to human musculature, one wonders how fast a person who’s merely trying to throw with as much force as possible could be if he weren’t concerned with accuracy of target. What might an Olympic shot-putter conceivably do if handed a baseball?
Not what I was thinking of but I might have compressed the two together. Roger Angell did write an article about Steve Nebraska. He is credited in the movie as having the original idea. Angell is a famed baseball writer and the step-son of E.B. White. Mostly writes for the New Yorker so it might have been there.
Supposedly, one night Dalkowski got all drunked up (which he was prone to do) and went with his teammates out to the minor league park and threw a baseball through the boards that made up the outfield fence.
The story goes that finally something “popped” in his arm and he lost a lot of speed. This suggests that it may have been a physical peculiarity that allowed him to throw with such velocity. Again, his lack of control kept him out of the big leagues.
Yeah, I might have been hasty in dismissing the name - but I think you did conflate the two. Definitely Sidd Finch was fictionally a Met; Nebraska was a Yankee (in the film at least, I can’t find the original article on line), and definitely the Finch article was an April Fool’s joke - for all I know, the Nebraska one might have been, too, but going by the description, it doesn’t sound like it, it sounds like it was presented as straight fiction rather than as a hoax.
When I was first starting out as a sportswriter in the mid 1980s, I had a chance to see and speak to two of the hardest throwers in major league history – Nolan Ryan and Lee Smith. Both told me that the secret to throwing in the high 90s was leg strength and a pitching motion that reduced strain on the shoulder.
The hardest thrower I ever saw was Rob Dibble of the Reds, who regulalry topped 100 mph on the radar gun. Every time I asked a coach/scout/pitcher about Dibble, they said that his unusual whip-like motion would keep him from having a long career. Sure enough, he suffered a shoulder injury at the age of 29 that ended his career.
As to the OP’s question, I think that there really are two issues. One is the maximum possible speed for one pitch. The bigger issue is how hard a guy can throw the ball regularly without hurting himself.
We may be nearing the limits of what a normal human arm can do, but that is no reason to stop. The Tommy John surgery is, to some, an ehancement. Do not be surprised at the appearance of non-therapeutic surgery on pitchers to boost their pitching abilities.
Interestingly enough Daldowski is from New Britain, CT and Dibble is from Southington, CT. The two towns are right next to each other. If I remember correctly both towns share a water supply, as there is a resevoir that stradles the border of both towns. Those who dream of having children who throw 100 mph may want to move there. What is it that they put in that water? Whatever it is, hearless loser Carl Pavano may want to retuern to his hometown (also Southington) a drink a little more of that water.
A bit of a hijack but could you elaborate for this non-baseball doper?
Are you suggesting in the fraction of a second that it takes a pitcher to wind up and deliver a ball, the batter adjusts to the pitcher’s motion and can assume a specific incoming pitch?
What kind of adjustment could the batter make anyway?
Batters (the good ones) learn to identify pitches based on the pattern the seams make as the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand. If the pitcher learns to throw a curve so that it starts out looking like a fastball, the batter won’t be able to tell which is which.
The batter needs to ID the pitch so he can tell where it’s going to go. If he IDs it as a fastball, he can be pretty sure it’s coming straight at him on its path. If he IDs it as a curve, he won’t be surprised when the bottom drops out just before it gets to him. Sometimes when you see guys wildly swinging at a curve that has just “dropped off the table,” they misidentified it as a fastball.
Garfield has it right. The longer version, as explained to me by my pitcher friend:
No pitcher can consistently throw fastballs past the top major-league batters. At their best, they might do so for several innings, but not for a game. IOW, if a good batter knows he’s about to see a fastball, he’s likely to do something to it that the pitcher won’t like.
So the typical promising young pitcher needs at least two pitches: a hard fastball and a curve. And he needs to deliver them such that the batter isn’t sure which is on the way until it’s too late to be fully prepared.
A hard fastball is a scary thing. It actually hisses as it passes by. The prospect of being hit by one, especially in the head, is grim (witness the helmets batters wear). Batters’ careers have been ended by this. All batters have been hit enough to know they want to avoid this if at all possible.
When a right-handed pitcher throws to a right-handed batter, a curve starts out looking like it’s aimed at the batter’s head. If the batter isn’t sure the pitch is a curve, he can’t be entirely sure that pitch isn’t going to hit him. So he’s coping with some measure of intimidation, which the pitcher must generate if he’s to have decent success. This is why pitchers prefer batters of the same “hand” and batters like to face pitchers of the opposite “hand” (with whom their batting average is nearly always substantially higher).
IMO, the most interesting part of baseball is the duel between pitcher and batter. The underlying theme is that the pitcher must try to throw what the batter isn’t expecting - when the batter knows what’s coming, he’s going to have good success. Scouting matters: pitchers try to understand what batters tend to do, and batters try to learn what pitchers have relied on in past games. There’s deception of all sorts; one example would be the pitcher shaking off several signs from the catcher, then agreeing on the one first made - batter has to decide what is the significance of the pitcher disagreeing with his catcher. Lots of subtlety here.
In the same sense, inevitabley a young phenom will have worse stats during the second half of a season than the first half. After teams have gotten a look at him, studied him and adjusted, they learn how to hit him. Then, if the pitcher is really good, he learns to adjust, mix his stuff up and figures out how to get the batters out anyway. Some, like Kerry Wood and Mark Fidrych, just blow their arms out.
Garfield’s answer is essentially right. It’s an accepted truism in baseball that hitting is timing, and pitching is disrupting timing. Any major league hitter has sufficiently good reflexes and bat speed to hit any major league fastball if they know how hard it’s coming in and where it’s located. The challenging part is to be able to identify the type and location of a pitch and adjust to it in the few thousandths of a second available. Even flamethrowers like Ryan, Koufax, Clemens, Gibson, et al. give up their share of hits and HRs. Throw the ball to major league hitters at the same speed and same location every time and they’ll crush it. A big part of effective pitching, then, is keeping the motion and delivery absolutely consistent while changing speeds; if the pitch also moves in flight, so that it arrives somewhere other than where it seemed to be headed (as with a curve, slider, or split-finger pitch), so much the better, but the key thing is to give the batter expecting a 92 mph pitch something at 80 mph (or vice versa). They may adjust enough to make contact, even to get a hit, but they aren’t usually going to drive the ball if their timing is off. Jamie Moyer, still pitching in the majors in his 40s, probably hasn’t broken 85 mph on a radar gun in a decade, if ever. But his change-up comes in at around 60 mph. Even that slow, major league hitters still aren’t successful against him when their swing is timed for 80 mph. And when they gear their swing for 60 mph, 80 mph looks like 100.
The other key part of pitching is location and control. No major league hitter can cover the entire strike zone with equal effectiveness – even Ted Williams, considered by many the best pure hitter ever, estimated that his batting average on pitches at the extreme lower outside corner of the strike zone was no better than about .230, or about .170 lower than the .400 or better he’d expect to hit on pitches down the middle of the plate belt high (he produced a famous diagram of his estimated average for every point in the strike zone in his book, The Science of Hitting). I suspect that even Williams, however, would hit low outside pitches better than that if he could count on the ball being there every time. So successful pitchers vary their location, even when (like Tom Glavine) they’ve made careers out of change-ups low and away. Glavine will come inside with a fastball, or up and away, to batters just often enough to make them look stupid when they gear themselves up for the change-up away. Everyone in the park knows what Glavine’s going to throw, but he’s able to do it with consistency and control and varies the pattern just enough to keep batters off balance. Ditto for Greg Maddux. Without the ability to hit the exact spot intended, however, those strikes at the lower outside extremity of the strike zone become balls, or even worse – home-run balls in the middle of the plate. Another look at Williams’ diagram will show that there’s only two baseball-widths difference between the area where he’d hit .250 and the area where he’d hit .300. Miss your spot to a major league hitter and there’s a good chance you’ll be rubbing up a new baseball.
Batters do indeed sometimes pick up on aspects of a pitcher’s delivery that tip them off on the type of pitch that’s coming, allowing them to adjust to it. But any pitcher that telegraphs their pitches that way isn’t going to be around very long in the majors to feast off of. Pitchers work very hard to ensure consistency in their delivery. As Garfield mentions, good hitters can often pick up the rotational pattern of the seams on the ball as it leaves the pitcher’s hand and determine whether the pitch is a fastball, curve, slider, etc. Good hitters tend to have exceptional eyesight, FWIW – not sure the average joe off the street would see the same thing even with training. And while you or I might not be able to do much with information about the speed and likely location of a pitch, anyone who’s made it to the majors as a position player generally can (and often does). According to the article linked above, to hit a professional fastball a batter’s swing starts when the ball is approximately 19 feet from the plate – in other words, over two-thirds of the way from the pitcher’s hand to the plate (given the 60’6" distance of the pitching rubber from the plate and the fact that the pitcher’s release point is usually a couple of feet in front of the rubber). Plenty of time to see the spin on the ball and adjust the swing accordingly.
Everything you say is all fine and good but doesn’t everyone know that baseball is just throwing a ball, hitting a ball and catching a ball? It all looks so easy when you watch the major leaguers on TV.
Just so there is no misunderstanding, the above statement is made with the utmost of sarcasm.
What these guys do is simply amazing. No ordinary person can step in and duplicate what the average major league player can do. Yes, it looks easy and the errors look stupid but it takes a hell of a lot to make it to the majors. Appreciate it!
One of the most amazing things I have ever seen was at the Louisville Slugger museum. They had a pitching machine set up to throw a 90mph fastball. The strike zone was right in front of you and the pitch hit a plexiglass wall inches away. Being on the receiving end of a big league fastball is humbling. Normal humans would not be able to start to swing before the ball was in the catcher’s glove.
