VELOCITY IS STRANGLING BASEBALL
More pitchers are able to throw harder, faster
A flame-throwing relief pitcher enters a game — mid-inning, runners on base, tie score — sending the telecast to another commercial break, dialing back the tension in the stadium and pushing the game into its fourth hour. As he faces his first batter, two more relievers are warming up in the bullpen.
He takes huge breaths and lengthy pauses between pitches, as he gears up for each neck-straining, 100 m.p.h. heater or sharp-breaking slider. The hitter, fully aware he has little chance of making contact, likewise gears up to swing for the fences, just in case he does. The defence, anticipating the full-throttle hack, shifts acutely to the hitter’s pull side.
Within this scenario are the ingredients many believe are strangling the game of baseball: long games with little action, the growing reliance on relief pitchers at the expense of starters, the all-or-nothing distillation of the essential pitcher/hitter matchup. Those are some of the problems Major League Baseball is contemplating, with newly installed and proposed rule changes. But they are merely the symptoms.
What is strangling the sport — the actual disease — is velocity, pitchers’ unprecedented capacity to throw fast. The question facing the stewards of the game is what, if anything, to do about it.
This much is undeniable: As baseball celebrates its 150th season this year, the version of the sport being played in 2019 is unlike any other in its history.
“It’s a new age of baseball,” Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander said, “and fundamentally, it’s velocity that’s driving it.”
Baseball’s timeless appeal is predicated upon an equilibrium between pitching and hitting, and in the past, when that equilibrium has been thrown off, the game has always managed, either organically or through small tweaks, to return to an acceptable balance.
But there is growing evidence that essential equilibrium has been distorted by the increasing number of pitchers able to throw the ball harder and faster. Rising pitch velocity has altered the sport, many believe, and not necessarily in a good way.
“It’s changed some dynamics,” Pittsburgh Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said. “The pitching side jumped ahead of the hitting side from my perspective, and now we’re playing catch-up on the offensive side.”
The 2018 season was the first in history in which strikeouts outpaced hits, a trend that has accelerated so far in 2019. The ball is in play less than ever, with a record 35.4 per cent of plate appearances in 2019 resulting in a strikeout, walk or home run. Teams are using an average of 3.3 relievers per game in 2019, just below last year’s all-time record of 3.4. The leaguewide batting average of .245 in 2019 is the lowest since 1972, and a drop of 26 points from 1999, at the height of the steroids era. The leaguewide strikeout rate of 8.78 per nine innings, also a record, is higher than the career rate of Roger Clemens.
“I wouldn’t say it’s killed the game,” said veteran Baltimore Orioles pitcher Alex Cobb, speaking of the rise in pitch velocity and its many effects. “More like ‘injured’ it.”
Most, if not all, of this change can be traced back to the rising velocity of the fastball — the fundamental unit of pitching — from a leaguewide average of 89 m.p.h. in 2002, when Fangraphs first recorded data, to 92.9 m.p.h. so far this season. At the upper end of the spectrum, the shift is even more striking: In 2008, there were 196 pitches thrown at 100 m.p.h. or higher, according to Statcast data. In 2018, there were 1,320, a nearly sevenfold increase. In 2008, only 11 pitchers averaged 95 m.p.h. or higher; in 2018, 74 did. Aroldis Chapman of the New York Yankees and Jordan Hicks of the St. Louis Cardinals have both been clocked at 105 m.p.h.
“You look around the game, and every guy coming out of the bullpen seems to be throwing 98 to 100 (m.p.h.),” said veteran reliever Peter Moylan, who retired this year after a 13-season career and is now an analyst on Atlanta Braves telecasts. “It’s insane. There’s more emphasis on the ’pen than on starters. It’s a different game than when I started.”
Even as MLB has sought to mitigate some of the effects of the current atmosphere — with rule changes designed to increase action — it is becoming apparent these changes amount to treating the symptoms and not the root cause. And that’s understandable: It’s one thing to identify velocity as the root cause of baseball’s inaction problem, but another thing to police it. You can’t legislate that pitchers can no longer throw above 95 m.p.h.
Baseball has always had pitchers who throw hard. But what has changed is the recognition that velocity as an attribute is perhaps the single biggest difference-maker in the sport. It has resulted in the focused cultivation of it — both by individual pitchers, through hightech, off-season training programs, and front offices, through player acquisition.
In 2018, the five highest-ranking pitching staffs in strikeout rate were the Astros, Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Indians and Los Angeles Dodgers — four division champions and a 100-win wild card. Those teams’ combined rate of 9.8 strikeouts per nine innings was higher than the career rates of Nolan Ryan or Sandy Koufax.
“You’re right that (front offices) are obsessed with velocity, and the reason is that it works,” Toronto Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins said. “It is definitely the hardest thing to hit. It changes approaches, for sure. You can’t hit velocity without getting geared up to attack it.”
That is borne out in the data. Here, via Statcast, are the slashlines (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) of MLB hitters in 2018 against four different pitch-speeds:
■ Vs. 92 m.p.h.: .283/.364/.475
■ Vs. 95 m.p.h.: .259/.342/.421
■ Vs. 98 m.p.h.: .223/.310/.329
■ Vs. 101 m.p.h.: .198/.257/.214
“Absolutely, it’s been a massive change,” San Francisco Giants first baseman Brandon Belt said. “It’s crazy. And it definitely goes back to velocity. Pitchers are throwing harder. I don’t blame them. You get major league contracts by throwing hard.”
One seeming contradiction is that fastball usage, as a percentage of overall pitches, has been steadily decreasing, from 64.4 per cent of all pitches in 2002 to just 52.8 per cent so far this year. But that doesn’t mean pure velocity is any less effective — it merely indicates teams have learned to dole out fastballs in more effective patterns. The simple threat of a 99 m.p.h. fastball makes the 92 m.p.h. slider or the 90 m.p.h. change-up that much more effective.
“The challenging part isn’t necessarily the fastball; it’s more the secondary stuff,” Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto said. “Strikeouts come from fastballs, there’s no doubt about it. But from my experience, the gap (in velocity) between the two can be more of a challenge than the fastball itself.”
While there are some who might love the extreme power-vs.-power dynamic in modern baseball there is awareness across the game that the overall lack of action and the style of play on the field is turning off fans and damaging the bottom line. Leaguewide attendance in 2018 declined for the sixth straight season, to 28,659 per game, down 13 per cent from its 2007 peak, alarming MLB officials.
“We need to adjust,” said one big league general manager, who asked for anonymity to speak freely. “People who love the game, it’s still great. We still love it. I don’t need it to change. But we’re not getting the young fans. The stats are alarming.”
“There are multiple ways to look at it,” said Chris Young, who pitched in the majors from 2004 to 2017 and is now MLB’S vice-president for on-field operations, initiatives and strategy. “Certainly, the game has changed compared to historical norms, with more strikeouts than ever. But that said, we’re also seeing extreme talent in terms of pitching.
“What’s important is finding a balance. You want velocity in today’s game, but we don’t want everyone to have extreme velocity. There’s an art to pitching, and we don’t want to get away from that, but there’s also something great about power and velocity.”
What’s important is finding a balance. You want velocity in today’s game, but we don’t want everyone to have extreme velocity.
The fascination with pitch velocity is not a recent development, of course. Even before it could be properly measured, the hardest throwers in the game — Amos “The Hoosier Thunderbolt” Rusie, Walter “Big Train” Johnson, Bob “Rapid Robert” Feller — were celebrated for their sizzling fastballs.
“Even a casual fan knew (those) pitchers could really bring it, even though nobody was quite sure how fast (they) did throw,” said Tim Wendel, author of High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All-time. “What’s changed in recent years is our fascination with velocity has become an addiction.”
But if the rise in velocity was not sudden, neither was it accidental. As a skill, it has been isolated and cultivated, with increasing sophistication. But what has this reliance on velocity wrought? It has altered the game in numerous ways, most of them not in a way that would be considered beneficial. Pick a problem, or a perceived problem, in baseball, and it can probably be traced back, directly or indirectly, to the rise of pitch velocity as the sport’s ultimate weapon.
■ Arm injuries? That’s an obvious one. In a 2018 study headed by former Red Sox trainer Mike Reinold, pitchers who went through a six-week velocity training program featuring weighted balls increased their velocity by an average of more than two m.p.h., but were “substantially” more likely to suffer arm injuries than those in the control group. The finding confirmed that of previous studies linking increasing velocity to increasing rates of injury.
“Within a subject, the faster he threw, the more torque (was placed) on the elbow. It was a very strong finding,” said Glenn Fleisig, research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute and a co-author of the 2018 study. “If a pitcher gains three miles per hour from an off-season program, he’s going to be more at risk for injury.”
■ Time of game? The average nine-inning game has taken three hours, two minutes so far in 2019, just a few ticks below the 2017 record of 3:05, and about 15 minutes longer than it was 30 years earlier. Part of that is undoubtedly due to more dead time, but there are also about 25 more pitches per game in 2019 than there were in 1989, partly the result of higher velocity leading to longer, drawn-out at-bats that result in more strikeouts and more walks.
■ Pace of play? A 2017 study by Fivethirtyeight.com found that MLB pitchers were holding the ball for two full seconds longer than they did a decade earlier, and that for every extra second they waited — in effect, gearing up for each full-throttle pitch — they gained 0.02 m.p.h.. Some teams, including the Tampa Bay Rays, appeared to have recognized the link and made it part of their coaching. Commissioner Rob Manfred’s proposed 20-second pitch clock, tested during spring training, is largely an effort to reverse this trend.
■ The frequency of pitching changes and the rising importance of relievers? Teams used an average of 4.36 pitchers per game in 2018, the highest in history and one pitcher more than was used as recently as 1994. One big reason: Teams have concluded that a procession of relievers throwing 96-100 m.p.h. for an inning at a time is more effective than a starting pitcher in his fifth or sixth inning of work, throwing 91-94 m.p.h. because he needs to conserve energy over a longer haul.