Fastball training answers need for speed
Learning how to throw harder can give pitchers a leg up on competition
KENT, WASH.— Trevor Bauer is the son of a chemical engineer. An engineer, Bauer explained, will consider a problem, develop a process to solve it, then implement, evaluate and adjust until finding a solution. Nothing is untrainable.
Bauer did not want to be a chemical engineer, though. He wanted to be, and still wants to be, the best pitcher in baseball. He succeeded on the mound as a boy in California, yet the youngsters who threw harder, even by a little bit, attracted more attention.
“I was like, ‘OK, I’m tired of those people getting opportunities over me because I don’t throw as hard,’” Bauer said recently, in the Cleveland Indians’ clubhouse. “Why don’t I throw harder?” Bauer threw 78 mph as a high school freshman. The summer after that season, he visited a coach in Texas, Ron Wolforth, to do something about it. In a few years, Bauer became a hard-throwing first-round draft pick and was soon in a major league rotation.
For most pitchers, from sandlots to stadiums, velocity has never been a decision. Anything else in pitching can be learned. But nobody teaches a fastball, it is said; you either throw hard or you don’t.
Dan Straily, a starter for the Miami Marlins, listed his pitches on the bench before a recent game. A college teammate taught him his slider. A major league teammate taught him his curveball. A minor league coach taught him his changeup.
“And then everyone throws a fastball,” Straily said. “I’ve thrown the same four-seam fastball forever.”
Yet Bauer and Straily have shown that the fastball can be taught — by building a better one, in Bauer’s case, or restoring a missing one, in Straily’s. Neither has been an all-star, but both have become durable, dependable starters, the kind worth millions to teams.
Bauer and Straily have both worked with Kyle Boddy at Driveline Baseball’s training centre here, where Bauer expanded on the lessons he learned from Wolforth at the Texas Baseball Ranch in Montgomery, Texas. Neither Boddy nor Wolforth pitched professionally, but they have built thriving businesses by teaching each pupil to maximize—safely, they insist — his body’s capacity for throwing hard.
They symbolize, and have helped fuel, the speed game baseball has gradually become. According to Fangraphs, the average fastball in 2002 was 89 mph. It has crept higher in each of the last seven seasons, to 92.8 mph. Rising velocity is changing the sport, and all but shutting out pitchers who cannot keep up.
Boddy has several units at his complex, including one to store Driveline’s inventory of brightly coloured PlyoCare balls, weighing from 3.5 ounces to 4.4 pounds. (Standard baseballs are 5 to 5.25 ounces.) Still another unit acts as a laboratory, with 12 high-speed cameras surrounding a mound, capturing biomechanical data while a cluster of computers tracks every movement in intimate detail.
“When you go watch the video,” Straily said, “you can see the hair on your finger.”
The fastest pitch on record is 105 mph, by Aroldis Chapman as a rookie in 2010. Boddy said the maximum, someday, will most likely be 107-110 mph — but more significantly, the velocity bell curve will continue shifting to the right. That is, more and more pitchers will cluster around 95 mph, meaning that virtually all pro pitchers must be selected from that group. And some will become disposable, a trend that is already evident.
“There’s tons of guys that throw 95-plus, and their average career is like a running back in the NFL,” Boddy said. “They pitch two or three years and then they’re done.”
Wolforth started his business in 1993, and a decade ago, he said, teams viewed him as a pariah. He could help pupils throw hard enough to get signed, but mainly built pitchers who could win teddy bears at carnivals, not actual games.
“There was real criticism: You get a Wolforth guy in 2008, he’s going to throw the ball through a car wash and not get it wet, but I’m not sure he could throw it over the white thing,” Wolforth said. “And now, when we send a guy up, not only can they throw it over the white thing and throw it hard, but they can also recover, and their pitch ability goes very high. We have shifted our emphasis and broadened it.”
Today, Wolforth said, he spends more time teaching mechanics, secondary pitches and command than teaching velocity. Wolforth believes that with a comprehensive, individu- alized program, all pitchers can find their maximum velocity. But that is only part of what they need.
“The radar gun doesn’t tell us if they can pitch or not,” Wolforth said. “It’s a very simple, snap way to tell something, and sometimes it’s not the best way, but people like it because it immediately gives you feedback and it’s comparable.”
As velocity rises, the theory goes, so do pitching injuries. Both are up this year. But simply blaming velocity may be too simple. Throwing too hard, too often, with improper mechanics, at too young an age — all of those factors can damage developing ligaments and tendons. And the best predictor of future injury is past injury.
Yet it would also be wrong to scold amateurs for pitching to the radar gun. They are only following the new rules of the game.
“Velo is king, at least in the draft process, amateur ball and up into minor league ball,” Bauer said. “Once you get to the big leagues, and you’re here, getting outs and stuff like that is king. But up until the big leagues, velo is king, and in the minor leagues, guys that have poor results but throw really hard get a lot more opportunities than guys that have really good results but throw 86 or 88.”
Of course, hitters would not be in the majors if they could not connect with straight fastballs. And while velocities are rising, pitchers are actually throwing fewer and fewer fastballs. Just 55.6 per cent of all pitches have been fastballs this season, the lowest figure in the 16 seasons tracked by Fangraphs.
Washington’s Max Scherzer, a twotime Cy Young Award winner, is dominating again this season despite using his fastball for fewer than half of his pitches, for the first time in his career. Scherzer said hitters had responded to pitching advancements by changing their approach.
“The only way they’re doing damage against some of these guys is to keep swinging for the fences, keep going for the home run,” Scherzer said.