Flameout for MLB’s big guns
Self-defeating strategy pushes for more velocity
Mix big, strong, fast athletes driven by milelong competitive streaks with technology designed to make them bigger, stronger, faster and what do you get?
An injured list that stretches from the manager’s office to the trainer’s room and back, a roster with too many players not ready for prime time, and a fan base growing increasingly disinterested.
Face it, the human body can’t keep pace with the human mind’s ability to devise ways to increase a pitcher’s velocity, a power hitter’s muscles, a pitcher’s spin rate.
The Yankees have so many injuries that in another era they already would have been written off, but to do so would be to assume that other teams won’t catch up to them in ailing players. For the Red Sox, their talent already diminished by the trade of Mookie Betts and David Price, things look even grimmer with the announcement that Chris Sale’s elbow flared up again after throwing 15 pitches of batting practice. Openers, anybody? Red Sox interim manager Ron Roenicke made several interesting points recently when discussing the state of pitching and the consequences of an industry-wide obsession with velocity.
Organizations are putting a greater emphasis than ever on acquiring velocity and putting greater effort into training methods that increase velocity, Roenicke noted.
“We’re training with heavy balls now, which for sure increases velocity, if you’re doing it right,” Roenicke said. “So all these things lead to more velocity, but also more injuries.”
Roenicke mimicked a reliever after he has delivered his first pitch by putting sleeve to his face and looking up.
“You see what pitchers do, rub here and look at the radar reading,” Roenicke said. “It’s there it’s real. You see it in every big-league game. A pitcher comes into the game, he throws that first pitch and those eyes are right up on the radar. And when they don’t see what they are used to seeing, maybe a guy’s 95 and all the sudden he looks up there and he’s 92, he’s like whoa.”
So he puts even more effort into the next pitch, increasing his risk of injury.
As for trying to convince a pitcher he doesn’t have to max out his velocity, good luck with that. Oft-injured Sox right-hander Nathan Eovaldi routinely throws 100 mph early in the exhibition season. Try telling just about any power pitcher to take his foot off the gas.
“It’s hard,” Roenicke said, “probably because it’s been such max effort the whole time that they aren’t able to back off a little and hit a spot. Sometimes you’ll see it on a 3-0 count, a guy knows he has to throw a strike, so he’ll back off a little bit, but they’re just not trained to do that. They’re trained to get after it every pitch. Starters are a little bit different, but even starters, how many guys can maintain that big velocity for years?”
The obsession with numbers in baseball front offices affects how scouts turn in reports on amateur talent go about their jobs. Recommend a pitcher with high velocity and he fails, well, you have the numbers to back it up. Go to bat for a finesse pitcher because you have a hunch about him and he doesn’t cut it, you get fired.
It’ll take guts for an organization to charge its scouts to search for finesse pitchers whose low-effort, smooth deliveries indicate they’ll have a better shot at staying healthy. Allowing 13 pitchers per roster curtails incentive to search for minimum-effort delivers. When one flamethrower gets injured, just summon another from Triple A.
Can finesse pitching make a comeback?
“I think if we see success, if we see pitchers come up and they’re successful hitting spots, I think if that happens, yeah,” Roenicke said. “I just hope they continue to give those guys chances, so if you’re in college and your record is whatever it is, 15-3, but you only throw 88, I hope we still give those guys a chance.”
It’s likely to get worse before it gets better.
“The biggest thing for me is the injury factor,” Roenicke said. “Obviously, we love to see guys coming out of our bullpen who are throwing 96 and above, they’ve got movement and they’re spinning the ball. It gives you a lot of comfort when those guys are coming into the game because you know they get away with more mistakes, but it’s all about the injury with me, trying to figure out as we move forward in years, is this injury thing going to get worse? As we learn how to increase velocities, increase the muscle mass that whatever strength your tendons and ligaments can hold up to, is this going to get worse? If it gets worse, then it’s bad. I know we’re smarter than we’ve ever been medically, yet we’re seeing more injuries than we’ve ever seen.”
It’ll get worse. And when it does, the game will be less interesting, the pace slower, the scores higher.