LIFE AT 100 MPH
THE BLESSING AND CURSE OF THROWING HARDER THAN THE NORM
During a college exhibition game on a Saturday afternoon in early October 2010, Ken Giles headed into the dugout after an overpowering 10-pitch inning of relief. • A lone scout, there to evaluate the opposing team, sat among the sparse crowd in the four short concrete bleachers behind home plate. Giles considered his outing in this meaningless game. Then a teammate relayed feedback from the scout regarding a velocity of epic proportions. • “You know what you were throwing?” Giles’ teammate said enthusiastically. “You were 100.” • There is a before and an after for every man who has thrown 100 mph. Reaching triple digits redefines him forever. A reputation for rarefied power becomes his new identity. Giles had not merely pitched 100 mph. As his teammate said, Giles was 100 mph.
Few scouts had even known of Giles, a righthander, until that point.
“Then it spread throughout the entire major league scouting,” Giles said. “It’s like a virus.”
Going forward, the bleachers at Yavapai College in Prescott, Ariz., overflowed with more than 250 spectators, including dozens of scouts pointing radar guns at each pitch Giles launched.
Now, nearly six years and dozens of 100 mph fastballs later, Giles has not surrendered a run in 25 of his last 29 appearances out of the Astros’ bullpen. His reputation born at Yavapai has led to a nickname known throughout the majors: “100 Miles” Giles.
As pitching velocity rises across the country, baseball lusts most for the 100-mph arm. Scouts flood into small towns based on hearsay of it. Executives dream about developing it. Fans exult whenever they see it. Giles revels in it. “It’s like having a superpower,” he said. “Guys that hover around 100, there’s a sex appeal to it,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said. “There’s usually a reaction out of the crowd.”
Giles was born with a hearing disability, but he does not need the sound of cheers to sense a crowd stirring with anticipation for his fastballs.
“You can feel the change in the atmosphere,” he said. “You can feel the rumbling. Your blood starts to boil.”
Some attest that a chasm between throwing 99 and 100 mph is palpable.
“It’s got a different sound,” Yavapai pitching coach Jerry Dawson said. “You can hear the seams cutting through the air.”
“Their stuff is at a different level,” Seattle Mariners pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. said of 100-mph pitchers. “They sense it. They wear it. You can see it.”
“I want to throw 100 one time,” said Astros reliever Michael Feliz, who has touched 99 mph. “I want that feeling.”
Chapman the standard
No matter how fast they pitch, players dream of throwing harder. Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman has the envy of baseball for his record 105-mph fastball. The Astros begin a series against Chapman and New York on Monday at Minute Maid Park.
“It was always fun to watch him do it,” Giles said. “If I watch closely enough, there might be that one key that could push my abilities to the next level.”
Average fastball speed in the majors has climbed every year since 2008 thanks to improved fitness and throwing programs. Fewer innings pitched and ubiquitous radar guns also have encouraged players to throw with maximum effort. According to Baseball Info Solutions, which examined pitchers who threw at least 25 percent of their fastballs at 95 mph or faster, 46 did so in 2003 compared with 184 last season.
“It’s trending toward more in the mid- to upper 90s, but 100 is a big deal,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said.
Peak velocity has become more common since the Guinness Book of World Records clocked Nolan Ryan at 100.9 mph in 1974. In 2003, only Billy Wagner, who was in his final season as Astros closer, threw at least 20 pitches at 100 mph. In 2015, nine pitchers did. Giles did so a respectable 12 times. Chapman is an anomaly: He unleashed 453 hyperspeed heaters, representing 39 percent of his total pitches.
Despite the infatuation with these arms, some in baseball sternly clarify that throwing this hard is not supernatural.
“Everyone loves velocity; they want to see triple digits,” Detroit Tigers manager and former Astros catcher Brad Ausmus said. “It doesn’t mean you’re going to be an excellent pitcher.”
But it does set a standard. Giles disappointed fans when he debuted in 2014 with the Phillies. “They booed me for only throwing 99,” he said, chuckling at the tough-love treatment.
Although Giles laughed it off, his first day in the big leagues foreshadowed an inherent conundrum gifted throwers eventually face: how to succeed when the fastball declines but the expectation to throw 100 mph remains.
Because these pitchers rely so much on top speed to compensate for any error, they rarely adapt well without it.
“A lot of them are wired different,” Stottlemyre said. “They’re not out there trying to be a pitch maker.”
In the chase to sustain or reclaim the elite fastball, hard throwers almost always hurt themselves more.
After 40 years in scouting, one National League evaluator assumes the worst when he sees 100 mph: “When’s this guy going to break down? We’re not built to launch something like that overhanded at that kind of speed.”
“The baseball pitcher, he’s actually hurting himself,” said Dr. Glenn Fleisig, the American Sports Medicine Institute’s research director.
Throwing a pitch around 100 mph subjects elbow ligaments to 100 newton-meters of torque, the maximum level of stress. Fleisig equates this to holding five 12-pound bowling balls in the palm of your hand in the cocked-back position. The repeated strain of these pitches creates small tears, which turn into fullblown injuries.
Surgeries skyrocket
At the institute in Birmingham, Ala., reconstructive surgeries on the ulnar collateral ligament in pitchers’ elbows increased from four procedures in 1994 to 131 in 2010.
Be it injury or command issues that routinely vanquished some of baseball’s hardest throwers, Giles does not have to look far from Minute Maid Park to find the most prescient examples.
Less than 5 miles away, Matt Anderson closed out games in the 1990s for Rice University with one prevailing motivation: “Throw the ball as hard as humanly possible.”
The Tigers drafted him No. 1 overall in 1997. By 2001, he amassed 22 consecutive saves as the closer. He stormed out of the bullpen to The Troggs’ “Wild Thing.” He ignored scouting reports and catcher’s signs.
“Hit the outside, hit the inside, whatever, um, I didn’t really go that route much,” he said. “He tells you a couple random things — like, yeah brah, let’s do this.”
An octopus-tossing contest ruined everything. At least that has been the story for years. Actually, Anderson tore a muscle in his armpit while pitching one night, but earlier at a Detroit fan event, he threw some baby octopuses — underhanded.
“Zeus lost his lightning bolt,” he said of why people think an octopus wrecked his indomitable stretch. “You have to figure out why it happened and explain it through something as obviously moronic as throwing a baby octopus 8 feet.”
Career declines rapidly
The injury robbed Anderson of 100 mph velocity. Without it, pitching felt “emptier.” He declined immediately and spent five years out of baseball before making a failed comeback in 2011.
More than a decade ago, Hinch oversaw minor league development for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who drafted Jason Neighborgall, a 102-mph pitcher whom coaches still mourn.
“He didn’t throw strikes,” Hinch said.
Neighborgall sent catchers to the showers covered in bruises. At Georgia Tech, he practiced throwing with his eyes closed, consulted a renowned mental coach, and ran a sprint for every pitch he threw above 95 mph, a punitive strategy to rein him in. None of it helped.
In 421⁄3 innings over his three minor league seasons, he struck out 48 batters, walked 128 and posted a 17.22 ERA.
The sizzle of a 100-mph pitch lingers in memories longer than it lasts on the field. One of the briefest bursts of high-velocity fame spanned 10 weeks in the spring of 2001 for Jonathan “Colt” Griffin.
“I ran into a guy at work the other day, and he knew about me,” Griffin said. “He was just in awe. He was like, ‘How’d that happen?’
“I’m still trying to figure that out.”
An irrelevant, wiry first baseman from Marshall, Griffin gave his try at pitching. Scouts attended a high school game in Natchitoches, La., to watch the opposing pitcher and left manic about Griffin’s mid-90s heat on a 42-degree afternoon.
A few starts later, Griffin reached 100 mph, purportedly the first high school player to register it on radar. Hundreds of scouts tracked him in a frenzy of attention.
As local lore has it, when a cop pulled over a man for speeding, the driver explained: “Well, sir, I’m going to watch Colt Griffin pitch.” The cop let him go.
Griffin once fired a pitch that nicked a batter’s helmet. Griffin’s coach thought he killed the kid. The batter was just lying still, in shock. His mother got the ball and had Griffin autograph it.
The Kansas City Royals drafted Griffin ninth overall with expectations he would be “the next Nolan Ryan,” according to then-scouting director Deric Ladnier.
Griffin never threw 100 mph again. Coaches tried to restore it by reconfiguring his motion. He tore his labrum after five years in the minors and retired at 22.
Growing up, he had hardly watched baseball on TV. He preferred to disassemble broken lawnmowers in his backyard and repair them. These days, he fixes parts as an engineer for an oil company in San Antonio. His fastball had opened a path he did not really want to pursue.
“That 1 mile an hour,” he said. “It made everything.”
Giles, 25, has overcome phases that challenged his predecessors. Like Griffin, he intimidated his peers, so much so that kids refused to play catch with him.
“If I hit you, you’re going to cry your eyes out,” Giles said. “I had to play catch with my dad most of my life.”
Oblique strains slowed Giles, but injuries did not derail him like Anderson.
His biggest hurdle, as with Neighborgall, was command. Teammates used to bet an over/ under on how many batters Giles would hit. It took years for him to straighten out by pitching more to contact.
A difference-making day
Now, Giles is ascending in the majors. He credits hitting 100 mph in front of a lone scout at Yavapai for propelling him.
“I felt accomplished,” he said, recalling that moment. “A lot of people downplayed me and what I’m able to do. I can raise the middle fingers to all the doubters. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life.”
Easing up on his pitches could prolong Giles’ career, but that goes against his nature. Throwing formidably at 100 mph pushes his body to its limit. He accepts that.
“If it blows out, it blows out,” he said. “Because if something happens to you and you never used it, you’re going to live with regret for the rest of your life.
“The 100 mile an hour label, that’s who I am. I’m not going to change.”