Modern pitchers find speed kills as batters adjust

PITCHING aficionados will constantly advocate that movement and location are more valuable tools than velocity. Yet, in a few weeks, teams in the draft will gravitate to those who light up a radar gun over those who display craft.

The theories are: 1) You can teach the hard-thrower craft easier than you can add heat to a fastball and 2) few in the drafting apparatus get fired for favoring something as overt as big velocity.

I bring this up because it seems hitters — at their Darwinian best — have evolved over the past few years to better handle the ever-increasing velocity and that pitchers who can pitch, of all things, now have an advantage. For ex- ample, Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated was the latest to do a deep dive in how the value of a curveball never has been greater.

Consider 121 pitchers had thrown at least 40 innings this year, and just one in the top 10 in average velocity also was in the top 10 in ERA: Michael Fulmer (95.2 mph and 10th in ERA). Meanwhile, three of the bot- tom nine in average velocity were in the top nine in ERA:

Dallas Keuchel (88.7, second in ERA), Jason Vargas (86.2, seventh) and Andrew Triggs (89, ninth). The average fastball for a major league starter was 92.2 mph and half the ERA top 10 was under that, and the two who were above — Clayton Kershaw and Lance McCullers — argu-

ably feature the best curves in the game.

Noah Syndergaard was throwing the hardest average fastball before tearing his lat. And perhaps the preceding information would be most valuable to the headstrong righty, who has chased more and more velocity and might be on the DL most of this season because of it.