New radar gun pulling a big fast one

NEW YORK — The scoreboard at Citi Field showed Jacob deGrom hitting 98 mph, and the ballpark buzzed with the Mets star back in top form.

In Seattle, fans surely thought the same when Felix Hernandez’s fastball ticked up on opening day. And how about that extra juice from Tigers ace Justin Verlander?

Pitchers are ramping up the velocity this season — or at least it seems that way.

But not so fast. They’re actually getting a little help: Major League Baseball has changed the way it’s recording and reporting pitch speeds, driving up readings all over the league.

After previously using PITCHf/x to provide velocities to broadcasts and ballparks, Major League Baseball Advanced Media is instead supplying numbers from its Statcast system. The key difference is that PITCHf/x calculates velocity at a set point — usually 50 or 55 feet from the back of home plate — while Statcast measures velocity directly out of the pitcher’s hand.

Because of that difference, Statcast readings are faster than PITCHf/x by about 0.6 mph on average, according to MLBAM senior data architect Tom Tango.

“We do have the technology to capture the speed right out of the hand now,” Tango said. “So that’s what we report.”

Trouble is analysts aren’t necessarily comparing apples to apples on velocity from last year.

For example, PITCHf/x had deGrom averaging 93.4 mph on his four-seam fastball in 2016. On Wednesday, Statcast measured him at 94.2 mph.

What does all that mean? For the average fan, perhaps a few more triple-digit fastballs at the stadium, but likely not much else.

For the sabermetric community, it’s an effort to get everyone using the same data.

“We’re standardizing so we all see the same,” Tango said.