Low velocity pitching could be the next big thing
I was browsing the internet and was recommended a Major League Baseball video. The title was “Willians Astudillo gets batters out throwing 46 mph pitches.”
My interest was piqued so I click on it and thoroughly enjoyed what I saw. I am the kind of guy who enjoys the unusual. I like seeing a triple play.
I appreciate seeing a submarine pitcher like Pleasant
Grove’s Parker
Twisdale. Unusual things add an extra fun factor to baseball.
Astudillo, a major leaguer who plays for the Minnesota
Twins, was getting professional batters out with his low velocity pitches. It was astounding to me in the little effort he seemed to use in delivering his pitches.
In the game the Twins were playing the Los Angeles Angels. Astudillo came into the game and retired the side using seven pitches. The first batter lined out to third, the second grounded out to second and the third lined out to third.
Seeing this video triggered my brain waves. I wondered if low velocity pitching would be the next fad in Major League Baseball. I further wondered if college and high school pitchers would start drastically changing the speed of pitches in order to throw batters off.
Can you imagine? Picture yourself as an MLB player. You are used to hitting a myriad of pitches that are being fired in by a professional pitcher at high velocity (90-100 mph). Imagine how thrown off you would be if pitches started coming in, with movement nonetheless, at around 50 mph. Awkward.
When batting the two factors that the hitter must consider are the temporal factor, or how long it takes the ball to reach the plate, and the spatial factor which is the trajectory of the ball as it approaches.
A batter tries to estimate the timing of the pitch by raising his leg forward in sync with the pitcher’s motion. But what happens when he faces a pitcher with a slow delivery? Yep, his timing is thrown off. And what happens when timing is thrown off? Bad things happen like flyouts, groundouts and strike outs.
Astudillo has proven that professional batters have a difficult time hitting slower pitches such as a 46 mph changeup. This could be the wave of the future.
I can see more pitchers using the Astudillo method to throw the batter’s timing off in order to produce outs. It worked for him, so why not use it across the different levels of baseball competition?