Breaking Down Baseball’s Early Velocity Surge
Pitchers are scary. I know this because I recently watched an outing by Matt Brash, who, despite his nonexistent command that day, used a scorching heater and two breaking balls to stymie a formidable Astros lineup. He walked six, but those free passes went along with five strikeouts and just two hits allowed. The Mariners won by a score of 7 to 2. So it goes.
Pitchers are scary, and they’re getting scarier, in large part because they’ve developed the ability to throw harder and harder. It probably doesn’t even bear repeating at this point, but because it’s the subject we’re on, let’s refresh ourselves. Back in 2008, the first year with PITCHf/x data, pitchers averaged 91.8 mph on their four-seam fastballs. Last season, they averaged 93.8. That the league as a whole has gained two miles per hour is indicative of substantial change.
It’s 2022 now. It’s early, but so far, pitchers have been averaging 93.9 mph on their fastballs, for an uptick of 0.1 mph. Such a small difference might not seem like much, or something we should focus on right now. But this is merely a cursory glance. We haven’t even separated the starters from the relievers, and it’s the latter group that most people associate with triple-digit wizardry. Are bullpens hiding the fact that rotations aren’t quite stretched out yet due to an abbreviated spring? Let’s find out:
Not surprisingly, relievers have long been ahead of starters velocity-wise. But two trends characterize the more recent years. First, the gap between starters and relievers has shrunk. This season, the standard starter is averaging 93.8 mph, whereas the standard reliever is averaging 93.9. And second, while reliever velocity has essentially stagnated, starting pitcher velocity has been climbing aggressively. Compared to last season, relievers have actually lost 0.3 mph on their four-seamers. Starters, on the other hand, are up by a similar amount: 0.4 mph. Within our established timeframe, it’s the largest year-to-year increase on record.
All hail the illuminating power of graphs. But maybe we are getting a little ahead of ourselves here. It has, after all, been just two weeks since the season kicked off. So in the hopes of not getting yelled at in the comments, here’s another graph. I checked the early-season starter fastball velocities from past seasons and compared them against their eventual, full-season iterations, excluding 2020 due to its shortened slate. If the two numbers are similar, that means we can more confidently put stock into what the first few weeks have demonstrated. Good news:
What starters average early on pretty much mirrors what they record by season’s end. If anything, there’s a tendency for them to pick up a bit of velocity as the summer heat arrives. That could be due to pitchers’ tendencies to ramp up with time, the warming weather, or survivorship bias (bad pitchers don’t normally stay on rosters). Sure, the season started deeper into April than it usually does and the month isn’t even over, but barring unforeseen circumstances, pitchers are indeed on track to shatter a record that has seldom lasted for an extended period of time.
What’s familiar about this year is that once again, there’s been a likely trade-off between effectiveness and longevity. Pitchers are no longer conditioned or expected to go the distance; they’re often built for five, six, occasionally seven max-effort innings, and the numbers bear that out. Fastballs are faster than ever. But starters are also throwing fewer innings than ever, which could help to explain the shrinking divide between them and relievers. Baseball’s innings-per-start ratio of 4.5 as of Monday’s games is the lowest in major league history. That should increase once pitchers emerge from what is essentially an extended spring training necessitated by the lockout, but there’s a good chance they end up undershooting last season’s mark of five innings per start. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is up to you. The point is, it’s impossible to ignore.
Another similarity: It’s the young guns who are leading the charge. They’ve spent most of their careers in the current age of player development. They’re receptive to data-driven feedback, and importantly, they have considerably less mileage on their arms. It’s no coincidence that starters 25 and younger are averaging a whopping 94.7 mph this season, another record high (remove their contributions, and the league-average velocity drops to 93.4 mph). Some of that, admittedly, is because a player like Hunter Greene has an outsized presence this early in the season (it depends on the data source and what counts as a four-seamer, but if we remove him from the youth cohort, the group’s average four-seam velo dips to about 94.3 mph). But he’s an example of what’s now possible in baseball. Pumpin’ cheese at a hundo has never been so casual.
By comparison, starters who are slightly older (ages 26 to 30) are sitting a full tick lower: 93.7, which is only marginally higher than last season. Now, rookie hurlers do tend to cool off significantly as the season progresses. In 2021, for example, their average velocity in April was 94.4 mph, a mark that stood at 93.8 the rest of the way. But it doesn’t change the overall picture. Many players are throwing harder, and that’s especially true of the latest generation.
These are new pitchers we’re talking about, pitchers who had previously never made an impact at the major league level. But also contributing to higher velocities are pitchers with a few seasons under their belt, pitchers who used the offseason to become better versions of themselves. Maybe this is where we can identify how this season’s surge is different compared to previous ones. I thought of Alex Cobb, who in his first start for the Giants topped out at 96 mph – something he’d never accomplished before. Might we be seeing more velocity gains from older starters, and can we show that?
Cobb won’t be included in the rest of this article because I’m focusing on four-seamers, but that’s fine – there are plenty of other pitchers to work with. So far in 2022, 68 starting pitchers have thrown at least 50 four-seam fastballs. Looking back to 2021 data, I worked out each pitcher’s change in velocity and selected players who added more than 0.5 miles per hour. It’s an arbitrary threshold, but bear with me. I’ve also included their respective ages (as defined by the baseball season, not real life):
| Pitcher | Age | 2022 Velo | 2021 Velo | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mitch Keller | 26 | 96.3 | 93.8 | 2.5 |
| Shohei Ohtani | 27 | 97.6 | 95.6 | 2.0 |
| Tylor Megill | 26 | 96.4 | 94.6 | 1.8 |
| Carlos Rodón | 29 | 97.1 | 95.4 | 1.7 |
| Tanner Houck | 26 | 95.4 | 94.4 | 1.0 |
| Max Fried | 28 | 94.9 | 94.0 | 0.9 |
| Shane McClanahan | 25 | 97.3 | 96.4 | 0.9 |
| José Urquidy | 27 | 93.2 | 92.5 | 0.7 |
| Yu Darvish | 35 | 95.1 | 94.5 | 0.6 |
It’s unclear to me whether this is consistent with earlier seasons. But here, at least, the vast majority of starters who have added significant fastball velocity are in their mid- to late-20s. Darvish seems to be the outlier, and so is Cobb if we’re looking at sinkerballers. Teams have become adept at tailoring their development programs to individual pitchers’ needs and strengths, but physiological limitations are real: Past a certain age, access to new velocity heights or even former glory requires a perfect storm, and maintenance is another challenge on top of that. Why might the pitchers listed be of a similar age? Because it’s an opportune moment for more permanent changes.
All in all, this year’s velocity surge is a continuation rather than a deviation from any norm. While the relievers remain stuck, the starters are catching up at an alarming pace. And among those starters, the youngest ones are pushing the envelope with new, never-seen-before speeds, while those who are slightly older are building upon what they carried into the big leagues. There’s not much movement past the age of 30, but success stories certainly exist; in the future, they could become more common. I did notice that starters 35 and up are throwing much, much harder than in years past, though that’s because there are so few of them to begin with, and the ones who have stuck around are at this point in their careers precisely because the gas never stopped.
As mentioned before, this analysis leaves out pitchers whose primary fastball is either a sinker or a cutter. But in case you’re curious: For relievers, the average sinker velocity is up by 0.2 mph, while average cutter velocity is up by just 0.1 mph. In the case of starters, the average sinker velocity is down by 0.1 mph. Surprisingly, the average cutter velocity has jumped from 88.1 to 88.8 mph, but I’m willing to diagnose that as a residual effect of peppering in cutters once in a while as opposed to a genuine rise in cutter-first starting pitchers. It’s worth bringing up though, since, well, that uptick encapsulates what’s so stunning (and terrifying) about modern pitching. For a moment, we thought we might have reached a plateau. Soon afterwards, league-wide velocity began to trend upwards again, and here we are. It’s hard to say there even is a limit.
Justin is an undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis studying statistics and writing.
do you think the shorter april outings are playing a part in the velo spike? With the shorten st, seems like a lot of the league is not fully stretched out and starters may be airing it out a little more, knowing they are only going one or two times through?
Normally I’d say yes but I think the abbreviated spring has something to do with the shorter starts. Taking that into account, it’s still surprising we’re seeing this velo spike from starters.
Well, yes, the shorter spring has caused shorter starts while starters are still being built up. The point is that these starters already know in advance that they’ll probably only throw 4 or 5 innings (if that much), so they have less reason to hold back on their velocity to get through their entire start like they normally do.
How then do you explain Max Scherzer who threw 5 innings and 72 pitches in his first ST start then came back to go 6 innings in his next ST start. Last night he was masterful again with 7 innings of 1 hit ball on 102 pitches. There is no rhyme or reason for many of the decisions which are, as you said, made before the game even begins. It has reached a point that I smile when a starter who is cruising is yanked and the reliever is shelled.
Scherzer is an exception who managed to get stretched out quickly during the abbreviated Spring Training, and even then he was only allowed to throw 80 pitches in his first start of the regular season.
To me the overall trend in baseball where starters aren’t pitching as deep into games has more to do with the increase in velo. More max-effort and less worry about saving it for 7 or 8 innings. It’s why relievers have always been much higher.
whoops, my bad. I see everyone has already said this.
It’s getting to the point where starters are now so max-effort in their style that their velocity bands resemble that of classic one-inning power relievers. At this point, anyone who wonders why pitchers keep breaking at crazy rates despite all the modern tools to keep them healthy is just willingly blind.
In that start in LA, Greene threw 57 heaters. He maxed out at 102 MPH, averaged 100.2 MPH, and didn’t go below 98.5 MPH. 70.2% of his fastballs were within 1 MPH of his average, which is just about as condensed as most max-effort, one-inning relievers. Josh Hader was around 68% last season, for example. deGrom has been at almost 67%. And on and on. Max velos are now just 3 MPH higher than average velos, which is insane. Starters routinely lose velocity throughout starts, even many of the good ones. Burnes lost over a full tick on his cutter by the time the order rolled around a third time last season, for example.
When these topics come up, I always think of Justin Verlander during his golden years in Detroit. From 2011-12, he averaged 95.2 MPH, topped at 102.2, routinely gained two full ticks on average throughout his starts, and led baseball in wins, innings pitched, ERA+, strikeouts and almost every other stat that matters, also showing little to no TTO splits by virtue of his stuff improving every time he faced a hitter for a repeat time. He was conditioned to pitch a full game, averaged 115 pitches per game, and just about didn’t miss a start in his career until 2015. And you know what? Only a third of Verlander’s fastballs from 2011-12 were within 1 MPH higher or lower than his average, twice the velocity range of the average starter now. There are pitchers in baseball now with incredible arm talent, but they are pitching in a way that won’t maximize it in terms of volume. Cole, Alcántara, Burnes, Greene, deGrom, and others. Those guys could be 230 inning guys in their sleep if they were conditioned for it.
I think this is a case where forcing teams to have starters pitch more would mean more health over the long term, if you could force them to throw with less effort. Matt Brash (who also loses velo past 65 pitches or so) had an interview with PitchingNinja recently where he straight up said he throws every pitch as hard as he can. This is a starting pitcher saying this! Does that sound like a guy who’ll be throwing 200 innings anytime soon? I don’t think so.
You’ve just made the primary case for my ideas for either (1) the starter-linked DH or (2) putting a limit on mid-inning pitching changes. You can’t force teams to think long-term about developing a guy into the next Verlander, but if you tweak the rules to give a big incentive to let your better starters take a crack at a third time through the lineup, maybe you can get some 230 innings guys again.
I think the biggest and more clear tweak would be to limit the size of the pitching staff, on top of some measure to control reliever shuffling from AAA to the Majors.
Being extreme, let’s say that starting tomorrow, pitching staffs were to be cut down to 10 pitchers per team (5 starters, 5 relievers). I’d bet money that the average fastball velocity would immediately decrease at least 1-2 MPH right off the bat, as starters would then be expected to complete 7 innings and throw 100+ pitches on the regular, and not once in a while during their best outings. You would also likely see more strikes being thrown, because being efficient would matter again. Having a starter essentially pitching like a reliever with the stamina slider turned up a bit would not be viable anymore. The more pitchers per staff, the more viable it becomes for the innings to be distributed in shorter, more intense fragments.
Less max effort innings and more starter innings would likely reduce strikeouts, increase batting average and OBP, probably make pitchers healthier long term, and also create more stars via making individual pitchers (starter or reliever) more important again. Win-win-win-win for baseball, in my eyes.
I’m coming around on the pitcher limit. I think there are ways to accommodate true two-way pitchers if others follow the Ohtani path, which was my main concern.
As for the AAA shuttling, maybe MLB should allow one “free” midseason call-up for any particular pitcher. Each time a pitcher gets called up after that, the team has to cut him a check for a full year’s MLB minimum salary (which will also count towards the luxury tax caps).
A ten pitcher limit would be great. I think that MLB won’t come near that for years. A twelve pitcher limit might be the best that we could hope for in the near term.
That’s not viable when starters sometimes need to come out of the game after 3 innings or less due to injury or because they just don’t have it that night, not to mention if they go back to normal extra innings rules next year.
Now I fully support what MLB is already doing this year with a limit of 13 pitchers and 5 options a year, but they don’t need to be anymore extreme than that. Sure, it won’t help this particular problem much, but having an adequately sized bullpen is more important.
MLB’s three batter rule was such a bad implementation of what needed to happen for pace of play reasons. To me the rule should have been no mid-inning changes at all unless the pitcher has conceded a run within that inning. If your starter comes out for part of an inning, he’s pitching all of it or your opponent got something out of it.
As for velo and health: Your relievers probably will throw just as hard, at least at first, but you have to put them out there knowing there’s at least an outside chance they face six batters whether you want it or not. Will they eventually learn to pace themselves? No idea. Honestly I suspect nothing changes for them; if they were great without trying to blow everyone away they wouldn’t be high leverage relievers in the first place. But at least it might keep starters a little more measured, or else force you to have a couple relievers who you can trust over longer, more measured appearances.
I hate the three batter rule also, but I’d take a different approach. I wouldn’t penalize a team for pulling a starter mid-inning for several reasons, most importantly to give teams incentive to stretch their starters out to offset my proposed rule change, which is to limit teams to one mid-inning reliever replacement. Any more than that, you lose your DH and/or have the new reliever begin his first batter with a 1-0 count. That would probably offset any benefit of leveraging a platoon advantage for just a single batter. And, of course, it would speed things up.
They’ve already done this. It’s called the Universal DH. Now like in the AL, NL managers no longer need to worry about removing their starting pitcher an inning or two earlier than they would prefer to do so in order to pinch-hit (or make a double-switch) for them at a good opportunity.
However, this hasn’t incentivized AL starters to hold back any more than their NL counterparts have in recent years, so I don’t see it or any other rule tweaking in the manner serving as a suitable incentive now.
It’s an interesting topic. The question boils down to: whether maximizing volume while operating below full capacity for elite starters is more valuable than operating at max capacity at reduced volume.
I actually tend to think that I agree, for certain elite SPs (the unicorns with multiple plus pitches, good command, and elite velo), it may make sense to go for volume since even operating below 100% they are likely better than most RPs the team would use in a given inning.
But I think that for most pitchers, maximizing effectiveness is the path to creating the most value. Not every pitcher has the tools necessary to be nearly as effective at reduced capacity as they are at full capacity.
I think you’re right. I’ve been screaming for deGrom and others of near his ability to chill with the velo for a while now, and I think the answer to the “is maximizing volume while operating below full capacity more valuable than operating at full capacity in reduced volume?” question you posed is a clear NO with the way the current game is set up. No reason for guys to ease off the throttle when every team has an assembly line of hard throwing relievers with a wipeout breaking ball waiting right behind them, with 8 or 9 relievers on a roster. If you take some of those relievers away, then the equation makes a lot more sense.
I’d also like to say that obviously, Verlander was an extreme example, because he is the 21st century’s Nolan Ryan, but gaining velo through games and pacing yourself is definitely a skill that can be gained. Johnny Cueto also did it during his best years, as I recall. For those golden arms like Cole and Alcántara (both of whom slightly gain velo through games despite sitting 97+, which is insane), starting at 94 and finishing at 99/100 makes a lot more sense than sustaining 98, from both a health and strategy standpoint.
I was trying to think how to articulate something like this with guys like Kershaw and Greinke in mind. These guys are still very good pitchers while losing a lot of their peak velocity, in part because that was never their primary weapon when they were best of the best elite. But those guys are, as you put it, unicorns, even without ever having elite velo. That’s not available to many guys.
What I wonder about is what this does to long term contracts for pitchers. How do you know whether someone is like Verlander or Scherzer, where what he’s throwing is hard even though it isn’t max effort so he might be able to sustain it for a decade, vs someone who is always throwing max effort? Charlie Morton is open about throwing the ball max effort every time out and he’s old, but he also didn’t do that until his 30s. Would he still have been good last year if he’d been doing that since he was 21? Seems unlikely.
What pitcher is going to tell you “no I swear, I’m not throwing max effort” in a believable way? You’re not going to ask the guy to hit 98 on the gun in January when you’re negotiating a free agent deal with him if he hasn’t thrown a pitch in four months. Just seems like we’re leaning in even more to blowing out arms while guys are still under team control. Somewhere around 30 years old these guys are finally able to get the big money their elite performance merits, but their arms are all completely done.
The difference with the starters is that the extra innings they pitch have a lot of value even if they’re not quite as effective as a parade of relievers would be.
It’s not viable to just send out relievers for 5-6 innings every game no matter how much you’ve maximized effectiveness, so you need your starters to go longer than just two times through the order at least sometimes no matter if you need to make a tradeoff in overall effectiveness on a per inning basis.
This is one of the best comments and analysis of the pitching situation as it exists today that I have seen anywhere. Has anyone ever asked the great fast ball pitchers of the recent past, my lifetime which began in 1942, which included McDowell, Gibson, Seaver, Ryan, Martinez and Randy Johnson, just to name a few, how much effort they put into each pitch early in the game. Watching all these men, it never occurred to me that they weren’t putting max effort into every heater they threw. Gibson’s iconic follow-through spun him around like a top. Ryan started the game at 100+ and ended the game at 100+ even when he was in his 40’s. I am of the opinion that velocity has to be controlled before hitting disappears even more than it has in
today’s game.
I feel like I read somewhere many years ago that Schilling had been asked that question and said he tried to max out or close to it early on and then realized he could throttle back a little bit and didn’t have to go 100% all the time, which led to him regularly throwing 250 IP innings on the regular in the late 90s and early 00s.
(No idea where the article was and there’s a non-zero chance that I am misattributing the pitcher, but feel fairly sure it was Schilling.)
There’s a similar story with Randy Johnson. Nolan Ryan had a random one-off conversation with him where he suggested a change in how he landed. It forced Unit to focus on having good directional mechanics rather than throwing as hard as he could, which got him in the strike zone. That was in late summer 1992. Through 1992 he walked 6+ batters per 9. After that he was never above 3.8 (and was generally below 3.
It wasn’t about backing off as such, but it’s a really similar effect I think. If you watch video of him throwing, the slider in particular looks like such an easy, low-effort delivery.
I still think it’s one of the great stories in sports history that Randy Johnson ended up with such good mechanics that he not only got his control in line, but was able to stay healthy enough to be a power pitcher pretty far into his 40s.
Obviously, we’d have to ask them, or we’d need hard data we don’t have, but when I go and watch some classic games, there seems to be more range to their effort level than what you see now, and it’s more based on the situation. There is no reason to be hitting near your max with the bases empty in the first inning, and that’s something I’m sure they were well aware of. Pedro could reach the upper 90s but his velo would often be more in the low 90s through his starts, for instance, and there were some 96+ heaters in his arm in the late innings.
There is much to agree with in what you say. It makes sense to not go full bore if you are getting everybody out with less than 100% effort. “Reaching back for something extra” when the need arose has been a part of baseball lexicon for as long as the game has been played. Even in today’s talent evaluations it is common to read that so-and-so sits 92-94 but can get it up to 98. Isn’t that the same thing but simply put in a slightly different context? Does that qualify for total max effort? I would say yes in the same way that starters of a past era used their fastball.
Pitching in a Pinch…
I agree with a lot of what you are saying here, but one thing I’d like to point out is the impact that a pitcher’s command has on how they approach pitching. Guys like Brash or Alcantara, or even Ohtani (to some extent) with below average control/command can get away with it and be effective because of how hard they throw – I’m not sure any would be nearly as effective throwing 93 as they would be throwing 98. Control/command is one of the hardest things to learn, so it’s not a given that it would improve with less velocity – there’s a reason most starters with big stuff but poor command in the minors end up as relievers. Guys like Cole and DeGrom have good enough control that I think they could, but I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all kind of thing – 140 innings of Brash at max effort could very well be more valuable than 215 innings of 80% Brash.
This is totally true, and I think you would end up with guys like Brash becoming similar to the ace firemen relievers of the 60s-70s-80s, a multi-inning buzzsaw who can give you 100+ high leverage innings in relief. And starters would maybe lean a bit more towards control. Each pitcher’s his own thing, and we wouldn’t know until they tried.
Agreed. The question then becomes is that 100+ inning guy more valuable as a reliever pitching 2-3 innings every 2-3 games or as a 5 and dive type starter. I don’t know the answer to that, and I don’t think teams really do either. It probably has a lot to do with the makeup of your roster. That’s why you have plenty of guys like Brash out there, but also guys like Garrett Whitlock, who has pitched more than 2 innings in 3 of his 4 relief outings, including a 4 inning one.
Your answer may vary depending on how you view the game stylistically, which is fair, but in terms of raw value I don’t know which is the “better” way to do things. It would be interesting to know if there was a way to quantify that.
I have to agree with bosoxforlife- this is one of the most interesting bits of analysis on starting pitchers I’ve read in a while. Is there any research you could point to for people interested? If not, I’d read the heck out of a fanpost walking through this.
I feel like the logical conclusion of this is 2 “starters” per game, each throwing 3-4 max effort innings. Not a fan.
Of course then you would have to find 10 fairly effective starters when teams struggle to find five nowadays. Some of those relievers who can throw the gas for an inning at a time could potentially be effective over 3-4, but I would suspect many could not (or there would be a steep, steep learning curve anyway).
I agree with you. This is a logical outcome and extension of the Rays’ starter approach for most teams. Maybe not every starter, but you can likely do this effectively for your 3/4/5 back-end guys. Do your lefty/righty combo that Boston planned with Hill and Whitlock.
I realize it’s just two starting pitchers out of the roughly 150 or so that have started a couple of times this year, so hardly a drop in the bucket that skews the average in any way but I’m slightly concerned about Flexen and Ray. Both are throwing about a tick or two slower than their average. Ray has been hovering around 92mph in his three starts this year, which isn’t too far from his normal of 93-94mph, but it’s considerably down from his Cy Young season last year (he sat 94-95mph on average). Last night against the Rangers he was 90-92mph. He has been effective, although not as dominant as he was in 2021.
Last year, Flexen averaged about 92-93mph on his fastball. This year he’s anywhere from 88-92mph so far. He’s never had a great fastball to begin with, but it is usually just fast enough enough to help him manage contact. Against the Astros on Saturday night, he was sitting 90mph on his 4-seam fastball, and threw lots of cutters in the mid-high 80s. He got tattooed all night. His opponent, Justin Freaking Verlander, was sitting 94-95mph in his second real game back from Tommy John surgery. He damn near threw a Maddux but was pulled after the 8th inning once he reached his predetermined pitch limit.
I’m not ready to panic yet, since it is early in the season, after a lengthy lockout, after a shortened spring, and the Mariners have been playing in terrible baseball conditions (cold in Minnesota, cold and rainy in Chicago, and cold but with a roof on in Seattle). It’s just a little odd that while many arms are throwing much harder than average already, a couple of key members of Seattle’s rotation are throwing below their career norms out of the gate.
It’s not fair that you only include 4-seam fastballs, since it leaves out high velocity sinkers like with Cobb and Jordan Hicks.
What’s interesting is the Rays have the hardest throwing starting pitcher, and the softest throwing pitching staff…by quite a bit. There’s a smaller gap ffrom #1-26 than 27 to the Rays.
I know it’ll be so contentious if I mention climate change here, but I can’t stop thinking how much of an impact warming weather can have on rising velocities. If warmer temperatures in summer help pitchers gain velocities, climate change can definitely be a factor in pitchers throwing harder than ever before.