JABO: Surviving With Jered Weaver’s Velocity

Pitching in the major leagues is almost incomprehensibly difficult. It’s easy to pick up on that fact by watching the revolving door of pitchers who simply don’t have the talent, health, or stuff to make it. There is no leeway in pitching, no slack, no grace period to ease into: major league baseball is a wood chipper that pitchers are fed into with the hope that they’ll emerge on the other side with a manageable amount of damage.

This is the main reason why pitchers live and die by velocity. With increased velocity, a pitcher’s margin of error grows, and they can get away with making more mistakes. With lower velocity, a pitcher has to rely on guile, movement, and strategy to be successful. Then, of course, there is the extreme low end of the velocity spectrum, which is what we’ll be look at today: the seldom-seen outlier, heir apparent to Jamie Moyer. These are the rare pitchers who have either figured out a way to get by with diminished stuff, or are simply (and cruelly) not long for starting duties.

The particular pitcher we’re talking about is Jered Weaver, whose fastball velocity dropped five miles per hour between the 2014 and 2015 seasons. With his fastball clocking in at just above 88 mph in September of 2014, Weaver was another veteran pitcher in the midst of a lucrative five-year, $85 million contract; a year later, after a month-long stint on the disabled list for hip inflammation, he was throwing at an average of 83-84 mph and had entered the rare territory of soft-throwing starters who are still offered a full workload. Here’s a good visual from Brooks Baseball that tells the story of what happened to his fastball velocity:

The main question today is this: what does Weaver need to do to be able to survive at this unique velocity level, and what might we learn about it from those who came before him?

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