Fastball Velocity, Fastball Usage, and All That Fun Stuff
For the better part of this decade, we’ve repeatedly published an article you can more or less predict. Nearly every year, a version of the same idea gets published. “You’re never going to believe it,” the article starts, “but fastballs got faster again this year.” There are usually some GIFs, maybe a winking joke about how we write this article every year and it keeps being true, and bam, 1,500 words out the door. Oh yeah! There’s also a kicker: “Fastballs keep getting thrown less frequently, too.”
Normally, I’d be writing that article again this year. There’s just one problem: four-seam fastballs didn’t get faster this year; in fact, they’ve been plateauing for a few years. This year’s four-seamers checked in at an average velocity of 93.9 mph. Adjusting for time of year (I used only data from August onward in each season so that we didn’t have any weather effects unique to 2020), here are the last five years of four-seam velocity:
Year | Velo (mph) |
---|---|
2015 | 93.3 |
2016 | 93.4 |
2017 | 93.3 |
2018 | 93.3 |
2019 | 93.5 |
2020 | 93.3 |
The 2019 season was the fastest on record, and 2020 fell short of that mark. In fact, the last five years look overall unchanged. Look instead at sinkers, though, and you’ll see some velocity improvement:
Year | Velo (mph) |
---|---|
2015 | 92.4 |
2016 | 92.5 |
2017 | 92.1 |
2018 | 92.3 |
2019 | 92.5 |
2020 | 92.7 |
Which one should we believe? Four-seamers are more common than sinkers, so the blended average looks like this:
Year | Velo (mph) |
---|---|
2015 | 93.0 |
2016 | 93.1 |
2017 | 92.9 |
2018 | 93.0 |
2019 | 93.2 |
2020 | 93.1 |
Okay, so fastballs didn’t get any faster this year. Sinkers did, and that’s interesting for sure, but at the highest level, it feels like the inexorable march towards higher velocity might have stalled for the moment.