The Two Fastballs of Ben Joyce

On September 3, 2024, Tommy Edman swung through an 0-2 fastball to end the top of the ninth inning of a game against the Angels. Witness, please.

Back when I was a kid, all anyone talked about was fastball velocity. Mark Wohlers could hit 100, and that was a big deal. Never mind that while velocity is important, it’s arguably the third-most significant tool in a pitcher’s tackle box, after location and movement. But even in the days of fuzzy over-the-air TV and print media, you could quantify velocity and share it simply. It was possible to describe the exquisite movement on Greg Maddux’s low-90s two-seamer, but it was hard and took up a lot of time. I think that’s got something to do with George Will being the way he is. But I digress.

Over the past 25 years, video highlights have gotten progressively more accessible, easier to make and share. And if a picture is worth 1,000 words (up to 3,000 words if you’re intransigently verbose, like George Will) a GIF is worth even more.

Now, we can all see Paul Skenes’ sweeper arrive at home plate in Pittsburgh not via the PA Turnpike, but via the scenic route: west on I-68 through Cumberland, then changing to I-79 north in Morgantown. And what a thrill that is.

Velocity, at the extremes, isn’t as GIFable. Here’s a pitch from the very next half-inning, 100.2 mph from Michael Kopech to Mickey Moniak, in a similar location.

Kopech is supposed to be one of the hardest-throwing pitchers west of the Rio Grande. I’m old enough to remember when he was a prospect, two trades ago, and the Red Sox were pumping up his value by telling anyone who’d listen about how he was hitting 105 in minor league games.

But it was Ben Joyce who threw that pitch to Edman, not Kopech. And it turned out to be historic. Joyce’s ninth-inning fastball registered 105.5 mph, making it the hardest pitch in any major league game (preseason, regular season, or postseason) in more than eight years. It was the third-fastest in-game fastball measured in the pitch-tracking era.

That kind of velo is not only exclusive (you’ll notice that until Joyce, the only two pitchers to reach 105 mph were Aroldis Chapman and Jordan Hicks), but ephemeral. Chapman has hit 105 nine times in his career: once as a rookie, the other eight times in the span of less than a month in the summer of 2016. Hicks’ two fastest pitches came in the same outing. It takes certain conditions — barometric pressure, physical fitness, having eaten one’s Wheaties — to operate at this level.

It’s not especially surprising that Joyce can do it. He’s the hardest-throwing college pitcher ever, and has made no secret of his ambition to throw this hard and even harder in a game. For this reason, I’ve long been fascinated by him. Longtime readers might remember Joyce’s minor league career, specifically the part he played in surrendering seven runs in one inning while managing to preserve a combined no-hitter.

But as much as you can teach anything these days — including stuff — vanishingly few people can do what Joyce does. Actually, exactly three people, according to that table a couple paragraphs ago. His right arm has been kissed by the gods of speed. So how’s he doing?

Pretty well. Joyce has had a lot of the problems you’d expect from guy who can throw 105 mph. He’s struggled to stay healthy, and occasionally (most notably on that regrettable afternoon in Alabama) struggled to throw strikes. Such are the tradeoffs of 80-grade velocity, dating back to Sudden Sam McDowell.

Over 34 1/3 innings in 2024, Joyce posted a 2.08 ERA with a 3.20 FIP, which is a bit worrying considering that Joyce allowed only one home run on a HR/FB rate of 5.0%. But he did manage to generate a lot of grounders and soft contact; his 58.9% groundball rate would’ve been top 10 among relievers if he’d thrown enough innings to qualify.

But Edman’s whiff notwithstanding, Joyce didn’t miss a lot of bats. His strikeout rate of 23.2% is downright pedestrian for a high-leverage reliever, especially considering that Joyce also has a slider with absurd two-plane break. Out of 474 pitchers with at least 30 innings pitched in 2024, Joyce was 211th in strikeout rate and just 380th in chase rate. (The good news: He was 21st in in-zone whiff rate.)

In some respects, Joyce reminds me of a young Hicks: A good reliever, but throwing 105 feels like a waste if you’re just a pitch-to-contact guy. Is there something about this level of velocity that flattens fastballs out? Makes them easier to put in play?

Not necessarily. Across the league, the harder a four-seamer is, the more whiffs and less damage it generates. But here’s another thing Joyce has in common with Hicks and Chapman: He throws not just a four-seamer but a sinker.

That wasn’t always the case for the other two members of the 105-mph club. Chapman only added his sinker after eight seasons in the majors; Hicks threw the sinker almost exclusively until 2023. Joyce only added his sinker in 2024 and was fairly successful with it. These aren’t the only hard-throwing pitchers who have multiple fastballs; Skenes has made it such a key part of his game that they invented a new word for his sinker.

But I noticed something weird about Joyce’s two fastballs. His four-seamer had a 29.8% whiff rate and a 32.9% strikeout rate. His sinker, on the other hand, had a 25.3% whiff rate, with a strikeout rate of just 2.6%. Taking all the pitcher/pitch type combinations that got used last year (with a minimum plate appearance threshold, that’s nearly 1,900 according to Baseball Savant), Joyce’s sinker got a slightly above-average whiff rate. But his strikeout rate on that pitch was in the first percentile.

Which is super weird. Was he only using his sinker with less than two strikes or something?

Apparently, yeah. A pitch that Joyce used almost half the time with less than two strikes went in a box labeled “DO NOT TOUCH” once the opportunity arose for a strikeout.

There’s a certain logic to it: If Joyce’s four-seamer is his knockout pitch, and you want to extend the boxing metaphor, it stands to reason that he’d have a jab in his arsenal to set up his power punch. What I want to know is whether this is normal, and fortunately that is an answerable question. In 2024, Joyce was one of 23 pitchers who hit 100 mph on the radar gun 10 or more times with four-seam fastballs. Of those 23 pitchers, eight — including Joyce — also threw a sinker at least 10% of the time. Here’s how they use their fastballs based on count.

So not every triple-digit fastball-sinker guy completely changes the playbook with two strikes. And in a lot of cases, when that change does happen, it’s in order to load up on a secondary pitch. Martinez, for instance, is four times as likely to use his splitter with two strikes than in any other count.

But Joyce’s swapping out fastballs once he gets a chance to strike a hitter out is not unique. Another recent record-setting SEC fireballer, Skenes, does the same. Chapman does the opposite, throwing a fastball mix of roughly three parts four-seamers to two parts sinkers with zero and one strikes. But with two strikes, it’s 3-to-1 sinkers over four-seamers.

When you throw that hard, you have options, it turns out. We’ll see if Joyce can figure out a way to turn that velocity into more strikeouts.