The Yankees Have Shown Us the Future
The Yankees gave us a glimpse of the future on Monday night, demonstrating how a game of ever-increasing extremes is only likely to continue trending in that direction.
No, this isn’t about bullpenning, a strategy that the club almost accidentally employed in the Wild Card game against Minnesota and that they ought to use again in Game 5 tonight. Rather, this is about fastball velocity.
The Yankees’ average fastball in Game 4 against Cleveland traveled at 98 mph. Ninety-eight! New York pitchers failed to throw a single fastball under 96 mph.
That’s kind of terrifying.
The following table shows the aggregate body of work of fastballs thrown in Monday night’s game, courtesy of Statcast data via Baseball Savant:
| Team | Total FF | FF% | ba | iso | babip | slg | woba | xwoba | hits | abs | spin_rate | velocity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NYY | 91 | 61.9% | .143 | .214 | .125 | .357 | .269 | .248 | 2 | 14 | 2259 | 98.0 |
| CLE | 66 | 35.3% | .400 | .200 | .571 | .600 | .475 | .417 | 4 | 10 | 2353 | 94.5 |
As a club, Cleveland recorded the lowest fastball rate in all of baseball this season, at 40.1%. The major-league average was 49.7%. And that makes sense: the Indians are the best breaking-ball staff on record.
On Monday, while Trevor Bauer leaned on his curveball (and perhaps while the Yankees hunted it in their second look against him in the series), the Yankees just shoved elite velocity — often up in the zone — the entire night and dominated.
The following chart illustrates the Yankees’ fastball location in Game 4:
Luis Severino, in particular, often threw the pitch high and to the arm side. He struck out over a third of the batters he faced, against a club that recorded the second-lowest strikeout rate in the majors.
The following color-coded chart employs varying shades of it to denote high velocity and shades of blue to denote lower velocity. Notice that there are very few blue data points, even among the breaking and offspeed offerings. The following pitch charts include all pitches. Severino threw a 92 mph changeup. Kahnle was throwing upper-80s offspeed pitches.
While there have perhaps been better greater single-game displays of pure velocity, the Yankees’ performance on Monday is still significant. Yes, Severino and his live arm accounted for 7.0 innings of the relevant sample. Note, however, that we didn’t see Aroldis Chapman or a number of the other high-velocity arms in the Yankees’ bullpen.
And in the midst of this display of power pitching, Driveline Baseball’s Kyle Boddy offered this thought:
As we know, velocity has been trending up ever year in the PITCHf/x era, both from starting pitchers and relievers.
Tom House recently told Tyler Kepner of The New York Times that 100 mph will soon be the new normal.
“I think in the next five to eight years, most pitchers, to sign a pro contract, are going to have to show 97, 98, and touch 101, 102. That’s where the research is going.”
And that’s where the Yankees are going. They showed Monday that they’re already capable of residing there.
If Monday’s exhibition becomes the new normal, how long can hitters keep pace? It’s a question I attempted to answer here recently. And on this front, there’s encouraging news for the preservation of some equilibrium between pitchers and hitters. According to the available research, including some produced by Driveline, batters are adapting. Hitting a high-velocity fastball, it seems, is more learned reaction than conscious decision.
But there has to be a hard limit at which point hitters’ performance begins to deteriorate, right? The distance between the mound and home plate is fixed at 60 feet, 6 inches (not including pitcher’s extension). There are speeds the human eye just can’t track from that distance.
A comment by Boddy for that piece a couple weeks back has some relevance here.
“I think velocity will asymptotically increase,” Boddy said via Twitter correspondence, “and hitters will progressively learn to hit it (already happening). Minor leaguers see that kind of velocity every day now, and the subset of players that reach the big leagues had to have success against it to get there.
“By definition, those in the big leagues (for a decent amount of time) have adapted to the new paradigms in some fashion.”
The evidence supports Boddy’s theory. Hitters have adapted to the environment of 2017, for example, a season in which the average MLB fastball reached 93 mph for the first time.
But what if in the not-too-distant future the average fastball is 97 or 98 mph? Less than a decade ago, it 2008, it was less than 91 mph.
We simply don’t know much about the 21st century athlete and how the advances in training at places like Driveline Baseball will fully impact the sport and pitching performance. This next generation of athlete, this wave of ballplayer who’s had the full benefit of various tracking systems, is likely to set records for performance across the board in terms of raw physical tools like velocity. The bar is always pushed higher. After all, we see records broken in the Olympics every four years. But the information and science boom in baseball threatens to make change less incremental and more dramatic.
What if velocity begins to outpace hitter’s ability to adapt, though?
I think we got a small-sample taste of that Monday night.
Against fastballs 98 mph and faster this season, major-league hitters hit .213 (434 for 2,041) with a .287 wOBA. In 2015, batters hit .223 with a .281 wOBA against 98-plus mph velocity.
What the Yankees demonstrated Monday night is that the game might not be anywhere near Peak Velocity, that the increases in arm speed won’t slow, but rather accelerate — particularly if bullpens account for more and more innings. The average MLB reliever’s fastball velocity was 94.4 mph this year, also a record.
The Yankees might have showed us the future. And it could be a bleak, dystopian one for major-league hitters.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
NOT IF MASAHIRO TANAKA KILLS IT FIRST
But, seriously, it could be both. Maybe guys will throw fastballs only 20% of the time, but they will all be 100 MPH. Severino only throws his fastball about 50% of the time already.
As higher velocities become more and more common I suspect that’s exactly what you’ll see. There was a piece a while back talking about the Yankees consciously having their pitchers throw less fastballs because hitters are getting better and better at hitting them. What is unhittable now will be the norm later that hitters will hit unless pitchers begin to use more breaking stuff. Once that happens I suspect you may also see some of the pitches at the upper fringes start to develop deadly cutters and 2 seamers that move at 99. Imagine Mariano Rivera throwing that thing at 100 instead of 91-93.
The bleak / dystopian bit at the end kind of belies the point about hitters adapting, no?
It’d seem as though it’s more likely to be a bleak and dystopian future for those fans who enjoy the occasional ball in play.
This, huzzah for 3 true outcome baseball! [Sarcasm]
and who don’t care for a 1-0 game lasting nearly 3.5 hours (CLE-NYY Monday night)
In reality, hitters have proven for decades that they can deal with velocity. Pitchers have also proved that throwing really hard insn’t particularly sustainable either.
How much of that stat is just pitch classification? Some pitchers don’t throw fastballs according to StatCast, but they do, like Kenley Jansen.
I read recently (here) that the Indians are the best staff ever… also the team that throws the fewest fastballs. That doesn’t add up, but that would be a baseball discussion, which this isn’t. #Sensationalism
While I doubt that we’re looking at the new dust bowl era of hitting as velocity increases, it’s possible that pitchers take a significant leap faster than hitters can keep pace and we get a 3-5 year run of higher K rates and more extreme run scoring environments even more reliant on power for offense.
I seriously doubt that the speeds will “asymptotically increase”/”accelerate”, since there are hard physical constraints to what the human body can do to throw a pitch that fast. IOW I seriously doubt we’ll see 110 MPH as the standard by say 2050…
I assumed “asymptotically increase” meant to approach some maximum limit and go no higher
^ Doesn’t know what an asymptote is…
I don’t know if that was directed at Cliff or me, but I teach this stuff (and in fact did today)-since the article did not specify vertical or horizontal, I did not know which one he alluded to. But later, when he specifically said that it would “accelerate”, it seemed to confirm that he had vertical in mind (accelerating as it zooms towards infinity) and not horizontal (slowing as it reached some relatively hard limit).
The former is silly, since it would indeed seem to imply that relatively soon everyone will be throwing as hard as Sidd Finch. In any event velocity may very well increase for awhile, but it certainly won’t do so indefinitely, and likely may instead look more like a population growth curve where some constraint slows and then stops said growth (which means either way the author of the article doesn’t grasp the math concept in question that he’s bandying about, not I).
Oh come on, of course “increase asymptotically” meant a horizontal asymptote. Don’t be a math lawyer.
And you know a logistic function first accelerates and then approaches an asymptote. Why do you think the author has a failure to grasp anything? You made a peculiar reading, shrug and move on.
My comment was directed at you. By using the word asymptotic in everyday language he’s referring to the quality all asymptotic behavior has in common: approaching a given value (or function) in the limiting sense. Sure a vertical asymptote may grow without bound but that’s not what makes it an asymptote. It seems very strange to assume the quote was intended to call to mind the graph of a particular class of function, especially one that doesn’t make sense given the context. It seemed to me that you didn’t see the commonality between horizontal and vertical asymptotes, hence my comment.
When someone says something has grown exponentially they’re not claiming that the data is best modeled by an exponential function. They’re just saying that growth has accelerated rapidly, something which is true for plenty of functions besides exponential functions. The same idea applies here. It’s the colloquial use of a mathematical concept most people understand.
There is no colloquial usage of asymptote, because nine out of ten people don’t recognize the word.
That suggests that 9 out of 10 people didn’t take a full year course of algebra 2, which horrifies me.
– A math teacher
between Alg2 and Statistics (AKA Sadistics) I funded the college education of 3 therapists’ children. Finally managed to purge my memory of everything. Best money I ever spent, too.
I studied in the British schooling system and I never saw that word, even though I went as far as Pure Maths.
Proud to say I’ve been asymptomatic for 3 months now.
Not advocating a point of view, just asking….but….in all the articles I’ve read over the last few years about possible causation of the increased number of arm/shoulder injuries, throwing harder is often speculated to be a reason. You know, that throwing 100 is putting so much stress on the body, especially when so many high school pitchers are reaching that plateau, that it’s possible this is a primary reason for injury. Is this still under consideration?
I dont think it is even controversial that throwing harder = more stress on arm.
But there is just too much money in the game to ignore the increased injury, and if teams will only sign/draft high velocity pitchers, high school and international kids are going to train to through with maximum velocity, injuries be damned.
There are only so many humans that can throw that hard. I am not sure that there are relatively more of them out there. I think they are all being used up currently. This isn’t really a new phenomenon. I wouldn’t be surprised if things started trending back the other way as at some point, there is just not more to harvest.
It is irrelevant to the headline, but yeah that’s a real problem… Look at the HS 1st rounders that throw 100+, way more have TJ within a year or two than don’t.
Man, I just don’t know about this as a way to talk about velocity increases. I mean, it’s indisputable that velocity has increased, and this trend has been happening already for a long time. As Travis knows very well: http://triblive.com/sports/mlb/5423918-74/mph-velocity-cole
Part of it is the increasing trend toward bullpen usage, as well as better strength training. But I just don’t see this as a great example here. But Remember Randy Johnson? Did we have “Randy Johnson is the future” articles every time he blew people away in the playoffs? What about a couple years ago with Syndergaard? I just don’t know how much I think we should read into Severino fireballing his way deep into a game should change our opinions that much.
Besides, when velocity gets too expensive we’ll see Billy Beane construct a rotation with elite junkballers (and a knuckleballer to round it out). And that will be fun too.
When I’ve looked at velocity vs K% in the past, it seems the best of the soft tossers still survive the MILB gauntlet to make majors. However, there is a Snoopy that says you have to get this many Ks per PA to pitch in the majors regardless of velocity (this impacts the number of soft tossers even getting a chance in majors more than the fireballers). Snoopy tends to raise the K% bar every few years. I’m guessing this K% is around 15-17% now with a few guys sneaking past Snoopy.
Am I, er, missing something here?
Well, if your team doesn’t have a Snoopy, your pitcher is likely to get Charlie Brown’d.
Just to double down on this–Severino has amazing velocity, with the second highest fastball velocity of the last 15 years. We don’t write this article on the day Sonny Gray starts, and we could just as well proclaim Sonny Gray the future too (because why not?). Heck, the other day Jeff Sullivan said Tanaka was killing the fastball. Is that the future too?
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=y&type=4&season=2017&month=0&season1=2002&ind=1&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=5,d
The list itself is interesting for other reasons. There’s clearly an upward trend in velocity since many of the great fireballers are recent (although I think part of the huge # of 2017 players is due to different ways of measuring pitch velocity). But it is not universal. #3-#8 on the list are no longer fireballing–Yordano Ventura (RIP) and Ubaldo Jimenez (age). Gerrit Cole threw high heat this year, but he wasn’t as good as he’s been in the past. Wily Peralta is now a minor league free agent. Matt Harvey’s velocity is fine, but he’ll have to pitch better than that to stay in an MLB rotation. Noah Syndergaard is still here and hopefully will make a full recovery, but the narrative then was that he was throwing *too* hard. I don’t know how much any of these guys demonstrate “the future.”
I actually agree with the sentiment that velocity is increasing, and we don’t know how much it will increase, but saying “look at this physical freak who hit 97.4 MPH on his fastball for a whole season” does not tell us much about the upper limits of human physical ability.
He is simply pointing out what some players do really well and stating that it is the future. If only it were that easy… This could just as well be about any positive attribute of any successful outcome – all they have to do is more of it!
Gray and Tanaka are not likely the future except you may see some pitchers ditch the fastball. Over time, velocity has gone up. This game had a lot of fireballers. It isn’t a stretch to assume that over time above average velocity pitchers today will be the average velocity pitchers in a few years.
Meanwwhile, I give you Ryan Merritt:
-36 career innings, inlcuding playoffs
-0 home runs allowed
-4 walks
-16 Ks
-1.50 ERA
-Averages 87 MPH on his fastball
#FreeRyanMerritt
there’s been a lot of interesting work done on the ball and making some reasonable, common sense arguments to back the idea that the ball is mostly responsible for the power surge of the last few years. when we correlate that change in power output, however, with the change in what pitchers have become — how available the 96mph fastball has become among relievers of every stripe and many starters as well — it seems to me that baseball should be taking a very long look at doping and how it may be changing the physicality of players in all facets of the game. given the prevalence of doping in so much of sport globally, and the laxity of MLB’s testing regimen in comparison to many professional sports governing bodies, it stretches credulity in the first place to think that PEDs are not being widely used in baseball. if PEDs are probably in common use, then these would seem to be likely consequences in the results of the sport.
Anyone address physics and the human body from a medical point of view. There is a certain point at which muscles/tendons tear. No way around it. I think we’re nearing that as evidenced by the increasing frequency of TJ and labrum surgeries.
I think it is particularly problematic for kids. Don’t ask me at what point kids become adults, because I don’t know. Sensational articles such as this one are telling kids a pretty clear message.
You are right, downvoter.
Great to see this rich discussion taking place in the form of down votes. I assume there is a good reason that nobody makes an argument to the contrary.
I didn’t downvote you. But your comment seems moot. Would you warn us about articles glorifying great guitar players because they “send kids a pretty clear message?” After all, a rock-n-roll lifestyle has been shown to be unhealthy, especially in light of drug overdose deaths. I’m old, should use hip hop instead, I guess. Still….the point remains. Anything special carries risk. And usually, the more worthwhile, the greater the risk.
There is no discussion because no one has any idea what you’re talking about.
Yeah, I’m not really sure what point you are making. Are you trying to say that MLB is telling young players you have to throw hard to make it to the majors??
Because that is not so much a message from MLB as it is just reality. If you are not in the top 1% of athletes you are not making it that far.
I don’t know. For 2017 alone the R2 of team pitch velocity vs total team pitching WAR is only .11 and team FB velocity and team FB pitch value/100 is only .069. I assume that there’s more than just velocity that makes a pitch effective.
EDIT
Ex. The Red Sox are 1st in team FB value but 7th in team average FB velocity and the Indians are first in pitching WAR and 15th in average team FB velocity.
Didn’t the Mets show us the future in the 2015 Playoffs? And then they all got hurt?
And didn’t we just break the league-wide Home Run record, even though the league had the highest average velocity of all time?
One more thought, could the supposed changes to the ball, like lower seams, also contribute to league wide velocity increases? Not saying there isn’t a real change just wondering if any of it is artificial.
In his 538 article (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/in-mlbs-new-home-run-era-its-the-baseballs-that-are-juicing/), Rob Arthur actually uses pitch speed data to confirm that the seems are in fact lower. While his ultimate goal is to measure the affect on fly balls, it seems to also bolster your hypothesis.
“Baseball’s camera- and radar-tracking technologies measure the speed of the ball shortly after the pitcher releases it and then again when it crosses the plate. By examining how much speed it loses between those two locations, we can calculate its air resistance (as measured by drag coefficient). For example, the average pitch loses about 7.4 mph on its way to the plate. The exact amount of velocity lost depends on the thickness of the air (which varies with temperature, weather and elevation), but a high-drag ball tends to lose about 8.7 mph on the way to the plate, while a slicker ball would lose only 6.5 mph.”
Very cool. Thanks for sharing this.
This is a fascinating post, but this line stopped me in my tracks: “As a club, Cleveland recorded the lowest fastball rate in all of baseball this season, at 40.1%.”
Wasn’t the club with the lowest FB% the *Yankees*, not the Indians? It depends on your definitions, of course, but by the standard pitch type (BIS) numbers, the Indians are low, but not remarkably low in FB usage. By the better (in my mind) Pitch Info numbers, the Indians are middle of the pack in four-seam, and low in sinkers. But it’s the Yankees who are near the bottom in four-seamers and dead last in sinkers – it’s the Yankees that famously rode breaking balls all year long, and that’s what’s made their decision to just blow 98 MPH heaters past a team like Cleveland so interesting: it’s a clear, marked departure from their pitching MO that they established this season…an MO that worked really well for them, particularly when it comes to avoiding the long ball.
At what point does the MLB float the idea of doing away with the 5 IP requirement for wins ?
Sure it makes historical comparisons impossible, but isn’t that already the case ? Who compares CC to Robin Roberts using wins ?
As for the “new normal”, it will be for the playoffs, but it’s still years away during the regular season.
And it will be interesting to see if late edition Jamie Moyer types will start to flourish at 84 mph if the league starts sitting at 97.
If you do away with the 5 IP requirement then you might as well just do away with the Win stat all together because it will become almost entirely meaningless when some “starter” throws 130 innings and wins 25 games.
People already think it’s meaningless. Do you think Cy Young is 2 and a half times as good as Pedro Martinez or Clayton Kershaw ?
Are HRs meaningless because LF in the old Yankee Stadium was 462 feet ?
What an odd response.
I simply said that taking away the IP requirement would make the stat even more meaningless than it already is so you might as well just get rid of it.
How that is relevant to HR’s or implies I think it is a good metric to compare pitchers is beyond me.
I love October baseball. The sudden cool wisps of autumn rolling in, the soft pretense of the cold winter to follow. 3-5 hour baseball games narrated by 3 (usually) men in the booth. Writers with pens and pencils at the ready to jot down one more “fun fact” and fill our heads with narrative tension. Baseball twitter being both fun facty and silly. And the glorious onslaught of “_______ is the future of baseball.” articles.
And expensive bourbon to wash it down at the end of the night.
I’m not being pugnacious here. I really love this stuff. It’s a great way to wake up from another long night of baseball, shake the expensive bourbon hangover, and read up on the future of baseball.
in 10 years it will be time to back the mound up. Needs to be lowered too.
If this is the future, then pitchers will have very short careers in the future.
It is generally people selling something that paint extreme velocity in those terms. It is usually someone pushing their own agenda, such as someone selling pitching mechanics or data. The future isn’t terribly important to those parties, as it is far more important that they get your click/money/fanfare/etc.
Disagree to an extent. The majority of teams cannot afford to bankroll a major league pitching staff 20 deep who all throw 100 and whose arms fall apart every three years. Mets are learning on the job. Guys who throw that hard will be 1-3 IP guys, with a few exceptions.
While I agree that the high hard fastball is the best weapon a pitcher can have, so few can make a career out of it as a starter. Most learn to take their fastball down a few notches and only step it up when necessary, lest they wind up with a dead arm (which I’m sure sometime next May, I’ll be reading an article “What’s wrong with Severino”).
Scouts have always gone after guys with velocity. This is nothing new. And as scouts have gotten to new corners of the globe, they have found more guys with the ceiling to reach 100. But generally, harder throwers make more mistakes and can be taken advantage of. Only the freaks of nature (Ryan, Johnson, Verlander, etc) have made a career of throwing gas a returning every 5th day. Most go the way of Kerry Wood or Henry “Wild Thing” Rodriguez… loads of potential, but wear down and lose confidence. Unless Dr. Jimbo and team invent a synthetic UCL and matching rotator cuff, of course…
So maybe the new normal for the big market teams will be to buy and stockpile big arms, but most teams can’t invest that kind of risk for a guy that maybe on the DL 40% of his contract. The market inefficiency will still be to find guys who get outs with out putting runners on base or balls in the air and manipulating the defense accordingly. And right now, your theory is on display because in the playoffs, teams can get away only throwing their 4 best arms games after game with little thought to health. But the majority of guys in the league that drop 102 fall in the Enny Romero category- true wild card with great upside… and definitely not a guy managers are going to lean on in the playoffs.