Breaking the 100 mph plateau makes news that can often travel to the front office at nearly the same speed. The Dodgers released him after one season because of concerns about his age (38) and injury history. Papelbon wouldve been a great starter, but the hard-throwing right-hander makes a pretty terrific closer too. It all depends on what pitch the pitcher is throwing, fastball are faster than curve balls, changeups. He pitched a one-hitter -- with nine walks and nine strikeouts. So how fast was Feller? It measured velocity closer to the pitchers release point than the JUGS gun, so the JUGS flipped to being the slow gun. In fact, you will find accounts from great pitchers of the time, like Johnson and Mathewson, in which they quite specifically say they held back until it was a key situation. Copyright 2023 Baseball America Enterprises. I never had one. How fast can a baseball pitcher throw? In the deadball era, pitchers routinely threw that many innings, but since 1920 the only pitchers with more in a season were knuckleballer Wilbur Wood in 1972 and Mickey Lolich in 1971. Feller's second pitch was the fastest one, clocked at 98.6 mph. Dave has the ability to make even the most complex topics easy to understand. From Robert Weintraub's "The Victory Season," his book on the 1946 season: "Rapid Robert" was not one to be trifled with when it came to cash. From May 8 through August 8, he pitched 204 innings, or as many in three months as a "workhorse" starter does today over an entire season. Could a 108 mph fastball soon be in the future? Even though both were clocked rather crudely, their measurements would extrapolate to over 100 mph on a modern radar gun. Take Bob Feller, the legendary fireballer of the Cleveland Indians, and owner of maybe the fastest fastball the game has ever seen. In 1893 the pitcher's rear foot was moved farther from home plate to its current distance of 60 feet, 6 inches. Modern measurements / clockings are done in miles per hour in the United States and kilometers per hour in Canada & Japan. A 90 mph pitch on a Speedgun could register at 92 on a JUGS gun and 93-94 mph on a Stalker. The former Dodgers closer once converted a record 84 straight save opportunities and was as close to untouchable as a pitcher will ever be. Radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) guns were first introduced in 1935 and the media has covered their evolution with great interest. In 1946, he started the season with a three-hit, 10-strikeout shutout, kicking off what he called his greatest season. On July 28, he threw a shutout against the Senators, striking out 10. The new meter, which gives an immediate reading which engineers said compared with standard laboratory meter accuracy, is built in a trailer. Pitchers are throwing harder than ever before. Its not often you find a starter who can throw up to 102 mph in any inning in any count on any day. When you have a good curve ball, it makes your strike zone larger because the hitters swing at pitches that are outside. How can that be? Location, location, location. There will be a contest for pitchers later. 14. Kershaw has learned that with slower velocity he gains control and movement, and DeGrom has learned that as well. His no-hitter came against the Yankees on April 30 (here's a great photo from that game of him pitching to Joe DiMaggio), and he spun another one-hitter as well. Why? Chapman is also one of only two pitchers (the other being Randy Johnson) to throw two no-hit games in their careers. Pitch counts are especially a concern for young pitchers, pitchers recovering from injury, or pitchers who have a history of injuries. I would assume Ford threw in the mid-high 80s, topping out around 90. He never finished outside of the top nine in strikeouts every year between 1969 and 1984. Document Creator: Sean Holtz of Baseball Almanac, Inc. 2003-2005. His 10.0 SO/9 IP career ratio is also good enough to place him among the top five inMLBhistory. Its believed he could throw upwards of 100 mph. There were freak arms throughout history. 1920 Major League Baseball Standard Pitching | Baseball-Reference.com 1920 Major League Standard Pitching Previous Season Next Season Other Leagues: AL, NL, NNL World Series Champion: Cleveland Indians Become a Stathead & surf this site ad-free. Walter Johnson was reportedly measured at 99.7 MPH at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where they could measure the speed of bullets. Jimmy Foxx, Jim Tabor, and Roger Cramer made it a clean Boston sweep with a first-place tie in yesterday's fielders contest. The best mark he recorded was 119 feet. According to http://www.kingandhiscourt.com/articles/article6.htm: Carl Hubbells screwball God I loved it. It wasn't exactly Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, but it was a remarkable achievement. I thought that even the top power pitchers of the 1920s and '30s -- again, before Feller -- topped out around 90 miles an hour. He also finished second six other times. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. After nine years of erratic pitching he was released in 1966, never having made it to the Major Leagues. Part of the Baseball Almanac family: 755 Home Runs | Baseball Box Scores | Baseball Fever | Today in Baseball History. Their speeds were shown by a gravity drop interval recorder. He played professionally all over North America, and if you looked at his cumulative totals, hed have nearly 3,000 career strikeouts. Up until 10 years ago, people werent just trying to throw gas. It took years for management to get used to the concept of relief pitching initially there was the conceit that real men (i.e. Mookie Betts is playing like an MVP again, Real or Not? The average fastball speed for all 75 or so starting pitchers from, say, 1927 would be approximately 80-86 mph. Over the course of the past decade, Chapmans fastest fastball had gotten faster by nearly a mile per hour. The Royals' Josh. Pat Jordan in The Suitors of Spring (1974). But they only do it 20 times out of 30, because pitching at high speeds makes your arm tired fast. Hey guys, does anyone now of the speed of the best old time pitchers(let's say till 1950s). Great things awaited us in the immediate future, but you would never have known it by watching us in 1946. His dominance only lasted about three seasons (2002-2004), but during that time, Gagne was simply overpowering. Privacy Policy. They probably couldve done a lot harder throwing if they wanted to. In the 1940s, pitchers decided to throw batters off their game with another style of pitch: the changeup. A varied assortment of men followed. McDowell, otherwise known as Sudden Sam, is another one of the pitchers youve probably never heard of unless you grew up as a Cleveland Indians fan during the 1960s and 1970s. http://www.kingandhiscourt.com/articles/article6.htm. Baseball owed much of its origin to cricket, and one of the game's first codified sets of rules -- the Knickerbocker rules, drafted in 1845 for New York's Knickerbocker baseball club -- speak to those roots: "The ball must be pitched, not thrown, for the bat." "Pitched", in the . Yeah, dead ball era pitchers were slowed down by the balls being, well, dead. Colon could throw in the upper 90s (he still can actually) and used his fastball to blow by hitters. Wood is now blowing away hitters as a full-time reliever. I had two or three different kinds of curve balls and a lot of confidence in each of them. Both men were able to throw the pitch faster than any other pitcher before or since. Farewell to a Mariners legend. Somebody got the idea to test Feller's velocity. Wow that fast! Her best was 40 feet per second. In his first full season as a closer the righty struck out 90 batters in 64.2 innings, good enough for his first and only All-Star selection. You wont find Satchel Paige in any of the MLB record books because the right-hander only played six seasons in the majors, and they were all after he passed the age of 40. An 85 mph fastball (if registered by a Speedgun at the plate) would be roughly 93 mph if measured by Statcast out of the pitchers hand. The Detroit times. The fastest official speed is 98.6 mph, but there are those who believe he once threw a ball 107.9 mph during a demonstration. Up until that year the pitcher's position was known as the pitcher's box. The current MLB Statcast system measures velocity as the pitch leaves the pitchers hand. Paige struck out a Negro League record 176 batters in 1929 and then set the single-game record by striking out 17 hitters on April 29 and then 18 hitters less than a week later. They used a gravity drop interval recorder. Who was the fastest pitcher in baseball history? Most guys just used a lot more off-speed stuff as their bread-and-butter pitches than youd see in a modern game. He once threw a pitch so hard that the catcher missed the ball and it shattered an umpire's mask. Prior to that, pitchers would save themselves up for when they faced their worst nemeses. It would be interesting to time-travel Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, and Pedro Martinez in their youths back to 1894 and see how their careers as 450-inning starters would have fared. Feller has also written that he slipped from the mound in a June 13, 1947 game against Philadelphia and injured his back, saying his fastball was never the same after that. One other thing to remember. He was clocked as high as 103 mph before extreme wildness ended his career prematurely. But Major League Baseball now registers that pitch as a 105.8 mph fastball. Back in the 1880s-90s, these guys threw over 400 innings a season with regularity. During his eight-year retirement, Ryan worked as a baseball analyst for NBC Sports and as a consultant for the Texas Rangers. I thought I might give Bob Feller something to worry about. Greg madux would only pump 90+ in later innings to throw hitters off. How were the arms of starters spared? I believe in the dead ball era, guys topped out around 85 mph. I pitched a no-hitter in Yankee Stadium. Cookie Notice There seems little doubt that Feller had one of the hardest fastballs of all time. One such pitcher was Hal Newhouser of the Louisville Colonels. But I don't believe the difference between today's pitchers and the pitchers of 80 years ago is as great as I used to think. Baseball Almanac is pleased to provide you with a velocity calculator which you can use to convert these various formats and compare pitchers - both modern and historical. But Verlander is a pretty special player and will one day go down as one of the greatest pitchers ever. Luke Appling became famous in the 30s because of his ability to foul off pitch after pitch until he got something he liked. The Pitch/FX system that MLB used in 2010 measured pitches at roughly 50 feet from home plate, which is where the 105.1 mph of Chapmans fastball was measured. ** Actual picture of speed taken from the field at bottom of the chart.^ Due to the large number of MLB.com Gameday additions this symbol means it was verified there. Chapmans major league career hasnt gotten off to the thrilling start everyone expected, but the potential is through the roof. Like Gangster Octopus says, we remember the exceptions. Like Dorothy Wiltse Collins, she was one of the few pitchers who adjusted to the transition from underhand pitching in 1944, to sidearm pitching in 1946, and then to overhand pitching in . Nolan Ryan earned his nickname "The Ryan Express.". In any event, I think that it is a combination of all these factors. Hes naturally right-handed. - Eddie Collins. You throw into a hole two feet square. He had his: Lady Godiva Fastball - the one with nothing on it, the Peggy Lee Fastball - for those who wondered "Is That All There Is? He even saved four games for good measure. CLEVELAND (AP) - Three Boston Red Sox threw a baseball 122 feet a second into a new photo-electric pitching meter yesterday. 16 falloutranger San Francisco Giants 8 yr. ago April 16 was a good day for Feller. **, Press J to jump to the feed. When Gagne walked to the mound, you knew he was probably going to embarrass you. Thrown almost identically to a fastball, the changeup is hurled at . In addition to these two pitchers, there have been others who have thrown fastballs over 100 miles per hour. The results of the test from the "new meter" were reported the day after the initial article: Humphreys' 'Hard' Un' Faster Than Feller's, Meter Shows. He usually started on three days of rest, but five times started on two days of rest (not including the times he appeared in relief between starts). Felizs fastball was once clocked at 103.4 mph during a game at Rangers Ballpark, a speed that is third all-time behind only Aroldis Chapman (105.1 mph) and Joel Zumaya (104.8 mph). The top speed is 90 miles per hour. I think it was pitcher Phil Hughes who commented on a Whitey Ford video on twitter, and said he was throwing 80 mph. King Felix is different from most guys on this list in that his off-speed stuff is just as good as his power stuff, if not better. In baseball statistics, pitch count is the number of pitches thrown by a pitcher in a game. On Sept. 24, 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw the fastest recorded pitch in major league history. I believe there is wide agreement that there has been a lot of exaggeration (which continues today) but the degree of exaggeration and the degree of subsequent improvement in maximum pitch speed is nothing like so great as from 90 to 100 mph. The "twist" here is this pitcher never appeared in a Major League game! . Some estimates put the fastball at 101-103 mph, others as high as 107.6 mph. Goodens 2,293 career strikeouts are just 46thall-time, but 1,875 of them came in his 11 seasons as a New York Met. Pitching is a very important technique in the game of baseball. Back to how fast Feller threw. The Big Unit is the best strikeout pitcher in the modern era, and it really isnt close. Back then, no one could touch 100 mph. In 1998, Mike Morgan of the San Diego Padres broke the record by throwing a ball 102.1 miles per hour (164.7 km/h or 44.6 m/s). Both were mentioned in the Meter to Record Feller's Speed article above and the unit of measure was feet per second. Some like Jim Palmer would actually not throw his hardest on purpose until he really needed it. At the Aberdeen Proving Grounds he was measured using the ever-popular speeding motorcycle test, once used in 1914 with Walter Johnson who reached 99.7 mph, and Feller reached 98.6 mph. Cleveland men who developed the speed meter said the only comparable scientific marks were made in 1917. Its easy to forget just how good Doc was with the Mets after his career pretty much fell apart in the late 1990s. He won it over Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants. Red Sox bullpen's tightrope act will wear thin, Real or not? His pitch speed was 108.1 miles per hour. All times are GMT-8. Ich-i-ro!' Major League Baseball does not recognize radar speeds as an official statistic. 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