Best of BP: The Pitch That Couldn’t Slow Down

“Jim Creighton, a seventeen-year-old pitcher for the amateur Niagaras of Brook­lyn (all teams were amateur then), created a stir in 1858 with a pitch that was not only faster than any seen before but also sailed or tailed or climbed or dipped; the result was “fairly unhittable,” in the words of John “Death to Flying Things” Chapman, a contemporary star with the Brooklyn Atlantics. How did Creighton do it? By adding an imperceptible snap of the wrist to his swooping bowler’s delivery.”

                         -Pitching: Evolution and Revolution by John Thorn

  My first big live look as a nascent prospect writer was Jeurys Familia. It was during his 2011 minor-league breakout that landed him 89th on BP’s 2012 Top 101. Some years later I found myself discussing Familia with Chris Blessing of Baseball HQ, probably on the concrete patio of a brewery somewhere in the Tri-Cities of Tennessee, but the memory conflates and rearranges so many of my conversations across the years. Familia had been a big deal for Chris too, albeit back in 2009 when he was covering Savannah. He just didn’t see all that many pitchers throwing 95+ in A-ball rotations back then. My poorly-indexed cache of prospect chat places this in 2014, after some funny Ivan Wilson at-bats and in the middle of Familia’s major-league breakout as a late-inning reliever for the Mets. Even a mere five years on, plus velocity in the low minors was much less memorable.

I don’t remember the first triple-digit radar gun reading I pulled. I thought it was a random reliever facing Michael Conforto, but my report has him sitting 96-98. Maybe he hit 100 in there, it’s certainly possible. I suppose it’s a little interesting that it doesn’t immediately jump to mind.

“Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” If you are reading this column on Baseball Prospectus, you probably immediately knew that was Warren Spahn. I’d guess Spahn threw in the 80s for most of his career, given the era and his reputation for changing speeds. Anyway, the best way to upset timing is to give a hitter less time in which to time. But don’t take my word for it, let’s check in with 2023 All-Star Brent Rooker who, as part of his star turn on X (formerly Twitter) this past offseason, spent a fair bit of time explaining to the masses that actually the harder a pitch is thrown, the harder it is to hit.

The last two weeks have seen a spate of pitcher injuries, including to some past, present, and perhaps future aces. This has led to a cacophony of discourse on the hows and the whys, to which I am if anything, a bit late to the party. The thing is, I don’t have any brilliant conclusions or even deductions. Many of the factors pointed at—the increase in velocity, the increase in breaking ball usage, early specialization, year-round pitching, the dreaded pitch clock—are all likely at least partial contributors to pitcher injuries. But our present endpoint, best encapsulated by Mason Miller throwing 102+ in between arm injuries, started with, well, Jim Creighton. And then Tommy Bond, who pushed as far as he could against the rule requiring a pitcher to throw underhand. And arm injuries were a part of the game even going back to the 19th century. Bond’s arm gave out in his mid-20s. His SABR bio dryly notes that in response “Manager Harry Wright slightly lessened his workload to a mere 493 innings.”

This happened in the hazily misremembered Golden Age of pitcher durability too. Sandy Koufax was done at 30. Mark Fidrych was a one-and-a-half-year wonder before a knee injury and a rotator cuff tear. In his newsletter, Sam Miller wrote eloquently about Karl Spooner who was a two-start wonder you’ve probably never heard of. And that’s true in a lot of these cases from the reserve clause era. Teams just moved on, because they really had nothing invested into the pitchers, and nothing they could do about arm injuries. You’ve heard of Spencer Strider, obviously, but you’ve also heard of Cade Cavalli and Forrest Whitley and Andrew Painter.

And you’ve heard about them in part because of people like me. The other thing that has happened since I schlepped down Route 9 to New Britain Stadium to see Jeurys Familia is an explosion of pro and amateur prospect coverage. Everybody from the New York Times to your local team blog has prospect coverage now—and hey, that’s where I started. Some of it is quite good, some of it less so, but it’s incredibly easy to get information about any young pitcher in any system. And all of them are throwing harder than ever. Because inevitably, that’s the first thing we notice. It’s a lot harder to hit 97 than 92 and a lot easier to dream on it. It certainly will cause me to keep the radar gun on a few pitches longer. We all have the same incentives here.

And those incentives started snowballing over a century and a half ago with Jim Creighton and have only accelerated this century as we’ve gotten more data on what kind of pitches miss bats. Teams select for them, teams teach them. They’ve gotten very good at it. They’ve also gotten very good at velocity maximization strategies—with some help from your favorite third-party pitching lab. It’s trickled down to the amateur ranks. Plenty of high schoolers are throwing weighted balls, and there’s a reason Paul Skenes transferred to LSU, Chase Burns to Wake Forest. Everybody is on the same page here, and the current conditions are the end result of a 150-year process that has no quick fix in a season or two, no reset to factory settings button for the sport. But let’s leave the history part to John Thorn and Steven Goldman and slide back into my lane.

Ryan Feltner was not a big live look, before, during, or after the handful of starts I saw in Hartford. He was old for the level, the kind of mid-round college pick the Rockies love to take and usually fail to develop. He pitched pretty well in Hartford when you look at the top-line numbers, but the stuff was very generic. Fastball was up to 95, but mostly 93-94. The command and shape weren’t positives. He had three offspeeds, none of which were even fringy. The fastball has ticked up every year since and now sits 96 touching 99, His cutterish slider has gone from around 83 to around 89, and he throws it more often than his fastball. And so far Feltner has avoided an arm injury other than some elbow inflammation at the end of last season. This is an outlier jump in stuff, but not unheard of at this point. Again, teams, labs, and players have gotten very good at this (okay, maybe not the Rockies). We all know the bargain here. Maybe Feltner logs a good season or two, stays healthy enough to land an eight-figure extension the Rockies seem fond of giving out to every homegrown prospect made-even-sorta-good. Maybe it’s a flexor strain in June, a UCL tear next spring. I don’t know. And I don’t know how to prevent it. What I can tell you is this version of Ryan Feltner is a fair two grades better than the one I saw in 2021. My eyes and Hawk-Eye will say the same thing. We just don’t know what kind of bargain that is yet.