I Told You So

One of the best parts of being a parent is to utter those four simple words, “I told you so.”  I’ve never made a habit of this, so, when the occasion does come around, I enjoy it, more so when my daughter more or less agrees.

 

That just happened with an email Clare sent, with a link to a recent story by Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated, asking “Is Velocity Overrated?” while assessing the cost to a pitcher from constantly throwing hard.  Verducci notes that seven of the twenty-one hardest-throwing pitchers from 2018 have had Tommy John surgery.  Verducci may also be the first sportswriter to admit that Noah Syndergaard’s fastball looks great but doesn’t accomplish all that much.

 

What Verducci doesn’t touch on is how analytics has elevated speed as the building block of pitching.  To the numbers’ crowd, the answer to swinging hard is throwing hard (and, of course, vice versa).  One hole in the story is that it considers the fastball only.  Has the average velocity of sliders gone up?  I’ll bet they have.  Whatever a pitcher throws nowadays, it’s supposed to be hard, even changeups.  Oh, to be able to go from 100-plus MPH “down” to 90.

 

Maybe a magazine piece with stats and graphs will inaugurate change, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.  Baseball is such a herd-mentality game that change is resisted across the board, until it isn’t, at which time it is again.  ERAs used to be enough to judge a pitcher’s effectiveness.  Now, it’s more dependent on speed guns.  Tell me, Tommy John was who, again?