Why It's Almost Impossible to Throw a 110 MPH Fastball | WIRED

it's baseball season again and that means that some San Lots stadiums the great face-off between pitcher and batter is back there are lots of pitches a pitcher can throw but every pitcher is judged on their fastball and the fastball is the best pitch in the game and baseball and that's because a heater thrown with precision is really really hard to hit everyone has a fastball and it's the pitch that gets thrown the most the very fastest throws 105 miles per hour and that can be havoc at the plate batting legend Ted Williams once said hitting a fastball is the single most difficult thing to do in sports and he was probably right batters barely have time to see and swing at the ball before it reaches home plate they should not be able to hit the damn ball you see the interesting issue and there are more and more guys throwing harder and faster in 2008 only 18 pitchers were throwing triple-digit bass balls and they collectively through 196 of them by 2017 there were 40 pitchers throwing that fast and they together through 1017 fast balls at or above 100 miles per hour but what if the fastball got even faster today we're gonna look at why throwing and hitting a 110 mile per hour fastball is almost impossible to find out what it takes I threw my fastest fastball with a scientist who's been studying pitching for decades I tried hitting a former big leaguers pitch and stepped into the virtual world to bat against a superhuman pitching avatar nope let's start with the pitch baseball fans had long been thrilled by the pure speed of the fastball take time to demonstrate his cannon ball delivery before radar guns Army Ordnance equipment had to be brought in to measure pitch speed rockets along a world record [Music] legends like Bob Feller and Nolan Ryan through incredible fast balls that left batters marina today's marvels of the mound also slim serious speed at the top of the radar gun is Yankees relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman who was once clocked throwing a stunning 105 mile-per-hour fastball he pitches an average of 101 miles per hour and last year threw over 345 triple-digit basketballs alright so what does it actually take to throw a ball that fast I talked to Glenn fly sig one of the world's leading authorities on pitch mechanics so do we have any sense of what is distinguishing people who have a range that Peaks out at 100 miles + is there something different about them physiologically proportionally height-wise yeah that's one of the cool things about baseball the answer is no they tend to be tall there are some guys who are 6 feet who are throwing faster than the guys were 6 foot 10 fly sig uses motion capture software to map and correct throwing mechanics but that doesn't mean just anyone can hurl heat you and I do everything right we're not gonna throw a hundred miles per hour maybe your range is you're gonna throw between 70 and 80 miles per hour and someone else's ranges is there gonna be throw between 90 and 100 all we could do with proper mechanics is get you to the top of your range so I asked fly sig who works with pitchers from Little League all the way up through the majors to look at my mechanics the energy has now gone up your body the arm is in the cockpit position what I see here is your arm does not have enough what we call external rotation at the shoulder meaning if I drew a vertical line up your trunk I would want your forearm to be perpendicular to that to make a an L shape so I'd want your hand to be much lower maybe a foot lower so your arm is cocked back more even with Glenn's advice I was only throwing about half the speed of the pros so what is the outer limit in terms of velocity leaving the hand of today's pitchers the top pitchers have always been about 100 miles per hour and I think that is the limit one hundred hundred five miles per hour I think that thing that could change is the average velocity could go up because more guys can optimize and maximize himself and get to that limit but fly success there's been a price for such speed there are more injuries and part of the problem is that more pitchers are throwing at top velocity and constantly throwing a top velocity and the body could only take so much he and his colleagues measured the force required to actually rupture elbow ligaments turns out it's actually the same force that a pitcher puts through his arm when throwing at top speed you every time you go back and forward is about a hundred millimetres here and here a hundred Newton meters is the equivalent of holding 512 pound bowling balls so imagine I hung sixty pounds from your hand but that's about the equivalent of what's happening on your elbow or shoulder at that incident that force makes for tiny tears in the ligaments and over time a pitcher who throws too hard too often is basically throwing his arm off phytic says that fast ball mania has led to a jump in Tommy John procedures that's the surgery to repair torn ligaments in the elbow he says that is the limiting factor for fast ball speed and I know be very exciting to see the limits break like for other sports where the ceiling keeps going up up I think we're at the ceiling that the ligaments and tendons can't take it so why do pitchers even bother throwing that hard because a well-placed fastball is the gold standard for striking out batters to understand what a batter is up against you have to look at this incredibly short period of time that they have to decide if a ball is even worth swinging at it's 60 feet six inches from the pitcher's mound to home plate but the actual distance is shorter the pitcher releases the ball about 55 feet from the plate and a fastball moving 100 miles per hour takes about four tenths of a second to make that trip and here's the thing it takes 50 milliseconds for the iron brain to even register the pitch another hundred and fifty milliseconds to swing the bat that leaves just a split second for the batter to decide if the pitch is worth swinging at the batter has to pretty much make his decision within 200 milliseconds that's why some people var good batters should not be able to do it I can tell you that it is incredibly difficult a little bit I went to Villanova University where Kevin movil who was the baseball coach there and a former pro pitcher himself a few fast balls passed me I made contact twice I was just concentrating on keeping the ball away from him I didn't want to hit you I didn't want to come inside I didn't want to get anywhere near you which I appreciated he was throwing in the 80s and was incredibly consistent but here at Villanova they've got a tireless pitcher who can throw everything from high school speeds right up to the truly impossible there nailed it so I am inside the cave at Villanova and right now it's a virtual batter's box inside a virtual stadium and I'm hitting against a virtual pitcher who can throw any style of pitch we want he can throw a changeup he can throw a fastball I can throw a curveball or a slider he can even do impossible pitches but no actual bats allowed this screen alone costs fifty thousand dollars engineer mark du Pina created the system by inputting actual MLB pitch data so what batters see is a real pitch delivered virtually what we're doing here as much as we can is develop a training tool and then we're also looking at to add in eg sensors to measure focus level eye trackers to properly see how well the eye is moving with with the ball we're developing something not only to help the baseball team but we're getting other scientists and engineers involved in this this project Japan I can do things like freeze the ball midair and have batters identify the pitch that's gonna be high yeah high and inside it's harder than it sounds but some of Villanova's players took right to it I was I wasn't right all the time but it was definitely very beneficial to try to pick up and really focus in on arm recognition and where the slot of the ball is coming out of it strike fastball and we can even show you what realistically a hundred and twenty mile an hour fastball would look like I tried one of those nope 121 121 miles per hour for psychologist Jerry long the cave batting simulator could answer questions about our ability to track moving objects 121 miles I agree you could have hit that oh yeah like is it really true that you've got to keep your eye on the ball to hit it what if the ball disappeared after 200 milliseconds the presence of the ball should almost be unnecessary is that true I don't know the answer to that I'd love to find that out I also tried one of Japan's other creations a hacked oculus rift that he's rigged so a player can swing for the virtual fences how the timing is completely different all right this is a fast ball moving in 111 miles per hour fifth or sixth time is the term finally right yes all right finally so in the sixth or seventh attempts knowing exactly when and where this ball is coming standing way in the back of the batter's box so that my sweet spot is perfectly aligned with the incoming trajectory of this pitch I was able to make contact with a 111 mile-per-hour impossibly fast fast ball so will we ever see a pitch like that in real life probably not but virtual reality could help us better understand how batters track and connect with the ball because what they're doing now is already almost impossible

Channel: WIRED

Views: 6,659,394

Keywords: baseball, fastball, almost impossible, fastest pitch, pitching, baseball season, throwing, tommy john surgery, 100 mph, 100 mph fastball, fastest fastball, 105 mph fastball, 110 mph fastball, 110, 110 mph, wired almost impossible, fastest pitcher, pitcher, mlb, major leagues, aroldis chapman fastball, aroldis chapman, throwing fastball, pitching fastball, how to throw a fastball, baseball pitch, hitting baseball, hitting a baseball, wired

Id: 8udNOTFiqUs

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Tis is really cool! That VR setup would be real fun

[u/BinxyPrime]

1/5 of a second seems like plenty of time before considering something almost impossible*