Fat Fastballs Are Twisting Pitchers’ Arms

WSJ: “Baseball has a pitching velocity problem – and it’s not slowing down. Yankees ace Gerrit Cole became the latest starting pitcher to suffer a season-ending elbow injury, part of a worrisome trend that’s easy to explain, but looks impossible to fix.”

Tell me about it. All through my high school & college baseball career I had big time early season arm trouble and I wasn’t even a pitcher. Fast forward to 2025. As the newspaper explained: “The unending pursuit of previously unimaginable velocity – coupled with a growing emphasis on finding new, elbow-bending ways to spin the ball – has effectively made the act of pitching fundamentally incompatible with the biology of the human arm.” Everyone in the game is in the know as to what’s going on. That is, “Pitchers throw harder than ever before, with the speed of the average fastball climbing from about 91 MPH to more than 94 MPH over the past 20 years. The total number of pitches recorded at 100 MPH or more has gone from 214 in 2008 to more than 3,300 last year.” Why? Because MLB stats show that major leaguers’ batting averages are far worst (.229) when facing a 96 MPH pitch than a more humanistic 92 MPH one (.252).

So, guess who gets the lucrative MLB contract coming out of college? The kid with a 92 MPH fastball or the one with the 96 MPH heater? Some remedies floated include “a minimum number of innings starters must pitch, limiting how many pitchers can be on a roster or even outlawing pitches over a certain velocity.” Fat chance?

Davd Soul