BP Daily: Throw hard or go home
Crunching a few numbers shows just how important velocity is for righty pitchers
Last week, while I was attending a minor league game between Kane County and Beloit, someone saw me leaning to the right after nearly every pitch to get a radar gun reading (held by a nearby player). "You care about how he's pitching, or how fast he's throwing?" asked a scout sitting near me, sarcastically.
"Is there a difference?" I replied, trying to equal his snark. We both laughed, knowing that there was some merit to the question.
The next day I was talking to another scout about velocity; eventually, he just came out and said what we were both talking around. "I've more or less come to the conclusion that, as unsexy as it is, velocity means more or less everything," he said.
We talked about the rare exceptions -- and how lefties aren't always limited to same restrictions -- but then we started to test our theory by naming right-handers in the big leagues who don't have at least average velocity.
It wasn't a long discussion.
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