by Tyler Kepner
“One hundred miles per hour is the new benchmark,” says Tom House, the former pitcher and coach who founded the National Pitching Association. “I think in the next five to eight years, most pitchers, to sign a pro contract, are going to have to show 97, 98, and touch 101, 102. That’s where the research is going.”
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Research is the buzzword around Driveline’s modest headquarters at an industrial park near Sea-Tac Airport. Hundreds of pitchers flock there every year, striding with purpose around the parking lots, holding kettlebell weights over their heads, or wiggling long sticks—called shoulder tubes, for warm-up and recovery—in front of their chests. Kyle Boddy founded Driveline in 2008, and takes the title of research and development director. He pitched in high school, but his arm always hurt and no one could tell him why. He worked as a software developer at Microsoft but was fascinated by the science of pitching, and probing the secrets to arm health and potential.
By now he has several units at his complex, including one to store Driveline’s inventory of brightly colored PlyoCare balls, weighing 3.5 ounces to 4.4 pounds. (Standard baseballs are 5 to 5.25 ounces.) In another unit, while one pitcher works in a screened-in bullpen, others fire the weighted balls, from close range, at padded walls. Still another unit acts as a laboratory, with 12 high-speed cameras surrounding a mound, capturing biomechanical data while a cluster of computers tracks every movement in intimate detail.
Boddy’s data points a clear direction for the game.
“We’re reaching a point where the maximum velocity is around that 110 mile per hour mark, like 107,” he says. “I just don’t think people are going to throw much harder than that. But what you’re going to see, and what we are seeing evidence of, is that there’s this curve that gets shifted to the right where everybody throws 95 now. There’s a stabilization. It creates a profile of a pitcher, like: ‘This is what we want.’ Front offices are so advanced, they know what will succeed at the big-league level.”
Major league hitters are so advanced that they can handle a steady stream of fastballs. In fact, as pitchers throw harder, they also throw fewer total fastballs—a better fastball makes for better off-speed stuff, because the hitter must start his swing sooner and therefore has less time to react. But with an ever-growing pool of hard-throwing amateurs, the soft-tosser with guile is being naturally selected out of the game. Picture pro baseball as a carnival attraction with a sign at the entrance: YOU MUST THROW THIS HARD TO RIDE THIS RIDE.
“How many prospects do you see coming up that throw 88, 90?” says Trevor Bauer, the Indians right-hander and the first established major leaguer to train at Driveline. “Watch the Futures Game—there’s not a single guy throwing under 94, and most guys are sitting 96 to 98. Sure, it’s the Futures Game and you have one inning and all that adrenaline, but watch All-Star Games from the last five or 10 years in the big leagues. It’s ridiculous. Average velo rises every single year. Doesn’t seem to have any sort of limit on it right now.”
Bauer threw 78 miles an hour as a freshman in high school in Southern California. He quickly grew tired of seeing harder throwers, with worse results, get more opportunities. Before his sophomore year, at the urging of a pitching coach, Jim Wagner, Bauer visited Ron Wolforth, who runs the Texas Baseball Ranch in Montgomery, Texas, and learned how to train to throw hard. Bauer went on to dominate college hitters at UCLA and was drafted third overall by Arizona in 2011. His journey to the majors made him a realist about breaking through the pro gates.
“It took a long time for people to realize that velo is king, at least in the draft process, amateur ball, and up into minor league ball,” Bauer says. “Once you get to the big leagues and you’re here, getting outs is king. But up until the big leagues, velo is king, and in the minor leagues, guys that have poor results but throw really hard get a lot more opportunities than guys that have really good results but throw 86, 88.
“A lot’s changed in five or 10 years. You get to college and college coaches say, ‘Hey, locate this, throw a changeup, let’s get people out,’ and you’re like, ‘OK, that’s what it takes to be successful at this level’—but you didn’t realize, because the information wasn’t sitting there telling you, ‘Hey, you’re not going to get drafted unless you do this.’ ”
Throw hard, he means.
“So it’s just taken a while for the research to be done, and for methods to be developed to train velocity reliably, and then for that information to be spread through enough high-level people that people start trusting it.”
Now, some of the more progressive college programs, like Vanderbilt and Oregon State, use Driveline training techniques for their pitchers—weighted balls, long toss, and so on. More than 10 MLB teams have visited Boddy’s complex in Washington, and major leaguers regularly consult with him, Wolforth, and others to rebuild their fastballs and learn to train with less soreness.
The coaches are learning, too, as the game rapidly evolves. Wolforth started his business in 1993, and a decade ago, he said, teams viewed him as a pariah. He could help pupils throw hard enough to get signed, but mainly built pitchers who could win teddy bears at carnivals, not actual games. In that case, he thought, what was the point?
“There was real criticism: you get a Wolforth guy in 2008, he’s going to throw the ball through a car wash and not get it wet, but I’m not sure he could throw it over the white thing,” Wolforth says. “And now, when we send a guy up, not only can they throw it over the white thing and throw it hard, but they can also recover, and their pitchability goes very high. We have shifted our emphasis and broadened it.”
Today, Wolforth says, he spends more time teaching mechanics, secondary pitches, and command than teaching velocity. He consults with about half of the major league teams and has helped rejuvenate the careers of several wayward pitchers, including at least two former Cy Young Award winners.
When pitchers suddenly throw harder, Wolforth says, they must also learn the right way to decelerate in their follow-through; using Volkswagen Beetle brakes on a Maserati, he said, invites disaster. Wolforth believes that with a comprehensive, individualized program, all pitchers can find their maximum velocity. But that is only part of what they need.
“The radar gun doesn’t tell us if they can pitch or not,” Wolforth says. “It’s a very simple, snap way to tell something, and sometimes it’s not the best way, but people like it because it immediately gives you feedback and it’s comparable.”
With so many hard throwers, Tom House believes, the traditional starting pitcher, as we have long known the role, will soon cease to exist. Future staffs, he predicted, will be made up of 12 pitchers throwing three times a week, with nobody working more than 45 pitches per game or going more than once through the lineup.
To some extent, this is already happening. Only 15 pitchers worked 200 innings in 2017, matching the previous year for the fewest ever in a nonstrike season. The World Series teams got there without asking much of any individual pitcher—the Astros’ innings leader (Mike Fiers, with 153⅓) did not even meet the minimum standard to qualify for the ERA title, and the Dodgers had just 12 games all season in which their starter threw 100 pitches, the fewest in the majors.
In 1976—in a 24-team league—47 pitchers reached 215 innings. By 2017, that number had fallen to zero across the game’s 30 teams. With such an inventory of pitchers who can throw hard for short bursts, teams now build five- or six-inning starters and let relievers handle the rest.
“When I first got called up, the pitchers they were going with were guys that were 88 to 92, with sink and cut—veteran guys that could spot it up,” says Brian McCann, the longtime catcher. “Over time, we’ve realized that the prospect in Triple-A that throws hard is a way more uncomfortable at-bat than the other guy.”
The Reds’ Joey Votto, who combines slugging and patience better than any modern hitter, says the
velocity spike has led to more swings and misses, but also to more mistakes cruising down the middle, begging to be crushed for home runs. Max Scherzer, a dominant right-hander for the Nationals, says hitters know they can’t string together singles against such overpowering stuff, so they tailor their swings to hit fly balls. They drive more misplaced fastballs into the seats and accept more strikeouts as a trade-off.
In 2002, the average fastball was 89 miles an hour. In 2017, it was 92.8 mph. With velocity, home runs, and strikeouts rising, pitchers’ workloads are falling. It is not a healthy trend.
“These guys only know one thing, because organizations are telling them one thing: give me everything you have and we’ll take care of the rest,” John Smoltz says. “It’s taking, on average, 25 pitchers per year per club, and no one’s paying attention to it because their theory is, ‘There’s just so many arms, we don’t need to.’
“I’m not stuck in the old school, but I’m saying, ‘Whoa, let’s slow the roll a little bit.’ I maintain that in three to five years, this game will crash. If I’m right, the pitching cannot keep up, and/or fans are gonna go, ‘Uncle, I can’t take it, it’s 10 pitchers a game, I can’t take the pitching changes, I can’t take the length of the games.’ They’re trying everything they can to speed up the game, but we’re not gaining any speed-up time.”
In 2017, batters struck out nearly 3,000 more times, while hitting roughly 2,000 more homers, than they had in 2014, the year that ended with Madison Bumgarner’s flurry of fastballs to Salvador Perez. That means a lot fewer balls in play, and a lot more standing around. The average time of a nine-inning game reached three hours, five minutes in 2017, an all-time high—and the average fastball velocity rose for the seventh year in a row.
Those two trends are joined tightly together, another paradox in a sport full of them: when the fastball speeds up, the game slows down.
THE CURVEBALL
A Karate Chop with a Ball
Mike Montgomery’s throwing program for the 2016 season began just before New Year’s on Via Saludo in Valencia, California. He had no reason to believe that his work would stretch until November, to Ontario Street in Cleveland, where he would throw the most anticipated pitch in the history of the Chicago Cubs.
It was Montgomery’s ninth professional season. He had reached the majors only a few months earlier, in June 2015 with the Seattle Mariners. He threw two shutouts for them but was otherwise ordinary. When his agent floated the idea of leaving for a $2 million contract in Japan, the Mariners seemed content to let him go. Their nonchalance bothered and inspired Montgomery. He would show them he was better than they thought.
First, though, Montgomery needed a catcher. He asked his mom, Jeannette, a former third baseman for the softball team at Cal Poly Pomona. She strapped on catcher’s gear, caught her son’s best fastball, and barked, “Is that all you got?” Montgomery, unnerved, tried other stuff, too.
“I would throw her my curveball and she would catch it,” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Man, maybe this pitch ain’t that good then, if my mom can catch it.’ ”
As a boy, Montgomery had been drawn more to basketball than baseball. But his father, David, rooted for the Atlanta Braves, and he watched their games on TBS at the family’s home in California. Montgomery liked the Braves’ aces, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz. He was tall and lanky and left-handed—the only lefty in the family—and when spring came around, coaches told him to pitch. As a sophomore at Hart High School, he made the varsity with a fastball, a changeup, and a palmball that acted as a curveball; Montgomery used the high seams like training wheels, the ball rolling off his fingers for a slow, loopy break.
The Kansas City Royals signed Montgomery as the thirty-sixth pick in the 2008 draft, and his palmball/curve did not come with him. The pro balls were stitched tighter, the seams lower, and the old breaking ball barely moved. In time Montgomery would understand that pro balls—including the even harder version in the majors—were better for breaking balls, because they were not as loose and could thus spin more. With the Royals, though, his curveball was hopeless. The fastball/change combination got Montgomery to Triple-A, but his attempts at a curveball were laughable. Once, in Omaha, it bounced on the grass and ricocheted off the hitter’s elbow.
Without a reliable third pitch, Montgomery lost his status as a top prospect. But when the Royals traded him to Tampa Bay before the 2013 season, Montgomery had a few things that would help him: a gregarious personality, an inquisitive mind, and no fear of throwing a lot. In 2014 he befriended a teammate, Nate Karns, and played catch with him every day. Karns showed Montgomery his grip for a spike curveball, in which the index finger is raised and curled, with the tip resting lightly on the leather; the middle finger and thumb do all the work. Montgomery modified Karns’s grip, removing the index finger completely when he let the curveball go, and worked on the pitch relentlessly. A coach, Neil Allen, let Montgomery throw 40 or so curveballs in a row in the bullpen, just to get the feel.
With the curveball, feel is big. The fastball, like nearly every other pitch, is thrown with backspin. The curveball is thrown with topspin, the seams whooshing downward as the pitch tumbles to Earth. Only certain pitchers have the loose, easy wrist action to make a ball act that way.
“Being able to spin the ball, either you can or you can’t,” says Nolan Ryan, who may have thrown the most devastating curve of all. “If they don’t really have that ability—yeah, you can teach them a curveball, but will it be an exceptional pitch? I don’t think so. I think people either have that ability or they don’t.”
A quick wrist is critical to disguising the pitch. Since a curveball is thrown so differently on release—with the pitcher’s hand facing his head, not facing the batter—it’s easy to telegraph. If a hitter sees that hand position, he knows he’ll get a curveball. He also knows it’s coming if the ball pops up before plummeting down. The curveballs that go out and then tumble down, after an imperceptible wrist turn, work best.
“The way many of us were taught to throw the curveball was to mentally think fastball out of the hand,” said Bryan Price, the longtime pitching coach and manager. “Even as you get up into what we call your power position, as your hand comes forward, it’s in fastball position first, and then accelerates into curveball position. That gives you hand speed through the pitch and gives you a tighter spin, tighter break, and more deception.”
Montgomery often struggled to control his curveball, but he always had the hand to impart spin. Andrew Friedman, who traded for Montgomery with the Rays, noticed the exceptional spin rate, and suggested he use it more. Montgomery was still not sure; he knew the curve was a separator—when he pitched well, that was usually the reason—but he could not trust it.
The Rays gave up on Montgomery before the 2015 season, his fifth at Class AAA. He would make 99 starts at that level, more than the combined total of Jon Lester, John Lackey, and Kyle Hendricks, three of the starters on the 2016 Cubs. But Montgomery used his apprenticeship wisely, as a laboratory for new grips and angles of release, trying to unlock the mystery of the pitch he knew he needed.
By the start of the 2016 season, he was ready, and his curveball was the difference. But he still needed more convincing.
“Monty, you have a swing-and-miss breaking ball,” said Mel Stottlemyre Jr., the Mariners’ pitching coach, after a side session in spring training. Montgomery insisted that his changeup was better and his curve was too erratic. “No, no, no,” Stottlemyre continued. “Believe me, I’ve been around this game a long time—I’m telling you, your breaking ball is that good.”
Montgomery was emboldened. On opening day in Texas, in relief of Felix Hernandez, he struck out the first batter he faced, Delino DeShields, on a wicked curveball. DeShields stared back at the mound, puzzled by a pitch he had not seen from Montgomery before. After another strikeout, Montgomery faced Prince Fielder, the dangerous left-h
anded slugger. He was nervous but confident. He aimed the curveball at Fielder’s front shoulder and it dropped over the middle for a called third strike.
On the bench after the inning, teammates bombarded Montgomery with praise. He stopped doubting his curveball after that.
“Man, my curveball is good,” he thought, “and I don’t know if I even understand that it can get better.”
The Cubs understood. They traded for Montgomery in July, encouraged by the curveball. All his years of tinkering were paying off: the data showed that Montgomery’s curveball was spinning about 100 rpm more than it had the year before. Chris Bosio, the Cubs’ pitching coach, echoed Friedman and Stottlemyre: that’s your best pitch, so use it more. Montgomery would double his curveball usage, from 12 percent in 2015 to 24 percent in 2016. By the end of that regular season, opponents had a .103 average off Montgomery’s curve in his career.
As the summer went on, Montgomery kept buying in. The statistics guided him. After every game, on his phone or in the Cubs’ video room, Montgomery logged on to BrooksBaseball.net to learn how many inches, vertically and horizontally, his curve had moved, comparing his results to those of other lefties. He remembered how certain pitches had felt coming off his hand, and matched them up with the data. The numbers comforted Montgomery. They told him never to worry, even when his best pitch deserted him as he prepared for the biggest moment of his life.
Montgomery was not part of the plan for Game 7 of the World Series against the Indians. Joe Maddon, the Cubs’ manager, wanted to use three pitchers—Hendricks, Lester, and Aroldis Chapman—to secure the team’s first championship in 108 years. He tried, but all of them wobbled. Montgomery warmed up in the third inning, then again in the fifth, the ninth, and the eleventh. He had already pitched four games in the World Series, and he did not have much left. Not only was he tired—much like Ralph Terry in 1960—he was bouncing his curveball everywhere. He did not throw a single strike with it in warm-ups.
