@adbono posted:I couldn’t have said it better myself. There are a lot of things that are contributing to the obsession with velocity. And few of them are good. First of all, today’s radar guns read hotter than the ones used back when the guys you mentioned were playing. Maddux could throw pretty hard when he wanted to. But he didn’t have to throw as hard as he could to get big league hitters out. I imagine he prolonged his career by taking the approach that he did. So while those guys weren’t regarded as hard throwers only Moyer was a soft tosser. To answer your question about commanding the baseball at max effort, not many kids can do that very well. And a radar gun reading on the ball right out of the hand on a full sprint pull down is not a FB velo. It’s an indication of potential but it often doesn’t transfer to the game mound. Some of the biggest offenders are so called velo drs that conduct velo camps and post results on Twitter to create a bunch of hype. What they really are doing is building their brand on the backs of unsuspecting kids and parents. Some pitching clinics are pretty good, but for every good one there are 10 bad ones. PG, PBR, and VTool don’t help the cause. All they talk about is velo too. All of it is social media based and plays into the immediate gratification that young players want. And the “scouting reports” that are written for those orgs are not written by scouts. They are written by employees, some of which have no background in baseball. I heard a D1 RC from a school in Houston say something about this subject that I thought was profound. He said, “ kids today care more about getting likes and follows on social media than they care about what actual decision makers (that can alter the course of their lives) think.”
Velo can create opportunities. But if you can’t command the baseball that’s all it creates and they can go away quickly. Nobody gives a tinker’s damn what the velo and spin rate are on ball 4. Except for the people that are taking your money in return for that data. The Baseball public has been brainwashed to believe that velo is the be all end all to pitching because that pitch can be parlayed into money. But it isn’t true (like so many other things we have all been told). Last weekend in a 3 game set (23 innings total) our JuCo pitching staff walked 25 batters, hit 4 more, and balked 4 times. That’s 33 free bases. By some miracle we won 2 of the 3 games, but the loss was a blowout. Our HC went ballistic on the PC and the pitching staff and asked me to come up with a plan on what to do. And I did. And it was a plan that focused on commanding the baseball, especially off speed pitches. Because hardly any 18-20 year pitchers that throw hard are very good at that. And I believe the reason that they aren’t is too much focus on velo at the expense of everything else that goes along with being an effective pitcher. But it looks good on Twitter!
Speaking of velo at a sprint, what does it say if a pitcher’s velo on those run and guns is basically the same as his mound velo? Is it that mechanics on the mound are actually getting him the velo, and on the run and gun he isn’t using mechanics to generate the same power? Or is it that he just isn’t athletic enough to figure out how to get power out of the run and gun? Or maybe lower potential for improving velo? Just curious. I know of a couple pitchers who have the same velo for run and guns. Others have a 5mph plus gap. My son is in between.