Interesting article!
Posted on Sat, Jul. 22, 2006
Speed limit on the fastball
Athletes continue to get bigger and stronger. So why won’t the fastball go faster? The body won’t allow it.
By SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star
The baddest, fastest, fiercest fastball anybody ever saw was more than 40 years ago, before color TV made it big, before radar guns, before Roger Clemens was even born.
The baddest, fastest, fiercest fastball anybody ever saw came from the left arm of a man you’ve probably never heard of. His name is Steve Dalkowski. He is 5 feet 11, 67 years old and dealing with the effects of alcoholism in a Connecticut nursing home.
“I pitched against Ted Williams when I was 18,” Dalkowski says now. “He came out, and he tells me he couldn’t see the ball. I tell him, ‘It went right under your nose.’ ”
Some swear his fastball reached 110 mph, maybe even 115. Earl Weaver, Pat Gillick and Bobby Cox are among many who still say nobody’s ever thrown faster. Dalkowski’s terrible control — he once lost a one-hitter 9-8 because he walked 17 — and an elbow injury kept him from ever throwing a big-league pitch.
Since then, hard throwers from Armando Benitez to Joel Zumaya have overworked radar guns all over the country. Officially, the Guinness Book of World Records credits Nolan Ryan with the fastest pitch, at 100.9 mph, in 1974.
But while the world record in the 100 meters keeps falling — nine times since 1968, twice since Maurice Greene’s 9.79 in 1999 — nobody has knocked Ryan out of the record book or Dalkowski out of memory.
Basketball players are taller, quicker and more athletic. High jumpers jump higher. Long jumpers jump longer. Swimmers swim faster. Even baseball hitters hit balls farther.
Pitchers, though …
“About 100 mph seems to be the maximum,” says Glenn Fleisig, a biomechanical engineer who has worked with big-league teams at the American Sports Medicine Institute. “You won’t have faster top speeds than before. But you can have more people near the top speed.”
The reason that’s true, the reason that the 2056 Cy Young winners won’t throw any faster than this year’s winners has everything to do with physics and the limitations of the human body.
•••
Ever seen roller derby? Or even a group of preteens at Skateland, when they connect arms and whip the kid at the end into superhuman speed? Surprisingly, it can tell us a lot about the act of throwing a baseball.
The speed with which the end skater zooms is dependent more on the timing with which momentum is transferred from the others than it is their collective strength. In other words, a weaker group of well-coordinated girls could whip their end skater faster than a stronger group of boys whose timing was a bit off.
The same thought applies to throwing a baseball. Faster speeds come from better energy transfer from legs to trunk, trunk to shoulder, shoulder to elbow, elbow to hand. In physics, it’s called the kinetic chain. In sports, it’s called coordination.
“You can always make people stronger,” Fleisig says. “But it’s not going to translate into more ball velocity.”
Which is why Roy Oswalt is 6 feet, 185 pounds and throws upper 90s, and the meathead at your gym is 6-4, 240 and probably couldn’t break glass.
It also helps explain why more pitchers have upper-90s fastballs than ever before. Presumably, Bob Feller or Bob Gibson or Christy Mathewson or Steve Dalkowski never studied biomechanics. For whatever reason, they just naturally threw with outstanding mechanics, maximizing their already-freakish potential.
As technology and knowledge advance, more pitchers benefit from knowing the proper technique to throw closer to their bodies’ capability.
Fleisig calculated that about 80 newton-meters of torque are put on the elbow when a top-level pitcher throws a fastball. He also studied cadaver elbows, testing their durability to force. The ligament in most elbows snaps around 80 newton-meters of torque.
And that’s the problem with throwing much faster than 100. There comes a point where more torque stops making the ball go faster and starts making the elbow snap. That will be true as long as there is no accepted way to significantly strengthen that ligament.
“I don’t think with rotational sports it’s possible to get the gene pool to do more than it’s doing right now,” says Tom House, former big-leaguer and co-founder of the National Pitching Association. “The low-end guys can always be improved. Those special guys, they’ve got a genetic max to them.”
Ligament limitation can also explain why athletes in other sports are doing things only dreamed of 20 years ago. Sprinters, for instance, aren’t close to reaching what their tendons and ligaments can take. No single movement from a sprinter puts as much stress on any ligament, tendon or bone as a pitcher puts on his elbow.
More important is the training factor. Sprinters — and swimmers, jumpers, distance runners, etc. — can strengthen the muscles they use. The ligaments most crucial to pitchers aren’t getting any stronger.
In fact, they wear down and tear over time.
“You never say never,” says Timothy Kremchek, the Reds’ physician and an expert on arm injuries. “But I doubt (pitchers will ever throw faster), just because of the unnaturalness of the spot. If somebody ever did throw that hard, it would be for such a short period of time I’m not sure people would really believe it. We are where we are, and it’s going to be that way for a long, long time.”
•••
Maybe this is why baseball seems to moving away from scouting by radar guns and focusing more on command and movement.
Greg Maddux wins four consecutive Cy Young Awards throwing about the same speed you see in the Sunflower League, while Colt Griffin never advances past Class AA with a triple-digit heater.
There’s an old saying in baseball that the best big-leaguers can hit a bullet if it’s straight and they know where it’s going.
“Honestly, we never did talk about how hard anybody threw,” says Rick Sutcliffe, an 18-year veteran and the 1984 NL Cy Young winner. “We talked more about hitting the outside corner at the knees. These guys, you can throw it as hard as you want, but if it’s not in a good spot, it’s going a long way the other direction.”
Throwing harder than anybody else sure never did much for Dalkowski, our man in the nursing home.
He struck out 1,396 and walked 1,354 in 995 professional innings, going 46-80 with a 5.59 ERA.
Nuke LaLoosh, the pitcher in “Bull Durham,” was loosely based on Dalkowski, who says he thinks the movie is both “funny” and “sad.”
Dalkowski still takes pride in being called the hardest thrower in baseball history, even if it never got him to the big leagues. Even if it’s unofficial.
Would he like to see someone take his title?
“Maybe someday,” he says. “Not right now, though, no. They’re getting closer, it seems. But they still can’t throw it like I threw it.”
There’s a chance no one ever will.
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To reach Sam Mellinger, sports reporter for The Star, call (816) 234-4389 or send e-mail to smellinger@kcstar.com.
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