The Slowest Pitch of the Year
When Jordan Hicks threw the ball 105.1 mph a few weeks ago, I got a notification on my phone, Twitter was abuzz, and even real-life people wanted to talk about the impressive 21-year-old right hander’s loose grasp of the limitations of the human body. It was an impressive feat to be sure, but baseball is amazing explicitly because there is an infinite number of ways to get people out. In fact, the 105.1 mph pitch, while physically impressive, resulted in a ball (and a wild pitch), and hurt his team’s probability to win the game. Even still, it grabbed all the headlines in ways that other things that actually help teams win games, like ordinary strikes and successfully executed hit and runs, just don’t.
You know what else isn’t reported on reported upon with the same gusto as the fastest pitch, but which, in isolation, has roughly the same import on a given game’s outcome? The slowest pitch of the season. The pitch that moves the most is also important a thing that I care about.
We know Jordan Hicks managed the fastest pitch of the season, and the most attentive among us may be aware of some of the slower pitches of the year and given enough guesses would have landed on the right answer (It’s not Pablo Sandoval). But what do we know about these extreme pitches? The answer: not nearly enough.
The Slowest Pitch of the Season
According to the download from BaseballSavant data, the slowest pitch of the season was released at 41.7 miles per hour by Jacob Rhame. Domestic Pigeons fly about an average of 50 miles per hour. Jacob Rhame managed to throw a pitch 20% slower than a pigeon flies in a game on May 29th. On May 30th, Jacob Rhame was sent to AAA.
To be fair, Rhame’s next slowest pitch on the season has come in at a sizzling 76 mph. He’s capable of throwing it very hard, even touching 98 with some frequency. So what the heck happened on that pitch to Ozzie Albies in the 8th inning of a recently tied game? Well… I went back and watched the at-bat, and Rhame’s velocity on the three pitches that it took to strike out Albies were: 87, 87, 96. Statcast has a way of flubbing data sometimes. Any data source will flub from time to time. Damn.
The next slowest pitch in the BaseballSavant dataset: 43.7 from Jacob Faria on the afternoon of May 16th. Now, one thing to know about Jacob Faria is that he pitches for the Rays. The Rays have been messing around with baseball conventions this year. They have used an “opener” to start games, with the idea that a one-inning specialist pitches the first inning of the game, followed by a pitcher who attempts to throw 5-6 innings. They’re basically taking the classic middle reliever and throwing him in the first inning. It’s an attempt to get people out in more effective ways, and maximize their chance to win. The Rays are doing inventive things with their starting pitchers in an attempt to win, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of their starting pitchers might have the most unique pitch of the year.
Jacob Faria certainly does. Most of the time, his repertoire is pretty average by Major League standards. He sports a 92 mph fastball that he throws just over half the time. He also has a changeup and slider, which he throws in there about 20% of the time each. All three of his primary offerings are within 1 run of average per Fangraphs’ Pitch Type Weights. But Faria is responsible for the slowest pitch of the year. It was first and third with one out in the bottom of the fourth in an afternoon game. Seems like a great time to break out the ephus!
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Ah, yes. The unintentional ephus!
Let’s break this thing down.
The set position looks good here. Everyone is in place. Escobar looks ready to hit, Willson Ramos looks ready to receive, the umpire looks nearly ready to do umpire things, and all Faria has to do is something that he’s done thousands and thousands of times.
This was not the plan. Faria’s upper half got the memo from the brain: “Deliver a pitch.” The memo just didn’t make it’s way all the way to the left foot. Or rather, the left foot forgot what the next step was next after “lift”. Everything else was ready to go and the left foot just found a good place to take a break.
An update on the left foot: It remembered its job, but is now stuck in the mud. We’ve all been there. I hate getting stuck in the mud. Imagine how embarrassed the left foot feels here.
Time for everything else to compensate. We often forget just how balanced these guys are when they pitch. This is not one of those examples. Faria looks like he’s about to fall over.
Escobar appears to be the only one who thinks things are amuck. Faria has taken a large swag-y step off the mound; the type of step that I take when I successfully shoot a piece of paper into the trashcan. This is also a good time to examine the folks in the crowd behind home plate. They’re all rocking sunglasses. 2 are just not paying attention. They’re missing something historic here.
Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of how long it took this ball to get there. Ramos still has not received the ball. Escobar looks like he is about to get his signs from the third base coach. He’s out of there, retreating from that offering as if it were a large snake. Faria is about 8 feet from the rubber, facing first base, unable to watch the pitch’s path. The best part about this might be the 44 mph overlay mark that usually appears on the home plate area to give viewers both location and speed of the pitch. Faria broke that software. Just broke it. The pitch is somewhere on the mound, possibly behind the rubber.
When I was learning to play baseball, coaches would always tell me that you could not outrun the ball. This was not some indictment on my running speed in particular, but rather a comment on the practical physics that govern our world. Faria’s 43.7 mph offering is another proof of that old adage. Nobody could outrun the ball, 30 mph sprint speed is about the tops ever, but that is awfully close. If only the adage were something about a domestic pigeon relative to pitch speed. Then, Faria would have proven the exception to the rule.
-Sean Morash
