YOU CAN'T HIT WHAT YOU CAN'T SEE: On Saturday, a former communist snuck into a California border town and threw a hard object at 105.1 miles per hour, narrowly missing a clergyman. He threw a bunch of other hard objects too, every one at more than 100 miles an hour. One of the intended victims managed to fight the ex-communist off with a stick, nobody was hurt, and the ex-communist left, defeated.
The ex-communist was Aroldis Chapman, a Cuban emigre; the hard object was a baseball; the clergymen were of the San Diegan Padre order. So, really, the only significant things about the encounter were the 105-mile-an-hour pitch -- the fastest ever reliably recorded -- and the snare-beat consistency of all of the 100-mph pitches.
A few weeks ago, when Chapman made his MLB debut, Jeff Sullivan at Lookout Landing did a couple of posts looking at how velocity affects the hittability of pitches and how hitters do against 100-mile-an-hour pitches. The results of the first confirmed the obvious -- the faster the pitch, the harder it is to put your bat on it. But the interesting thing to me was that of over 550 pitches thrown at greater than 100 miles an hour in the sample period, there were zero home runs. Chapman throws so hard that he has eliminated a True Outcome.* That's scary.
*The "Three True Outcomes" -- strikeouts, walks, home runs -- are the three principal things that can happen during a plate appearance that are not affected by the defense. Since the difference between a deep fly ball and a home run is sometimes luck, some key pitching stats try to normalize the ratio between the two, but maybe that would be unfair to Chapman and Joel Zumaya.
