Why Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn Likely Had a Higher K/9 Rate than Eddie Harris in Major League
Being faster has always been better, right? As a kid I personally never dreamed of the day I could throw an 85 mph fastball.
Fuck that. I wanted the big 100. Just look at the classic movie Major League. Did kids watch this film and idolize Eddie Harris and dream about one day being a crafty, velocity-challenged veteran on the mound? Nope. Unless you’re some kind of weirdo, you chose Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn and the 100-mph fastball that made him not only a badass but also a hitter’s worst nightmare.
I feel that at times pitch speed is somewhat of a given in the MLB. Sure, guys who barely throw 85 mph like Mark Buehrle are at times embraced the same way as guys throwing 102 like The Cuban Missile Crisis Aroldis Chapman, but I feel that for the most part, if you throw somewhere in the 90s, your speed is somewhat irrelevant to the everyday baseball viewer. It also seems like fastballs are really the only pitch where speed is of concern. Again, on the extreme side, having a guy with a 70 mph 12-6 curve may garner a tad more attention than normal, but I feel it’s not unreasonable to say that 95 percent of baseball fans could not name how fast their favorite team’s third starting pitcher’s slider is.
How important is pitch speed in the MLB? I have written previously about the difficulties in evaluating rookies and minor leaguers due to not only the lack of significant Minor League statistical information, but also the questionable correlation between Minor League and MLB production. Evaluating something as simple as a pitcher’s pitch speed could help narrow this gap in knowledge about rookies.
It’s also interesting that while pitch speed is one of the most relevant factors for baseball scouts when drafting players (picture the old guys at high school games lugging around radar guns), it essentially disappears from evaluations upon anyone making it to the MLB. In the same sense that no fan really cares about a sixth-year wide receiver’s 40 time anymore, no one looks up a pitcher’s changeup speed before choosing them in DFS.
Because there are essentially two key variables that go into a pitch’s overall effectiveness (pitch speed and movement; although windup and release point also deserve attention, they are understandably more difficult to measure), you may think it’s obvious that pitchers that throw harder are more effective. However, I find it useful to analytically measure small variables such as pitch speed, as sometimes our assumptions end up not being true at all.
To read the rest of this lesson, you must purchase the course!
