The scoreboard at Citi Field, New York, showed Jacob deGrom hitting 98mph (158kph) and the ballpark buzzed with the Mets star back in top form.
In Seattle, fans surely thought the same when Felix Hernandez’s fastball ticked up on opening day. And how about that extra juice from Detroit ace Justin Verlander?
All across the majors, pitchers are ramping up the velocity this season — or at least it seems that way.
Not so fast. They are actually getting a little help: Major League Baseball has changed the way it is recording and reporting pitch speeds, driving up readings all over the league.
After previously using PITCHf/x to provide velocities to broadcasts and ballparks, Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) is instead supplying numbers from its Statcast system.
They key difference is that PITCHf/x calculates velocity at a set point — usually 15m to 17m from the back of home plate — while Statcast measures velocity directly out of the pitcher’s hand.
Because of that difference, Statcast readings are faster than PITCHf/x by about 0.97kph on average, MLBAM senior data architect Tom Tango said.
“We do have the technology to capture the speed right out of the hand now,” Tango said. “So that’s what we report.”
The trouble is, for now, that fans and analysts are not necessarily comparing apples with apples on pitch speeds from last year.
For example, PITCHf/x had deGrom averaging 150kph on his four-seam fastball during an injury plagued season last year. On Wednesday, Statcast measured him at 152kph, a bump DeGrom noticed during the game.
“Last year, it felt like all I could do to get to 93 or 94[mph, 150kph or 151kph],” DeGrom said.
On Wednesday, he got there no problem, but that 1.29kph uptick might be mostly because of the new readings. The same may be true for Hernandez — up 1.13kph on four-seamers from last year’s PITCHf/x to this year’s’s Statcast data; Verlander — up 1.29kph; and Stephen Strasburg — up 1.45kph. Conversely, Arizona’s Zack Greinke — down 0.16kph might not be holding as steady as it seems.
What does all that mean? For the average fan, perhaps a few more triple-digit fastballs at the stadium, but likely not much else.
For the sabermetric community, it is an effort to get everyone using the same data.
“We’re standardizing so we all see the same,” Tango said.
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