This kid might throw harder than anyone in history
Interesting read I say as I have loved good pitching since I was a kid.
Strasburg is on the all time fast track
Strasburg is on the all-time fastest track
SAN DIEGO – The radar gun blinks wildly. It’s not used to this. No one makes it strain to read out a third digit. It looks like binary code, not the speed of a pitch from a 20-year-old kid: 101.
It keeps showing up, 101 again and again, and as scouts peek at the number, they ask aloud what everyone else in the baseball world wonders: Will Stephen Strasburg someday throw a baseball harder than anyone has before?
Two men holding radar guns as well as his pitching coach said he has touched 103 mph this season. Only three others have done that, and all were major league relief pitchers, not juniors in college. Strasburg is a starter for San Diego State, and his velocity levels off in triple digits, something never seen, not from Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson or any of the modern fireballers since the advent of the radar gun.
So it’s no surprise that Strasburg is dominating college like no pitcher ever has. He has 74 strikeouts in 34 1/3 innings, meaning only 29 outs have come via batted ball. He fanned 23 batters in one game last year, and in seven outings with Team USA last summer, culminating with the Beijing Olympics, he struck out 62 in 41 innings.
And the stories about standing 60 feet away from Strasburg, apocryphal though they may seem, are more of the horror variety even if they sound comedic. His catcher, Erik Castro, tells of the time he thought a changeup was coming and Strasburg went fastball. Decapitation was barely averted.
“You feel fortunate when you make contact,” said Rance Roundy of UNLV, who had an opposite-field single and only one strikeout in three at-bats against Strasburg.
“He’s that overpowering.”
The day after a recent outing – he had 15 strikeouts in seven scoreless innings against BYU on Friday – Strasburg leaned back in the dugout and marveled at the rapidity of his rise. How he went from an immature, overweight high school senior ignored by every major league team to the most coveted amateur player ever in three short years. How in another three months he’ll have super-agent Scott Boras negotiating on his behalf the largest contract ever given to a ballplayer out of the draft.
Executives believe the asking price for the Washington Nationals, who hold the first overall pick, will start at $15 million. It’s even been suggested that Boras could pull a fast one and attempt to destroy the draft slotting system by shooting for a deal that essentially would treat Strasburg as a front-of-the-rotation starter before he’s thrown a professional pitch.
Just like teams pay for home run power, they pony up huge money for power pitchers who can sniff 100 mph. Strasburg sits there, a red and black cap pulled low on his head, and when asked to contemplate the prospect of throwing a baseball faster than anyone in history, he can’t help himself. A smile begins to creep over his face.
Only then he shows he’s more than a hard thrower. He’s becoming a pitcher, so he delivers a curve.
“No,” he said, the smile suddenly gone. “I don’t think about that at all.”
How can’t he? The only pitch ever clocked faster than 103 mph was a 104.8 mph fastball by Detroit Tigers reliever Joel Zumaya on Oct. 10, 2006, in the American League Championship Series. Mark Wohlers and Matt Anderson are the only other pitchers known to have touched 103 mph on a radar gun, and each did it once.
If Strasburg knows anything about Zumaya, Wohlers or Anderson, he doesn’t let on. If he realizes that none of them accomplished much more than a record reading on a radar gun, he doesn’t say. Zumaya is out again with another injury in a never-ending string. Wohlers lost his control and flamed out quickly. Anderson, the first pick in the 1997 draft, lost his velocity and career to a bum shoulder.
No wonder talking about his fastball is uncomfortable for Strasburg. He knows pitching involves so much more. Besides, what on earth could possibly speak for itself more definitively than his crackling heater? Ambiguous it is not. If one day it becomes a pinnacle of human achievement, something noted by Guinness and baseball historians, the feat won’t have required anything more from him than a windup, a delivery and a follow-through. Words would be superfluous.
“The scary thing is he could develop a little more velocity in the next couple of years,” said a scout from a National League team. “He absolutely could be recognized as the fastest pitcher ever, at least since pitches have been clocked.
Any hitter bracing only for Strasburg’s fastball is set up for failure, however. His breaking pitch – a cross between a slider and curveball – is jelly to the fastball’s peanut butter. He often gets ahead in the count with the fastball then puts hitters away with the 86-mph hook.
“It’s got curveball action and slider velocity,” San Diego State pitching coach Rusty Filter said. “Stephen has an idea how to pitch. He’s not a thrower.”
Unlike almost everything else young and fast, Strasburg is rarely wild. In 210 innings of college and international competition since 2006, he’s walked only 45 batters while striking out 316. He’s a strike-throwing strikeout artist, the rarest of commodities.
“A challenge for him is to hit more bats and keep his pitch count down,” Filter said. “That should happen naturally as he moves on to pro ball.”
Strasburg wasn’t always in such fast company. He’d been at San Diego State all of a week in 2006 and he was doubled over in the corner of the dugout, heaving and vomiting after a routine conditioning workout.
Tony Gwynn, the Hall of Famer and the Aztecs’ coach, shook his head. The sorry spectacle confirmed everything he feared about the freshman pitcher. Filter had convinced Gwynn to give a scholarship to Strasburg, a local kid nobody else wanted.
One thought kept coming back to Gwynn: How can somebody who throws so hard be so soft?
Sure, Strasburg could throw 91 mph, but he was a good 30 pounds overweight. He couldn’t run a few laps without getting sick. He didn’t know how to bench press. The school’s conditioning coach nicknamed him “Slothburg” and told him he ought to quit on the spot.
Questions arose off the field as well. After five days living in a dormitory, Strasburg moved back with his mother, who had recently purchased a house near the campus to help care for Strasburg’s grandmother.
“I wasn’t the most mature guy out of high school, and moving to my mom’s gave me a place to sleep and relax,” Strasburg said. “The dorm was an overload, too much, too soon.”
Famed “Guitar Hero” victim Joel Zumaya leads a group of flame-throwing pitchers. Here’s an unofficial list of the hardest tosses.
(Dave Sandford/Getty Images)
Fast company Team MPH Year Age
Joel Zumaya Detroit Tigers 104 2006 21
Stephen Strasburg San Diego State 103 2009 20
Matt Anderson Detroit Tigers 103 1998 22
Mark Wohlers Atlanta Braves 103 1995 25
Aroldis Chapman Team Cuba 102 2008 21
Matt Lindstrom Florida Marlins 102 2007 27
Justin Verlander Detroit Tigers 102 2007 24
Bobby Jenks Chicago White Sox 102 2006 25
Randy Johnson Arizona D’backs 102 2004 40
Armando Benitez N.Y. Mets 102 2002 29
Easily overwhelmed. That was becoming the label. During high school games he would melt down at the slightest provocation.
“I had a hard time handling anything that would go wrong, whether it was a call, a bad hop, an error, a guy hitting the ball hard,” he said. “I beat myself up. Anything negative would carry over. High school was the dark ages for me.”
Credit Filter with seeing a glimmer of light. Strasburg had a 4.37 grade-point average at nearby West Hills High, so he was a smart kid. He had a live arm despite his woeful conditioning. Filter convinced Gwynn that Strasburg had an upside, that he was worth a gamble.
“After two months on campus he went from 6-foot-3, 255, to 6-5, 225,” Gwynn said. “His was killing it in the weight room. His fastball went from 91 mph to 97. It happened that quick.”
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Originally Posted by CoachChaz
