The Palm Beach Post

NO SPEED LIMIT?

Is the 110-mph fastball the next barrier to fall?

The 10-second 100-meter dash. The four-minute mile. The two-hour marathon. In baseball, is the 110-mph fastball the next big number to fall? What is the limit? How fast can a profession­al pitcher throw a baseball?

There is some debate about what the fastest fastball to date has been. In the documentar­y “Fastball,” filmmakers looked at a few key moments. Bob Feller threw a ball faster than a motorcycle going 86 mph. Nolan Ryan was clocked at 100.8 mph by a radar gun in 1974. If you convert Ryan’s number to the out-of-the-hand methodolog­y used to measure pitch speed today, you get 108 mph. For some, that counts as the fastest pitch on record.

We have been tracking major league pitchers with the same quality of technology since 2007, though, and nobody has thrown harder than Aroldis Chapman and his 105.8 mph fastball in 2010.

Since those other pitchers were clocked using outdated technology, it is probably fairest to call 105.8 mph the modern record.

But what is the fastest a human could throw the ball?

“When you build up a simple physics model that is essentiall­y a series of collisions between body parts, you get a max fastball velocity of about 125 mph,” said Jimmy Buffi, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineerin­g. Buffi is a former Los Angeles Dodgers analyst and co-founder of Reboot Motion, a player developmen­t consultanc­y firm.

“We’ll need to use new methods,” said Kyle Boddy, a current Boston Red Sox consultant and the founder of Driveline Baseball, a player developmen­t lab and consultanc­y company. “If there is a way to continue on, it won’t be with current methods. Using the best mechanics from elite pitchers, piecemeal is unlikely to be the way we can create the 110-mph pitcher.”

But considerin­g the potential for injury in this pursuit, maybe we are at the limit.

“Fifteen years ago, I was quoted as saying that I didn’t think top velocity or the ceiling was going up, but I foresee it getting pretty crowded at the ceiling. It wasn’t a lucky guess that I pulled out of my butt.”

Glenn Fleisig Director of biomechani­cs research at the American Sports Medicine Institute

“I don’t think people are going to be able to throw that hard,” the Dodgers’ Bobby Miller, the league’s third-hardest-throwing starter, said about numbers such as 110 and 125 mph. “You reach a certain point where your arm will probably break.”

Let’s take a closer look at those three different answers.

The case for 125 mph

There is a concept in pitching called the kinetic chain, which describes the transfer of force from the ground, and the larger muscles in the legs, up through the core and out to the end of the arm. In a theoretica­l space, that chain is basically a bunch of interactio­ns that attempt to conserve the momentum created down low as it travels out to the arm. Buffi’s job at Reboot is to help make those transfers as efficient as possible. He created a physics model to describe them for the purposes of answering this question.

“To come up with this toy example,” he said, “I thought of the pitching motion as essentiall­y a series of energy transfers between two masses, similar to a large ball colliding with a smaller ball. The legs are the larger mass, and they transfer energy to the torso, which transfers energy to the upper arm, then to the forearm, then to the hand, then to the ball.”

The relative sizes of each of those muscle groups govern the amount of energy that can be transferre­d in each interactio­n, just as it is in the classic physics problem in which a big ball hits a smaller ball. In the model that Buffi created, a 200-pound person putting 500 pounds of force into the ground while being 85% efficient in his transfers (an efficiency that is elite but within the range of possibilit­y, in his estimation) would throw 125 mph.

One of today’s hardest throwers, Oakland closer Mason Miller, agrees that the size of the player and force into the ground were common denominato­rs when you looked at the hardest throwers.

“Physically, I’m 230 pounds, maybe 240 at my biggest. Chapman is like 250 pounds,” Miller said. He has thrown the fourth-fastest pitch this season, at 103.7 mph, which trails only a couple of Chapman fastballs (one at 104) and one from Los Angeles Angels reliever Ben Joyce. “Force production into the ground is important, we’ve seen that from force plate testing, that’s a good measure of power production.”

But there are some flaws in this case. Ground-force reactions north of the ones Buffi used have been recorded already by athletes at Driveline Baseball, and they did not throw 125 mph. That is much faster than what has been observed, as well.

Miller said: “One hundred twenty-five seems like it’s way out of our current existence.”

“Oh, my goodness, 125, that’s crazy,” said Minnesota Twins closer Jhoan Duran, who has topped out at 104.8 mph.

The case for 110 mph

The study of biomechani­cs, or the mechanical laws relating to the movement and structure of living organisms, has unlocked velocity for a lot of today’s hard throwers. The average four-seam major league fastball, measured by the same technology and methodolog­y, has increased in velocity every season since MLB started tracking it, from 91.1 mph in 2007 to 94.1 now.

Sam Hellinger, of Driveline Baseball, shared an example of how this understand­ing of the body has helped players train to get more velocity. Justin Thorsteins­on, a former Division I pitcher hoping to sign on with an organizati­on, came to them throwing 87.7 mph in June and was throwing 91.5 mph by August. Changing how his shoulder moved was key. Scapular retraction — in rudimentar­y terms, how far back the throwing shoulder reaches before coming forward — has been linked to velocity by biomechani­cs studies because it creates a big separation between the hip and the shoulder. As that separation snaps back like a rubber band, torso speed is accelerate­d, which is then transferre­d to the arm. That was a big focus for Thorsteins­on.

After some work with weighted balls and specific drills, Thorsteins­on improved his scores in the specific biomechani­cs they were targeting.

So, could a 250-pound monster of an athlete refine each of his movements and bust past 106 mph?

“If you’re getting bigger than Chapman, who throws 105, if you get any bigger, you lose coordinati­on,” said Dodgers starter Walker Buehler. “He’s as big and as strong as you can be, and his delivery is all about velo.”

Boddy is also not sure that a big dude, plus the best piecemeal mechanics of our time, is the right way forward.

“We’ll need to use new methods, like simulation of human movement with millions of synthetic data points using machine learning and artificial intelligen­ce to explore the entire latent space of possible mechanical outputs and muscular contributi­ons to the throwing motion,” Boddy said. “This is something Driveline Baseball has been working on for years.”

The case for 106 mph

Let’s flip over to a different sport for a second. In the 100-meter dash, we have records dating to the 1970s. If we track the best times by year, it looks as if we are hitting a bit of an asymptote: Instead of large gains as we saw in the 1980s and 1990s, we are fighting over smaller increments of change.

If you altitude-adjust these numbers — running higher up can shave some millisecon­ds, as we saw with a couple of record-breaking runs earlier this century — we are zeroing in around 9.7 to 9.8 seconds as perhaps the fastest a runner can manage in a neutral setting. This is seen by some to show that modern training, nutrition and equipment have pushed the body as far as it can go.

The maximum pitch velocity seems to be following a similar trajectory in baseball. Chapman threw 105.8 mph in 2010, and since then, the average best fastball has been 104, with a peak of 105.7 (Chapman again in 2016) and a nadir of 102.2 (in 2020). The best non-Chapman fastball is around 104 mph in any given season.

There are some difference­s between pitching and running, though. Here is where Glenn Fleisig, director of biomechani­cs research at the American Sports Medicine Institute, comes in.

“Fifteen years ago, I was quoted as saying that I didn’t think top velocity or the ceiling was going up, but I foresee it getting pretty crowded at the ceiling,” Fleisig said. “It wasn’t a lucky guess that I pulled out of my butt.”

He added: “The difference here is that we’re pushing this little ulnar collateral ligament to its limit. We are strengthen­ing our muscles and improving our mechanics and nutrition, but based on how the body is built, the ligaments and tendons don’t improve proportion­ally to the other parts of the body and the process.”

When that ligament tears, the pitcher needs Tommy John surgery to get back on the mound, and those surgeries are more common than ever. How much stress that ligament can handle might be up for debate.

“No one really knows how much stress a UCL can really take,” Randy Sullivan, of the Florida Baseball ARMory, said recently on a podcast.

The sport might be telling us something with the spike in arm injuries. All those torn ligaments, which are increasing­ly tied to top-end velocity by the best available research, seem to suggest that we are running up on the physical limits of that little tendon. Maybe 106 mph is all we can do.

“I’ve thought about it before,” said Joyce, the Angels pitcher who has thrown the hardest this year and also had a fastball tracked at 105.5 mph in college. “I would think someone will hit 106.0, but I don’t know if there is much more than that.”