In a 1940 publicity stunt, the Cleveland Indians’ flamethrowing pitcher, Bob Feller, tested which was faster: One of his own blazing deliveries, or a motorcycle. Feller’s pitching won, hands down. But today, Feller’s once-remarkable speed has become commonplace, even bettered, as major leaguers routinely pass triple figures on the radar gun. The secret to this arms race? The advances in pitching analytics,often authored by people without any previous baseball pedigree.
That’s part of the narrative of Unhittable, a new book by one such individual – Rob Friedman, more commonly known to his online followers as PitchingNinja. The book’s subtitle says it all: How Technology, Mavericks and Innovators Engineered Baseball’s New Era of Pitching Dominance.
This brave new world is tracked through methods such as heat maps, slow-motion cameras and AI. Those who chart this landscape use previously unheard-of terminology – among other things, readers will acquaint themselves with a precedent-defying phenomenon called Seam-Shifted Wake. All the while, stats gurus seek to quantify not just velocity but accuracy in how pitchers deliver the ball to the plate.
“It’s really changed through the years,” Friedman says. “[Baseball] used to be more focused on guys who were farm-strong but never lifted weights … [on the idea] you could not teach people how to throw hard, you were either born with it or could not do it.” Today, he says, “Technology brings out the best in everybody.”
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Pitchers taking advantage of the wealth of analytics include last year’s National League Cy Young winner, Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Friedman is similarly upbeat about another young star, Nolan McLean of the New York Mets.
“My favorite guy to watch is … lesser-known,” Friedman says of McLean. “His stuff is absolutely nasty. I was happy that in the World Baseball Classic, the world got to see the movement of his stuff. He’s extraordinary, off-the-charts.
“Obviously, Paul Skenes I follow, I like, I root for him. Tarik [Skubal of the Detroit Tigers] is another guy. But Nolan McLean is not on the radar, even by some in New York.”
To quote Yogi Berra, is the rise in pitching talent deja vu all over again? Namely, are we seeing a return to 1968, when Denny McLain went 31-4 for the world champion Detroit Tigers, and Carl Yastrzemski led the American League with a .301 batting average? Friedman has thoughts on whether the cards are once again stacked against hitters.
“I’ve never said [the game is] too pitcher-friendly,” Friedman says. “My name is PitchingNinja. I love nasty pitching.” He calls baseball “the only sport in which the guy with the ball is technically on defense. The pitcher really is on offense. Guys will be reacting to what the pitchers do.”
In the modern game, Friedman says, “I do think pitchers have a big advantage. The question is, do fans want it the way it is?”
McLain’s opponent in the 1968 World Series, the St Louis Cardinals, featured the fearsome Bob Gibson, who was known for throwing triple-digit speeds. The book quotes Gibson about the toll that throwing 100 mph takes on a pitcher’s body: “Everything hurts. Even your ass hurts. I see pictures of my face and say, ‘Holy shit,’ but that’s the strain you feel when you throw.’”
Injuries to pitchers are on the rise. Does Friedman think that’s down to pitchers trying to throw as hard as possible these days? While he says there is “no agreement on why injuries happen,” he adds, “It’s just like a race car. You drive fast enough, you lose control. At some point, things break … Even Paul Skenes has backed off some,” lowering his velocity from 102 mph to 99 mph, “enough to get hitters out.”
Instead of just focusing on velocity, Friedman says, pitchers can also “focus on adding more pitches,” including through the practice of tunneling – developing multiple pitches that begin similarly before breaking in varying directions.
Before becoming PitchingNinja, Friedman was a lawyer. The nickname arose as a social media account; Friedman used it to share pitching-related videos and lessons. Interest surged to the point where he had to interrupt dinner with his wife to respond to a DM from five-time All-Star Yu Darvish. Another analytics expert who made it big, Daren Willman, first began sharing pitching information while he worked in software at a district attorney’s office in Harris County, Texas. The creator of the Baseball Savant website, Willman parlayed his passion into a full-time job with MLB, then into a similar role with the Texas Rangers, including during their World Series championship season; he’s now back at MLB.
“You don’t have to formally be in baseball or be a great baseball player to have an impact on the sport,” Friedman notes.
Speaking of outside-the-box thinking, that was the secret behind Nolan Ryan’s legendary speed, according to the book. It was the Hall of Fame fireballer who bucked longstanding baseball tradition to train with weights. The Ryan Express retired from a decades-long career with the all-time major-league strikeout mark.
“I don’t think he gets enough credit,” Friedman says, adding that in Ryan’s day, pitchers “did not weightlift, they thought weightlifting was a bad idea. He was one of the first to take to it, lifting throughout the season, which was maybe unique.”
Taking a macro approach, Friedman adds that Ryan’s career coincided with the “very cusp of when we started understanding more about technology – the computer revolution. We were able to digitize everything. In the 1990s, more of this came about, digging into data on what made pitchers more effective.
“Slow-motion cameras from Edgertronic showed thousands of frames per second of how balls left your hand. Everybody could have a radar gun … they were not ridiculously expensive, it was technology almost anybody could use.”
Friedman credits a more recent pitcher – Trevor Bauer – with a surge in interest in the analytics-minded approach to pitching. (Friedman writes that Bauer has had his share of controversy off the field, including a 194-game suspension for violating MLB’s domestic violence and sexual assault policy. The book notes that Bauer was not criminally charged by authorities, and his treatment in the book focuses on his pitching.) Friedman writes that Bauer embraced analytics and explored training methods that were unpopular in baseball at the time: Long toss and weighted balls.
“He was not naturally talented,” Friedman says. “He was the poster child for that time period. He engineered himself into being a baseball player using available technology. I think he’s a good case study, a bridge to what we see today.”
Reflecting on the continuing debate between analytics and tradition, Friedman says, “Players with no formal engineering [background], who always played and were good, might ask, ‘Why are these weenies who can’t even pitch trying to tell me how to pitch, play, coach?’
“It goes both ways. Sometimes really smart people criticize players for not being open-minded. I don’t know if either side’s right. There needs to be a bridge to talk to everyone. All analytics are is more information.”
