Is Stephen Strasburg the 100-MPH King?

When Stephen Strasburg takes the mound at Nationals Park Friday night, all eyes will be on the radar gun. Can he hit triple digits? How many times can he do it? That begs another question, though. Just how often does a pitcher throw a pitch that's over 100 miles per hour? As in, really over 100 mph and not 100 on the juiced scoreboard gun. And what happens when they do?

Using Joe Lefkowtiz's Pitch F/X tool, which compiles the Pitch F/X data collected for every single major league game that's used in MLB.com's GameDay, we can see that through June 16, 173 pitches have had an initial velocity (which is what the radar gun reading usually relays to fans) of 100-plus mph in 2010. Those 173 pitches have been thrown by nine pitchers: Strasburg, Joel Zumaya, Justin Verlander, Henry Rodriguez, Phil Coke, Neftali Feliz, Kyle Farnsworth, Ubaldo Jimenez, and Daniel Bard.

Zumaya is far and away the king of triple digits. He's accounted for 127 of the 173 100-plus pitches (73 percent). He's also thrown 12 of the 17 hardest pitches this season, including the only balls to be clocked at 102 mph or more. FanGraphs lists his average fastball at 99.3, so this should be no surprise. No one's fastball matches Zumaya's.

Of the remainder of the group, Farnsworth and Jimenez have cracked 100 just once apiece while Coke's done it twice, Strasburg has done it three times, Bard four, Rodriguez and Verlander five, and Feliz is second to Zumaya with 25 pitches in triple digits.

Unsurprisingly, Feliz also owns the fastest non-Zumaya fastball at 101.6 mph. Coke is noteworthy as the only lefty on the list, but his two pitches that appear seem like outliers. His average fastball sits around 93 and his two entries on the list were back-to-back pitches that lit the gun up at 101-plus. It seems pretty likely that that may be due to a technological glitch.



Share Everyone else more or less checks out as a plausible 100-plus guy, though. That puts Strasburg in pretty elite company already, even if Pitch F/X credits him with a few fewer triple digit pitches than the stadium guns have so far. Strasburg, Verlander, and Jimenez are the only starters to crack 100 this season and it shouldn't be long before Strasburg's hit the magic number more than the other two combined.

In this case, the data confirms what everyone already knows; through two starts, Strasburg is the hardest-throwing starter in baseball.

But what happens to pitches that top 100 mph? Overwhelmingly, they don't go into play. Of the 173 pitches we're looking at here, 61 were called balls, including two of Strasburg's three. By comparison, 16 have been called strikes, 17 have been swinging strikes, and 44 have been fouled off. Total, that's 138 of 173 (79.8 percent) pitches not put into play. In fact, just nine of the 173 have gone into play for a hit.

Of course, it seems like common sense to say that it's hard to hit a pitch that goes 100 mph, but seeing that 100-plus mph fastballs only go into play about once every five times thrown is a stark reality.

For a pitcher like Strasburg, where that 100-mph fastball combines with a sinker, changeup, and wipeout curve, well, it's not at all hard to see where the 22 strikeouts in 12 1/3 innings come from.