fastball Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
This Juan Soto hot streak is way, way, <i>way</i> better than you realize
Shohei Ohtani is the best player in baseball. Mike Trout is the best pure position player in baseball. Juan Soto is the best hitter in baseball, and as much as I love Mike Trout… he’s not close. Juan Soto is doing something Trout has never done. In Juan Soto’s last 40 games, he has an OPS of 1.253 a...
Step into the batters’ box against this guy… if you dare!
Would you step up to the plate in a Major League game if you knew there was a 10 percent chance you were about to get hit by one of the pitches? Maybe you’d put a foot in the box and stand in the corner and hope the pitcher had enough control this time, but every time that pitcher started his windup...
The AL Cy Young race is kinda trash
Now that we have a full baseball season again, after 2020’s season-in-a-can, we can get to choosing our award winners on normal calibrations. Thankfully, Shohei Ohtani made the AL MVP choice academic by having the most unique and unmatched individual season in baseball history. Pretty easy to hand h...
Good lord, Javy Báez!
If I didn’t love Javy Baez so much, I would say that this is the perfect encapsulation of what it means to be a Met and the Mets experience (my urge to laugh at the Mets never dies)....
No, you cannot hit a 100 mph fastball
The incredibly stupid debate over whether it’s harder to hit a 100 mph fastball or hit a half-court shot has been on the internet for a while, because if there’s a stupid debate to be had, it’ll happen online at some point....
No, armchair Twitter goofs, you can’t hit top-tier pitching
I’m not a professional athlete. I’m not even an athlete. I used to be, back in my youth. You’ll hear a cornucopia of opinions on sports from me, from strategy to execution. When a player does something fantastic, I’ll say it. When a player does something awful, I’ll say it. What you will never hear ...
Gerrit Cole gives away the game
Were you in the mood for an extremely uncomfortable two minutes of media interaction to kick off your day? I bet you were. Who wouldn’t be? This will probably look like any meeting you’ve had with upper management. Step up, Gerrit Cole, and give the people what they want!...
Pitchers are even less afraid these days
We didn’t need Spencer Turnbull’s no-hitter last night to know that pitchers have smothered baseball these days (and that the Mariners have had all their bats replaced with Play-Doh). It’s the fifth no-hitter of the year, and we’re barely a quarter through the season....
Carlos Ródon's near perfection and some good dealing going on in Chicago
Carlos Rodón of the White Sox twirled the second no-hitter of the MLB season, and narrowly missed out on a perfect game. Two outs short of the perfecto, he hit Roberto Perez on a misplaced slider. It would have been the White Sox’s fourth perfect game — setting and new record for a franchise — and f...
Moving back the mound, and other rules changes we can get behind
With MLB taking over Minor League Baseball, and apparently hitting small towns worse than the death of American manufacturing, one small benefit is MLB’s newfound ability to experiment with new rules in the lower leagues it now controls. It gives the big leagues a lab, as it were, to test the effect...
So about those ‘deadened’ baseballs … exit velocity says, ‘Nope’
While watching Shohei Ohtani take a Dylan Cease fastball that was at the height of his Adam’s apple 450 feet out to right center Sunday night, I felt my curiosity piqued when the Statcast numbers came in. 450 feet seemed right, because he utterly murdered that ball. But that wasn’t what shifted my e...
20 years ago, we lost a bird to Randy Johnson’s cannon
There aren’t too many things that startle you while watching a baseball game. Comebacks can take innings to complete, rain delays are in the forecast, home runs carry for a few seconds, and errors happen once or twice a game....