Newly drafted Panthers quarterback Bryce Young’s height remains a hot topic of conversation in regard to how it will affect his upcoming NFL career. And a photo of Young juxtaposed alongside Panthers edge rusher Brian Burns might add fuel to the discussion.
Burns, a two-time Pro Bowler who was a first-round pick in 2019, on the other hand, stands 6’5” and weighs 250 pounds. So, it makes sense why the two new teammates have drastically different appearances in the photo of their introduction.
When Aroldis Chapman began warming up in the bullpen for his first major league appearance in 2010, fans in the outfield seats at Great American Ball Park stormed the area around the Reds’ bullpen just to get a glimpse of what a 100-mph fastball looked like.
The novelty of triple digits is long gone.
It is an everyday occurrence. Not a day has gone by this season without someone throwing 100 mph.
One-hundred-mph fastballs are more common than stolen bases and double plays. Twenty-seven pitchers hit 100 mph in April, as many as pitchers did over the entire season 10 years ago.
The rise in velocity began as a gradual evolution. Athletes have grown bigger and stronger, and are better trained. But there has been a stunning leap forward in the past four years. It happened as the science of throwing became big business, fueled by biomechanics, technology and investments by private companies and major league teams.
The number of major league pitches clocked at 100 mph and faster more than tripled over three years, from 1,056 in 2019 to 3,348 last year. The rate continues to go up this season, as shown by this recent spike that includes the prorated total for ’23:
Not coincidentally, as velocity goes up, so do injuries. Teams paid $486 million last year to 427 pitchers on the injured list, a rate of $2.67 million each day. Pitchers too hurt to pitch spent 30,728 days on the IL while collecting 9% of all money paid to players. Despite better training and lighter workloads, pitchers have about the same chance of staying off the IL as a flip of a coin. Only 51% of pitchers who appeared in a game last season stayed off the IL.
This season, 173 pitchers ended April on the IL, having collected $100 million while unable to pitch, or $3.1 million per day. Five of the seven most expensive pitchers, as ranked by average annual value, began May unable to pitch: Max Scherzer, who was serving a 10-game suspension for violating the rule against sticky substances; Justin Verlander; Jacob deGrom; Stephen Strasburg; and Carlos Rodón, all of whom were hurt. (The highest-paid pitchers still taking their starts were Shohei Ohtani and Gerrit Cole.)
“We really improved the mechanics or biomechanics of many pitchers from major leagues down to little leagues,” says Glenn Fleisig, the research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham who is also an adviser to MLB and an established leader in pitching biomechanics.
Fleisig was a guest on my podcast with World Series–winning manager Joe Maddon, The Book of Joe. “Improving the mechanics means getting more velocity and maximizing your force of using your whole body, but that has come with a price,” Fleisig says. “It’s been a price that pitchers could pitch faster than ever before, but they’re putting more force on their elbow and shoulder than before.
“So, through optimizing mechanics and conditioning and nutrition, baseball pitchers are pushing their body to the maximum performance now and kind of redlining it and getting that maximum performance—but always teetering on the edge of overuse injury.”
When it comes to velocity, both supply and demand have increased. Teams survive the injury rate of pitchers because someone else is coming out of a pitching lab right behind them throwing 100 mph, often somewhat anonymously, rather than with the pedigree of Chapman. As this chart shows, pitchers who can throw 100 have doubled since 2019 and tripled since ’18.
On April 22, Gregory Santos threw the fastest and second-fastest pitches recorded by a White Sox pitcher, 102.3 mph and 103.1 mph—five months after he was designated for assignment. Who is Gregory Santos? In 2015, the Red Sox signed him as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican Republic with a $275,000 bonus. He was throwing 93 mph two years later, when they traded him to the Giants. In 2021, his fastball averaged 97.7. He was suspended that year for testing positive for a steroid. In ’22, he averaged 98.8. The Giants designated him for assignment in December before trading him to the White Sox.
“Maximizing velocity, it is not the pitcher who wins,” Fleisig says. “It is the team who wins. It is not the pitcher. We’ve done biomechanical studies looking at the relationship between velocity and the torque on your elbow. We found that the torque on the elbow varied a lot from pitcher to pitcher, but within any pitcher, the more velocity they throw with, the more torque on the elbow.
“Our studies have shown that to succeed, particularly as a starting pitcher, you should vary your velocities. You shouldn’t max-effort every pitch. You should mess around with the batters at various speeds of your pitches, your locations, et cetera, to succeed as a pitcher, not as a thrower. To be healthy and successful, the pitcher should vary the velocity.”
Teams always have coveted velocity. What has quickly changed the market is the ability to add or find velocity at an extreme level. Clubs consider velocity a skill that can be improved, and more and more pitchers are testing the limit of what their shoulders can withstand. The rotation of the shoulder when throwing a baseball is the fastest human motion ever measured biomechanically. The shoulder fires 7,000 degrees per second. It’s the equivalent of having your arm complete 20 circles in one second.
“It’s unbelievable,” Fleisig says.
Researchers at ASMI wondered how much more speed the human shoulder could withstand. They did research on cadavers. They found the forces the cadavers could withstand before the joint broke apart were less than the forces they measured when pitchers threw in their lab.
“So, our science says that an arm should break every single pitch, but obviously it doesn’t,” he says. “But what happens is the cadavers aren’t … um, not to be too gross, but they weren’t young healthy men. They were older people. So the point is the elbow and shoulder are pushed to their biomechanical limit pretty much every pitch.
“But the problem is, as pitchers get faster and faster, they are getting stronger and stronger with their muscles and their mechanics are getting more finely tuned. The weak links are the ligaments and tendons. They have ligaments and tendons holding their joints together, like the Tommy John ligament in the elbow and their rotator cuff tendons in the shoulder.
“And when people work out, get stronger, essentially their muscles get stronger, but it’s really hard to strengthen your ligaments and tendons. So, what we’ve got is a situation now where, through good mechanics and good strength conditioning, the muscles and the mechanics are overpowering the ligaments and tendons.”
Here’s another chart that shows how the slow growth of velocity has suddenly spiked since 2020:
What I find fascinating are the mechanical changes pitchers are making to help push that average higher. Since 2015, the average four-seamer is being thrown with a slightly lower release point (5.86 to 5.83 feet; it was even higher in 2008) and more extension (from 6.2 to 6.5 feet). Translation: Pitchers are using their lower half more and “getting down the mound” more, rather than the old-school way of “tall and fall” and “getting your arm up.”
Fifteen to 20 years ago, teams would send pitching prospects to the ASMI lab to undergo a biomechanical evaluation. Teams weren’t sure what to do with it. Now they can get the data and crunch it themselves, even through markerless motion capture during games.
“What’s happened over the last 10 years is there’s been a revolution,” Fleisig says. “Teams are trying for a competitive advantage and are using biomechanics. I was once the only show in town, but now teams are hiring biomechanists. More than two-thirds of teams employ biomechanists, and teams have biomechanics equipment.”
How high can the maximum velocity go?
“If you asked me 10 years ago,” Fleisig says, “when Chapman or whoever was the fastest pitcher, I said in several interviews that I don’t think the maximum velocity is really going to go far up, but I think it’s going to be a glass ceiling that’s going to get more crowded near the top.
“And over the past 10 years that’s happened. The max-velocity guy might be one mile per hour faster than it was 10 years ago. But it’s really crowded. Every team has 95-plus. Pitchers now, everyone is pushing their body to the limit, but I don’t think the limit could go up, because I don’t think the ligaments and tendons can go farther.”
It may seem counterintuitive, but as pitchers throw faster, they throw fewer fastballs. The use of fastballs (not including cutters) was as high as 58.4% in 2009. Last season, it fell below 50% for the first time, to 48.5%. This year, it is down further, to 46.9%. At this rate, hitters will see 80,886 fewer fastballs than they did 14 years ago, even though the average velocity of those fastballs has gone up 1.9 mph.
But what biomechanics have done for velocity, technology has done even more for spin. Breaking pitches have become so nasty that, this year, a run-of-the-mill slider is tougher to hit (.218) than a fastball at 99 mph and above (.232). For example, St. Louis righthander Jordan Hicks has thrown the most 100-mph pitches this year (110). Hicks hit 100 mph more times in April than the entire league did in April just five years ago (92 in 2018). And yet, batters hit .333 against his triple-digit fastballs.
In this super-velocity era, pitchers also are throwing fewer pitches and with more days of rest. Ten years ago, pitchers made 51% of starts on four days of rest. By last season it had dropped to 39%. This year it is 24%. Having a rotation work every fifth day is a dead concept.
“We’re not going back to that because of the things we talked about earlier,” Fleisig says. “It’s the type of pitchers … the maximum velocity by optimizing mechanics, getting the maximum force on the arm. So we’re going to have to deal with the fact that this is where we’re at, but there’s a balance for how hard you could push.
“There’s workload, which is the accumulation of how much force or how many pitches you throw, but there’s also a new thing. Scientists call it the acute-to-chronic workload ratio, which means not just how much have you done, but how much has it varied over the course of the days, the weeks, most of the year. And what we found in science, baseball, soccer and all sorts of sports is that athletes get hurt when they have too much workload, but also when they’re acute-chronic workload ratio is too high, meaning they’re varying up and down.”
The Yankees have kept Cole’s pitch count within the range of 92 and 109.
Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo
Developments over the past four years have created an industry standard of pitching: max out on velocity while curbing workload. The days when I tracked teams that packed huge year-to-year innings jumps on young pitchers is over. No pitcher has thrown 120 pitches since June 28, 2022, a streak of more than 3,400 consecutive starts. Over the past three seasons, a pitcher thrown 120 pitches only eight times—as many times as Kerry Woods did in a 21-start stretch as a 21-year-old rookie in 1998. Now we have real-time biomechanical measurements and acute-to-chronic workload ratios, which is why the Yankees generally pitch Cole every sixth day and have kept his pitch count within the narrow range of 92 and 109.
For years, we’ve known the biggest risk factors for injury have been poor mechanics and fatigue.
“I’ve done a lot of science over the past 35 years,” Fleisig says, “and some studies have shown [fatigue] has a 50% effect or a 100% percent effect. We did one study where it was a 36 times effect, and it was the strongest study we’ve ever done.
“We looked at a group of high-school-aged baseball pitchers who had never had an arm problem versus high school-aged pitchers who came in for surgery. We asked them many questions like, ‘How old were you when you started throwing a curveball?’ But the one question that was basically the telltale about who ended up having surgery at the high school level was, ‘Did you routinely keep pitching after you were fatigued?’
“Essentially, if you asked someone if you keep pitching up to fatigue and they said yes, I would’ve bet you $36 to one that that guy was the one who ended up with surgery versus the guy who said no. It’s huge. So unfortunately for me, fatigue is not something that can be measured very well with computers or anything like that.
“Fatigue is a self-feeling, essentially at all levels. Pitchers should keep pitching when they’re feeling good, but when they’re fatigued, it’s time to call it a day. At the amateur level, it’s, ‘Hey, he’s my best pitcher. I’m going to keep riding this guy.’ At the pro level, it’s the other way around. They’re very cautious because they have a lot invested in these guys. At the pro level, you should certainly call it a day when it’s fatigue. Part of the problem is that, on the pro level, they’re shutting it down too soon. For some guys, they’re being overly cautious.”
Now we understand there is another risk factor to add to poor mechanics and fatigue: chasing maximum velocity. It is a known risk pitchers gladly accept, especially in deep bullpens where the work tends to be short and intense. When it comes to the “wow” factor, 102 is the new 100. Pitchers touched 102 mph more times in April (83) than over the entire 2021 season (43).
Pitching has changed significantly and quickly. It is as obvious as the LED readouts on radar guns on a nightly basis. Weighted ball training, strength training and pitching labs stocked with biomechanists are sending forth more and more pitchers who are bumping up against the limit of what is humanly possible.
Kelce told TMZ that he and The Miz have discussed a role with the WWE.
“My guy George Kittle was at WrestleMania throwing clotheslines left and right, man. It was awesome to see him go nuts, but I got to get involved somehow, someway,” Kelce said. “Me and the Miz have been talking a little bit about it so hopefully, we can brew something into fruition here.”
As Kelce explained, 49ers tight end George Kittle joined The Miz and Pat McAfee at WrestleMania 39 last month at SoFi Stadium, which resulted in Kittle and McAfee teaming up to take down The Miz.
Last month, Sports Illustrated’s Robin Lundberg spoke with Kelce, and the two discussed the possibility of Kelce teaming up with Kittle in the WWE at some point.
“George absolutely killed it at WrestleMania. He made me want to be a part of that,” Kelce said. “Hopefully we can get that tag team in store here sometime soon.”
Kelce also revealed to Lundberg what his ideal wrestling move would be.
“My dream scenario: off the top ropes, putting someone through a table,” Kelce said. “That’s always been my favorite.”
How we use the internet is changing fast, thanks to the advancement of AI-powered chatbots that can find information and redeliver it as a simple conversation.
Actor Michael J. Fox opened up about his long-standing battle with Parkinson’s disease in a new CBS interview, saying his disease has progressed in recent years in a way that’s made everyday life harder.
“It’s banging on the door,” the 61-year-old actor said about his struggles with Parkinson’s. “Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna lie. It’s getting hard, it’s getting harder. Every day it’s tougher. But that’s the way it is. I mean, you know, who do I see about that?”
Fox explained that he’s struggled with the side effects of the disease, which have included repeated falls that led to broken bones.
“[Falling] is a big killer with Parkinson’s. Falling and aspirating food and getting pneumonia,” he said. “All these subtle ways that get you. You don’t die from Parkinson’s, you die with Parkinson’s. I’m not gonna be 80. I’m not gonna be 80.”
Still, the actor reflected on his own privilege in dealing with his diagnosis and how he’s managed to live a full and successful life thus far. “It’s been 30-plus years,” the 61-year-old actor said. “There’s not many of us that have had the disease for 30 years… I realized with gratitude, optimism it’s sustainable.”
His philanthropic organization The Michael J. Fox Foundation has raised over $1.5 billion, and recently announced the discovery of a Parkinson’s biomarker that doctors hope will lead to earlier diagnosis and treatment.
“Where we are right now, in five years we’ll be able to tell if they have it, tell if they’re ever gonna get it, and know how to treat it,” he said.
Fox’s life and Parkinson’s battle are the subject of a new Apple TV+ documentary titled STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie. It will be available to stream on May 12.
Normally when a person’s child is playing in a sporting event, it’s a given that the parent will be rooting for their kid’s team.
However, that might not be the case for Warriors star Klay Thompson when Golden State team faces the Lakers in the second round of the 2023 NBA playoffs starting Tuesday night.
His father, Mychal Thompson, is a former Lakers center. He was the No. 1 pick in the 1978 NBA draft by Portland but played his final five seasons in Los Angeles. Coincidentally, the last time the Lakers and Warriors faced each other in the playoffs was in 1991, when the elder Thompson was still playing for L.A.
Now, the Warriors star’s father works as a radio color commentator for the Lakers. Thompson even grew up a Lakers fan. Klay admitted he knows it will be a tough call for his father in terms of who he’ll be rooting for when Game 1 rolls around.
“I don’t know. I really don’t,” Klay Thompson said. “If I had to guess, probably his employer. But I’m just excited. I have so many great memories with him watching the Lakers, watching Kobe, watching Shaq and Pau, and the rest of the gang. So I’m just really excited to try to stick it to the team that I grew up rooting for.”
“If I had to guess, probably his employer. I have so many great memories with him watching the Lakers, Kobe, Shaq and Pau… I’m just really excited to try and stick it to the team I grew up rooting for.”
Only time will tell which team the elder Thompson will decide to root for Tuesday night. Either way, fans are likely to be treated to a tremendous matchup.
Jerry Jones had sold the idea that the Cowboys were taking someone else so hard that his college scouting director, Mitch LaPoint, who was in on the act, wondered whether the Dallas owner had actually changed his mind on drafting Kansas State running back Deuce Vaughn with the 212nd pick. And that was when LaPoint looked over at Cowboys VP of player personnel Will McClay, and McClay gave him a wink and smile.
Plenty of people in the room knew. McClay and LaPoint were two. The Joneses, of course, as well as coach Mike McCarthy, OC Brian Schottenheimer and special teams coach John Fassel were clued in.
But Chris Vaughn, the assistant college scouting director, and Deuce’s dad, wasn’t.
And while Vaughn knew his kid was atop the team’s draft board with what was left at 212, he didn’t smell a rat after being summoned to the war room by national scout Ross Wuensche. He’d been working on pursuing potential undrafted-free-agent targets, like most of the other scouts, to give his thoughts on a number of other prospects with whom he didn’t share a last name. He figured the Cowboys were just going in another direction.
“I’m not thinking we’re taking Deuce, because when I come in, we’re talking about a couple other players as options,” Vaughn said Sunday morning. “I commented on the guys we’re talking about, the positives, the negatives of taking him there. I’m completely team first, but yeah, there’s that inner struggle. Once we finished that conversation, we as a group decided on a player. We went on the clock; I thought we were taking that player.”
Chris Vaughn wrote a report about every possible draft prospect except one, his son, seen here at the combine.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
Jones doubled back and asked Vaughn again about one of the players in that conversation, then started on a second before stopping himself and grabbing a cocktail napkin and a pen.
How would you like to turn the ticket in on your son?
For the elder Vaughn, what followed was a blur. He walked by Jerry Jones to give Jerry’s son, and Cowboys COO Stephen Jones, a hug. For a second, with the clock ticking down on 212, he made a beeline for the phone to make the call, worried he was running out of time (even as college scouting director Chris Hall went to input the pick electronically—the napkin was symbolic). Then, he stopped, hugged Jerry and collected himself.
“Well, go to the phone,” Jerry said.
“That when I was thinking, like, Oh my goodness, we’re gonna take him,” Vaughn says.
Anyone who follows college football is well aware of who the younger Vaughn is, and how he generated that moment by making up for what he lacked in size (he was 5’5″ and 179 pounds at the combine) with production (having rushed for 1,404 yards as a junior and 1,558 yards as a senior). And all of that accomplishment is why the rest of Saturday had been really hard on the kid and his dad, and why there was that tinge of frustration for the dad when he saw his kid atop the Cowboys’ board, still yet to be drafted.
“The dad in you wants to say, Hey, my son’s the highest-rated guy on the board right now. Why aren’t we considering him at this pick?” he says. “The professional in you, is like, We want what’s best for this organization.”
There was a very specific reason for it not seeming unusual to Chris that he wasn’t asked to comment on Dallas’s top player left as the 212th pick approached, while he was tapped to give his opinion on others. That was actually part of the agreement.
During the Cowboys’ initial set of draft meetings, back in December, McClay and LaPoint told Vaughn they wouldn’t have him grade his son, and Vaughn agreed that it was the right thing to do. Vaughn joked with his wife, Marquette, about it, saying if she graded him, “He’d be the first back off the board in the draft.”
So as a matter of course, Vaughn did his work covering the eastern half of the country, then cross-checking the western half, at which point he simply skipped over his son.
“I wrote over 350 evaluations on college players in this draft. I did not write one on him,” he says. “I never did an official report on him. Did all his teammates at Kansas State. They got drafted yesterday. I evaluated all those kids, but that was our organizational decision to not have me do it. … I thought that was good.”
And, to be sure, it wasn’t for any lack of wanting Vaughn’s opinion. Now in his seventh season in Dallas, after coaching in college before that, McClay told me over the weekend that Vaughn’s become valuable because of his ability not only to evaluate but cultivate relationships at schools, which allows Dallas to access the best information on prospects.
He just didn’t think it was right to put Vaughn in the position of having to do it with his son.
All of which was fine until Saturday afternoon, when a deep running back class precipitated the younger Vaughn sliding a bit. The 21-year-old was with his mom, his college position coach and his high school coach back home in Round Rock, an Austin suburb three hours from the Cowboys’ war room. And as the wait wore on, his dad would look at the board, as he was doing his job, and try to figure out where he was going.
After Dallas made its fifth-round pick, taking North Carolina OT Asim Richards at 169, McClay and LaPoint directed the scouts to start work on the college free agents and, after retreating to his office, Vaughn got a call from his kid. They hadn’t yet talked Saturday, because, in Vaughn’s words, “I didn’t want to put pressure on him.”
“It was a tough conversation because, of course, he’s watching the draft; you feel helpless,” he says. “You’re just waiting to see when your name is gonna get called. When you’re expecting to go earlier than what’s happening, that becomes very frustrating. Now you start going into, What’s next? What do I do now? He called me, and we’re talking through the situation. It was really hard. I expected him to go before that. He expected to go before that.
“That’s the nature of the draft. That’s not anything that doesn’t happen at every draft with somebody’s child. That’s not uncommon. But whenever it happens, it’s tough. We had that tough conversation—here are the options if somebody doesn’t take you in the next two rounds.”
Meanwhile, down the hall in McClay’s office, another tough conversation was happening. Jerry Jones, Stephen Jones and Jerry Jones Jr. were huddling to talk about the possibility of taking Vaughn at 212. McClay took the Joneses through the kid’s strengths and weaknesses, and then they sorted through the potential entanglements of doing it, right down to the possibility that eventually they’d face the prospect of having to cut a coworker’s kid.
The group resolved that Deuce Vaughn was worth it, and that’s when they hatched the plan to spring the news on his dad, and created a moment no one in the room would soon forget.
In that war room, McClay had his 16-year-old son, and Jerry Jones’s grandsons John Stephen, Paxton, Shy and James were close by, too, with all three of Jerry’s kids longtime lieutenants to him with the Cowboys. So, for everyone, the anticipation of the moment was great, and seeing it play out, given the setting and the people there, was even greater.
McClay called it the coolest moment of his scouting career, and thought back to video Vaughn had shown him of a grade-school-aged Deuce running into him with a football tucked away. Vaughn himself had Deuce the middle schooler, and the memory of his kid being relegated to the B team as a seventh-grader, in his head.
“The biggest thing, especially when your kids play sports young, is how they will handle adversity,” he says. “Football is a great sport, and when you do well in football, there are always enough people to pat you on the back. For some people, that’s what motivates them. Some of them don’t love the game. They love what the game gives them. They love what it brings to you. So he got put down to the B team after always being the best player.
“Why that happened, I don’t know. But it was huge in finding out if he loved football for the game itself and not for being the star or being the starting tailback. That told me a lot about him as a football player, and I think it’s what’s kind of made him who he is. He loves the process. He loves the game, not just what the game gives him.”
It showed Vaughn that, more than anything else, his kid just wanted to play, and that continued to manifest as he became a Texas high school football star, and then the lead dog for a really good Kansas State team. It’s also why he knows his kid—after averaging 24 touches per game as a senior and 22 touches per game as a junior—will do what it takes in the NFL, even if that doesn’t mean getting the ball right away.
And like any dad would be, Vaughn is pretty excited to see how it all plays out.
With, as it turns out, a better seat to watch from than he ever guessed he’d have.
