Chapman shutting down

[RickD]

Is the Reds' Aroldis Chapman showing fatigue? The team thinks so. He hit 98 MPH one night and the next night could only hit 94!


"When he's throwing 91 mph, that's more than 10 mph difference," Reds catcher Ramon Hernandez told MLB.com. "As wild as he was, it's got to be something. Maybe he's tired. He's never had to go back-to-back two days in a row. Especially him, when he's throws the ball, there's a lot of stress, more than any pitcher, because he throws way harder."

The team will shut him down for a few days just to make sure it's fatigue and not something more serious.

[astrosfanatic]

The Reds can only blame themselves here. As soon as Chapman started throwing 105, a coach should have pulled him and been in his ear about how that isn't good for your arm. Oh well

[JoshRedcay]

Well Dusty sure does have that rep, and I think that's really the only explanation with that kind of drop in velocity. Just not good for the arm to be throwing anything 104-105 MPH.

[RickD]

Agreed. Just because you can do something does not mean you should or it is beneficial.

[Old Sweater]

Just not good for the arm to be throwing anything 104-105 MPH.

Totally agree.


http://www.science20.com/science_20/science_baseball_what_fastest_pitcher_can_throw

Is there a demon in the air at 105 MPH?

So back to how fast a pitcher can throw. In my favorite movie, The Right Stuff, some engineers and pilots in the late 1940s felt like the sound barrier was a hard limit to airplane speed - the plane would come apart if you tried to go beyond. Yet Chuck Yeager broke that sound 'barrier' in late 1947 (5) and from then on records got broken time and again.

So is there a sound barrier, a demon in the sky, for baseball, or do we just need a Chuck Yeager?

Maybe there is a demon. Or at least a body barrier. Like I mentioned in Note 4, there is a lot of energy in stored tendons at the mid-point of throwing a baseball. Glenn Fleisig, a biomechanical engineer who studies pitching at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala., subjected cadaver elbows to increasing amounts of rotational force. His experiments showed that an average person's ulnar collateral ligament (UCL - the part that connects the the humerus and ulna in the elbow) breaks at about 80 Newton-meters. The torque on an elite pitcher's elbow when he throws a fastball? About 80 Newton-meters. So pitchers are already doing things that would destroy a normal person's arm.

The ceiling for the human arm is right at 100mph. I was reading an science article that stated a 5oz baseball is equivalent to a 60lb weight(tendon in elbow that Strasburg blew) when a pitch is delivered at 100mph,

[RickD]

Must have worked:


Chapman announced his return in a big way last night, throwing a pitch to Pittsburgh's Andrew McCutchen that registered 106 mph on the scoreboard radar gun.

There was some dispute about the actual speed of that particular pitch, with the TV broadcast registering 105 and the Pitch F/x system used by mlb.com "only" hitting 102.

[JoshRedcay]

Still, young pitchers are going to see that and make it their goal to go out and throw as hard as they can rather than getting down their control and command.

[RickD]

I don't see Chapman having a long career.