Baseball 2013: Here Come the Flamethrowers

As Major League Baseball prepares to open its season Sunday, high-octane pitching is dominating the game as never before. One day it's the Cincinnati Reds' Aroldis Chapman, the"Cuban Missile," firing 103-mile-per-hour fastballs out of the bullpen. The next, starters like the Washington Nationals' Stephen Strasburg and the Tampa Bay Rays' David Price are clocking triple digits deep into games when they should be tiring.

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Dylan Bundy, the Baltimore Orioles' 20-year-old, started lifting weights when he was 10, and he threw in the high-80s in middle school. He broke 90 as a freshman in high school, and had hit 100 before graduation.

In the 2003 season, there was only one pitcher who threw at least 25 pitches 100 mph or faster (Billy Wagner). In 2012, there were seven, according to Baseball Info Solutions.

In 2003, there were only three pitchers who threw at least 700 pitches 95 mph or better. In 2012, there were 17. There were 20 pitchers a decade ago who threw at least 25% of their fastballs 96 mph or faster. Last year there were 62, including Carter Capps, the Seattle Mariners' 22-year-old right-hander, whose average fastball travels 98.3 mph, tying him with the Royals' Kelvin Herrera for the top spot in the game.

At the same time, just a decade after performance-enhancing drugs helped power an unprecedented boom in offense, hitters are spiraling into ineptitude. Last season the game's batters struck out 36,426 times, an 18.3% increase over 2003.

"It's pretty simple," said Rick Peterson, director of pitching development for the Baltimore Orioles, who sees a direct link between strikeouts and the increase in velocity. "The harder you throw, the less time the batter has to swing and the harder it is to make contact. Everybody can square up a slow-pitch softball. A 95-mile per hour fastball is a little different."

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Nearly 20% of all plate appearances last season resulted in a strikeout. In 1968, just 15.8% of plate appearances resulted in strikeouts. And that was the so-called "year of the pitcher," when the dominance of the likes of Bob Gibson and Denny McLain caused baseball to lower the mound and begin experimenting with a designated hitter.

Baseball's speed revolution is an outgrowth of a series of radical�and sometimes surprising� shifts in the way both children and adults approach the game at every level.

This isn't just about bigger, stronger athletes. In terms of the stress placed on a human body part, nothing in sports compares with what the shoulder undergoes when a top pitcher throws a fastball. The joint can rotate at roughly 7,000 degrees per second. Since a full rotation equals 360 degrees, the arm would complete nearly 20 full rotations in a single second if it were physically able.

"That's about as fast as a human joint can move, so pitchers probably won't ever throw much faster than they do now," said Glenn Fleisig, a biomedical engineer at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Alabama and one of the leading researchers in the science of pitching. "But now you're seeing more and more pitchers every year getting close to the ceiling, so the question becomes, why?"

Photo illustration by John Kuczala; Getty Images (pitchers)

Aroldis Chapman, the 'Cuban Missile,' and reliever for the Cincinnati Reds was clocked at 105.1 mph in 2010.

Part of the flamethrowing trend is a function of simple economics. The best pitchers now command some of the game's highest salaries. Being merely average is worth $11.5 million a year (Bronson Arroyo, 12-10, 3.74 earned-run average). As a result, the game's biggest and best young athletes are gravitating toward the pitching mound.

On average, the game's pitchers have gained about a half-inch in height since 2000, according to Adrian Bejan, an engineering professor at Duke University, who studies sports evolution and wrote a recent study of body size in baseball.

That makes sense, Bejan reasons, because the pitching motion mimics the action of a trebuchet, the medieval weapon for throwing stones against heavy fortifications. Early designers of trebuchets figured out the key to flinging a stone faster was increasing the height of the body and the length of the arm and rope, which together function like the pitcher's body and arm. A longer rope just required more weight to propel it forward. Baseball scouts have essentially come to the same conclusion. Think Randy Johnson, who is 6-foot-10, or even Capps, who is 6-foot-5.