Aroldis Chapman’s Best Pitch Ever
Last night, the Chicago Cubs took a commanding 2-0 lead over the San Francisco Giants. The last pitch of the night was thrown by Cubs closer Aroldis Chapman. He’s an incredible athletic specimen and throws the fastest fastball of anyone who ever tried to throw a baseball fast. He seems to have stepped his game up this year by more regularly throwing it in there at 103 miles per hour. He threw 107 pitches at least 103 miles per hour this year. In all previous years, he tossed 70 such pitches in there.
His pitch speed has long been fun. But that pitch at the end of the night last night was something else entirely. Behold:
Aroldis Chapman, 103 mph movement. #GoodLuck pic.twitter.com/zR5sgzsul0
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 9, 2016
This isn’t some voodoo GIF magic that makes the pitch look nastier than it was. No, Chapman’s final pitch last night was just that good. Here is the highlight on MLB.com where we can confirm that A) it was tossed in there at 103 miles per hour and that B) it moved sideways significantly.
I’ve never seen a pitch like that and judging by how much Kebly Tomlinson missed the pitch, neither had he. The combination of speed and run just seemed totally unfair. Even if the pitch were right down the middle, Tomlinson did not have a chance. This pitch is pure pitcher dominance incarnate.
I crunched some numbers and made the following graph, which contains all Chapman pitches in the regular and postseason that he chucked in there over 101 miles per hour. The attempt was to quantify just the ridiculous-ness of this Chapman pitch.
At first I was a bit disappointed that the pitch from last night appeared to be clustered among a handful of other pitches that the Cuban has thrown. But, there’s another way to look at this graph. We’ll call it the line of WHAT WAS THAT? It’s a line that stretches the imagination. Pitches near this line are at the very extreme of what is possible by the human body. These are the pitches that make you think the matrix just broke, or that physics took a split-second coffee break.
Fastballs that move this fast and also run this much simply are not thrown by other pitchers. Aroldis Chapman sits on a throne unto himself. He has an upper echelon that only he is capable of and we saw it in last night’s game-ending pitch.
This is why the Cubs went out and got Chapman at the July 31st trade deadline. Because of his last pitch last night, they are now one step closer to their first World Series ring since 1908.
-Sean Morash
PS: I made a GIF of that LOL pitch. It’s from a May 29 at bat against Desmond Jennings. Those three upper most, left most points on the graphs above are all from that Jennings at bat. Jennings struck out.
