HEART OF THE ORDER
Speed demon
How having a tool readily available to measure the velocity of pitches changed the game.
Danny Litwhiler is one of the three MLB players who made the greatest impact on the game
I am guessing you are more familiar with the other two.
Jackie Robinson led the way in integrating the game and his impact went well beyond baseball.
Babe Ruth’s epic homer power changed the way hitters approached the game, as well as how pitchers pitched them and how defenses were set up.
Litwhiler? Well, the game of baseball wouldn’t be the same with Litwhiler. Simply put, he was baseball’s greatest innovator.
Litwhiler was an All-Star in 1942, probably the best player on an awful Phillies team that year. That season, he became the first player in MLB history to play a full season without making an error.
Primarily an outfielder, Litwhiler played 11 seasons in the majors (he missed the 1945 season to serve in the Army Special Services), compiling a .281 batting average and 119 OPS plus — meaning he was about 20 percent better than the average hitter over the course of his career. Good, solid player. No candidate for Cooperstown.
He is in the College Baseball Hall of Fame (class of 2021). He coached for almost 40 years, first at Florida State and then at Michigan State. Among his players at Michigan State were Steve Garvey and Kirk Gibson.
But none of that was where he truly excelled.
Litwhiler was a genius in coming up with new devices and ways to do things. Among his successful ideas were a shatterproof mirror that pitchers could use to check their deliveries, a special bat to teach bunting, and weighted baseballs.
Three really stand out:
When Litwhiler went a season without an error, he had a decided advantage. He laced the fingers of his glove together. Before that, baseball gloves were well, gloves. They had a web between the thumb and the index finger, and the other four —or sometimes only three — fingers were just freelancing it.
He and a neighbor invented a drying agent for baseballs and for baseball fields.
3. He used the radar gun to measure the speed of pitches.
For almost anyone born after World War II, it is probably impossible to imagine baseball being played with those old-style gloves.
I’ve lived most of my life in desert climates, so I probably lack the proper appreciation of keeping waterlogged baseball or for drying out a field. Still, I can understand that more than a few games and baseballs have been saved by these products.
Like any true innovation, the radar gun in baseball came from print, not TV.
But perhaps the biggest change in the almost 60 years I’ve followed the game is the speed at which pitchers throw. And that can be traced to Danny Litwhiler and the radar gun.
The revolution was not televised
The dawn of the radar gun era in baseball is often credited beginning with an August 1974 game at Anaheim Stadium when those wild whacky rebels from ABC Sports decided to use a JUGS gun on Nolan Ryan during a Monday Night Baseball telecast. Ryan was clocked at 100.8 mph.
The only thing wrong with this is it is not true, though you can find this version of facts in a number of places on the Internet, including Wikipedia and mlb.com.
ABC did not have TV rights to MLB games in 1974, and JUGS didn’t come up with a prototype until the next spring.
In reality, Ryan’s fastball was measured by Rockwell International, using lasers.
This is believed to mark the first time the speed of a blazing fastball had been measured scientifically during a regular-season game. The August game was a test. In early September, Rockwell conducted a second reading, this time with the knowledge of the public. Fans were asked to guess Ryan’s top speed. This time it was 100.9 mph.
Like any true innovation, the radar gun in baseball came from print, not TV.
And it also came about in September 1974. An article appeared in the State News, the student newspaper at Michigan State University, about the campus police acquiring portable radar guns to catch speeders.
Radar had been developed before World War II, most successfully by the British. After the war, police in Glastonbury, Connecticut began testing radar as a way to detect drivers exceeding the speed limit. In 1949, the department created the first speed trap.
Police radar was initially bulky and heavy. But as technology advanced, the devices became smaller. By the 1970s, a hand-held unit that plugged into a car’s cigarette lighter was available.
The Michigan State baseball coach, Danny Litwhiler, wrote in his biography “Living the Baseball Dream’’: “I looked at the story and thought, I wonder if it could check the velocity of a baseball. I knew the commander of the campus police, Adam Zutaut. He was our neighbor and also a friend.”
Police work
Litwhiler arranged to have Zutaut meet him at the baseball field, where the coach had two pitchers and a catcher waiting. Zutaut began taking readings from behind the pitcher’s mound. The radar gun worked.
Both pitchers recorded faster deliveries from the mound. This in itself was a revelation.
Litwhiler wrote that his left-hander’s fastball was clocked in the mid-70s and the right-hander threw in the low 80s from flat ground.
Both pitchers recorded faster deliveries from the mound. This in itself was a revelation. Lithwhiler pointed out that while everyone believed pitchers threw with more velocity from the mound — which is why MLB lowered the mound from 15 inches to 10 inches after the 1968 season — no one knew. Now they knew.
The radar guns needed to be reconfigured slightly to work consistently. The campus cops weren’t too keen on that. The device cost around $1,200, Litwhiler found $600 in his budget to rent and adjust the gun for regular use tracking a baseball.
Earl Weaver fell in love with it and started measuring anything he could with the radar gun — not only pitches but birds and even a low-lying airplane.
Everyone needs this
Litwhiler decided this could be a great tool and notified Commissioner Bowie Kuhn so that all 24 clubs could have equal access to it.
In the meantime, Litwhiler knew in order for the radar gun to become a practical tool, you needed to be able to power it from something other than a car’s cigarette lighter.
He contacted some people he knew at JUGS, the maker of a popular pitching machine that was able to throw curve balls. And the JUGS people came up with a prototype for a radar gun that operated on batteries.
A brand new toy
Litwhiler took the prototype to spring training and the first camp he visited was the Baltimore Orioles. Manager Earl Weaver fell in love with it and started measuring anything he could with the radar gun — not only pitches but birds and even a low-lying airplane. Weaver tried measuring players running, but, for some reason, the radar gun didn’t work for that.
The radar gun was a hit everywhere. And soon scouts and coaches throughout pro baseball were using it.
According to Pocket Radar, by 1978, nine major league teams were using radar guns; by 1980 every team used them.
In the 1980s whenever Dodger home games were shown on TV, scout Mike Brito could be seen standing behind the plate with a white Panama hat, pointing a radar gun at the pitcher.
“The scout in the stands, the pitching coach, maybe even the high school coach has one,” Cincinnati Enquirer scribe Bob Hertzel wrote in a 1987 article that was carried by Scripps-Howard News Service and picked up by the Chicago Tribune. “We know that an average major-league fastball travels 85 or 86, that Nolan Ryan normally is up about 95 and that he has pushed 100, that Dwight Gooden is 93 or 94, and that ABC-TV owns a gun on which no one ever seems to throw the ball less than 90.”
By the time the new millennium rolled around, the speed of every pitch was displayed in every ballpark. TV broadcasts of games incorporated the speed of the pitch inside the graphic that showed the score, innings outs, and base runners.
How fast was fast?
Up until the radar gun, the only pitchers who had been measured were the players everyone thought were the fastest.
Walter Johnson, the strikeout king of the early 20th century, was clocked at a munitions lab in Connecticut in 1917 at 83.2 mph.
In 1946, Bob Feller was timed, throwing into a frame designed by the U.S. Army, and his fastball was measured at 98.6 mph at Washington's Griffith Stadium.
Legend has it that minor-leaguer Steve Dalkowski threw faster than anyone.
In the late 1950s, he was timed at 93.5 mph at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in South Dakota. But Dalkowski, known as much for his horrible control as his jaw-dropping velocity, needed to throw for 40 minutes before he finally hit the target needed to record the speed of his pitch.
Unfortunately, these numbers before the radar gun — and even after — are apples-and-oranges comparisons.
In 1960, This Week, a Sunday supplement magazine that was carried by the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, polled players on who they thought was the fastest. They came up with a group of six pitchers, and the magazine filmed them during spring training, then checked out how many frames it took for the ball to reach home plate and calculated the speed from that.
Steve Barber, a rookie, was the fastest at 95.33 mph. Don Drysdale, who came in second at 95.31, later groused about the test being conducted in spring training. Sandy Koufax was third (93.20), followed by Ryne Duren (92.86), Herb Score (91.08), and Bob Turley (90.75).
Beyond compare
That put a number to how fast the fastest guys were And let’s face it, baseball fans and people associated with the game love numbers.
Unfortunately, these numbers before the radar gun — and even after — are apples-and-oranges comparisons.
The ball slows after it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Johnson’s measurement was taken from behind the plate. He and Dalkowski did not throw off a mound. Dalkowski’s and Feller’s readings were the velocities when the ball crossed the plate. and Ryan’s reading was from about 10 feet in front of home plate.
The six guys who were filmed in 1960 were measured by an average speed between the release and when the ball crossed the plate.
And even when the radar guns became present everywhere there was a difference in how velocity was measured. The JUGS gun took a reading about a foot from release. Its main rival in that era, the Ray Gun, measured from about halfway between the mound and home plate.
In the Statcast era, which began in 2017, the velocity is measured shortly after the release. The Pitch/FX system that MLB used from 2006 through 2016 took its reading from around 50 feet from home plate.
Their success shows you can be successful with relatively little velocity. That, however, is not the lesson baseball took from its new measurement tool.
How about the rest of the pitchers?
When Earl Weaver managed the minor-league Aberdeen Pheasants in 1959, he didn’t need a radar gun to tell him that Dalkowski’s fastball was faster than Bo Belinsky’s.
Besides being able to measure the speed of a low-flying airplane, what Weaver really liked about the gun was that it told him when a pitcher — any pitcher — was losing velocity and needed to come out of the game.
The radar gun also told us how fast the average fastball was. And how fast — or slow — the below-average fastball was.
Litwhiler wrote in his biography that the average fastball was around 85 miles per hour, and he mentioned a couple of established guys who couldn’t even break 80 mph.
One of those guys was Randy Jones of the Padres. Jones went on to lead the National League in ERA (2.24) in 1975 and won the Cy Young the next season.
The other was Rudy May. He led the American League in ERA in 1980 (2.46).
Their success shows you can be successful with relatively little velocity. That, however, is not the lesson baseball took from its new measurement tool.
Pitchers who threw at the velocity of Jones and May wouldn’t get signed today.
The need for speed
Velocity has always been treasured in baseball. It gives a hitter less time to pick up the location of where the pitch is going and to identify the spin of the breaking ball.
Now baseball scouts could more easily quantify in their reports what their eyes told them, no more relying on descriptions such as “rapid or firm.”
Efficiency experts have found that just the act of measuring performance leads to improvement. We all want to do our best of someone is keeping track. So you sign guys who throw harder to begin with — then you measure the velocity of every pitch.
Two things happen.
For one, velocity ticks up every season. By last season, the average four-seem fastball thrown in the majors was 93.9 mph, up from 93.1 in 2015, The Associated Press reported. That is quite a leap from Litwhiler’s estimated 85 mph in 1975.
OK, that happened over almost a half-century. But keep in mind, professional pitchers had been throwing overhand for more than 90 years to that point.
Just like improvements in some men’s track and field events have leveled off, a similar trend should have been occurring in fastball velocity, unless someone came up with a new technique. (You could argue that MLB has expanded its net for player talent has contributed to more velocity, but that is at least somewhat offset by much lower youth participation in the United States.)
The second thing that happens is you get a lot more injuries. This usually gets blamed on throwing breaking balls when pitchers are too young or throwing them incorrectly, year-round youth baseball, or young pitchers being limited by pitch counts and not developing arm strength. Those all might contribute.
But throwing hard puts a great deal of stress on the arm, which is the main reason Tommy John surgery practically has become a rite of passage for big league pitchers.
Probably every serious pitcher over the age of 10 has some idea of how fast they throw. A radar gun is available on Amazon and every sporting goods store. Heck, if you go to a professional baseball game, they probably have a booth that measures the speed of your pitch.
There is even a device now that can time your pitches if you are throwing into a net in the backyard.
Radar has been a true game-changer.
All because a baseball coach got an idea from reading an article in a student newspaper.