The Baseball Thread

The Red Sox dropped two of three to the Pirates over the weekend, but got back on track last night with a 6-4 win over Cleveland. In the sixth inning, Trevor Story hit the weirdest home run I’ve seen in a long time:

In case you can’t tell what happened, the ball hit Jhonkensy Noel’s glove, then hit the Pesky Pole, then went back to the glove, then off a fan and ultimately landed back in Noel’s glove.



Nothing after “hit the Pesky Pole” mattered, though — once it hit the foul pole, that was a home run. A 306-foot home run, to be precise — the second-shortest of the Statcast Era (2015-present). If you’re curious how a home run could possibly be shorter than that — so was I. Statcast projected the distance of this Lorenzo Cain home run to be 302 feet. You tell me which one went further.

Alex Vesia didn’t know he possessed a superpower. A late-round draft pick with a few cups of coffee in the big leagues, Vesia had neither great numbers nor notable prospect status. He was Clark Kent all the way.

But when the Los Angeles Dodgers traded for the lefty reliever in 2021, they practically handed him a mask and a cape.

“They asked me, ‘Do you know what the vert is on your fastball?’” Vesia said. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Induced vertical break — that’s what the Dodgers were talking about.

For more than a century, it was the hidden secret behind some of the game’s greatest fastballs, an ability so powerful that it was long considered a myth, dismissed by science but recognized by scouts. Their reports told of fastballs with “life,” of four-seamers that turned “invisible.” These pitches could rise like ghosts, and hitters would swing right through them. This was more than velocity. These pitches were special, and could seem to move upwards in some immeasurable way.

Then, roughly a decade ago, curious minds began to gather fresh data and learn the truth behind the rising fastball.

It was real, in a sense. When a ball doesn’t fall at the rate our brains expect it to, it looks to the human eye like it is rising. That perception of rise is created by a ball spinning on a proper axis, generating lift from the seams, fighting gravity as it crosses the plate. The phenomenon came to be known as induced vertical break, a discovery that has changed everything about modern pitching.

“I like to call it the Gerrit Cole Era,” San Diego Padres starter Michael King said. “That’s when everybody started throwing that four-seamer at the top of the zone.”

Today’s pitchers throw bullpen sessions and make a game of guessing each fastball’s “vert,” and discussing its “ride,” another term for the phenomenon. Most big leaguers produce roughly 16 inches of induced vertical break with their four-seam fastballs, but a select few can routinely get to 20 inches.

Vesia has averaged 21 inches this season, the most in the majors. He led the league in induced vertical break last year, too. His velocity is pedestrian — he sits 92 to 94 mph — but opponents are hitting .167 against his fastball. In five seasons with the Dodgers, Vesia has a 2.61 ERA with more than 12 strikeouts per nine innings. He pitched in four of five World Series games last year and got the save in Game 2.

“When I throw the ball down the middle and a guy swings through it, it makes sense,” Vesia said.

(...)

There’s an argument to be made it was the best individual performance the sport has ever seen.