Gather round, fans, and be amazed by the true tale of—technically—the greatest throw in the recorded history of baseball. The year was 2016, the 14th contest of the 162-game regular season. It was the fourth inning, and the home-side Yankees were losing 3–1 to the visiting Oakland A’s. New York outfielder Aaron Hicks caught a pop fly off the bat of Oakland’s Yonder Alonso near the warning track and launched a bullet to home plate to gun down Danny Valencia, who was trying to tag up and score from third. And lo, it was soon revealed that Hicks’s effort set the mark for the fastest outfield throw ever recorded by MLB’s Statcast technology, at 105.5 mph. Valencia was called out, the inning ended, and eventually the Yankees lost the game anyway, 5–2.
But never mind the score, because on this day, the game of baseball had a new legend… right? A new entry to its pantheon of immortal achievements? A man who can throw a ball from the outfield to home plate 2.4 mph faster than it had ever been thrown before? That’s impressive, is it not? You must be wowed by the sheer size of the number itself—it’s a full three figures long, plus a decimal, and it is so exact.
What’s that? Your jaw does not yet hang open in wonder? Yeah, no kidding. Welcome to modern sports mythmaking. It sucks.
In the days before we had any real ability to prove the truth of our stories—when they were just yarns spun around a fire and pigment sketches on a cave wall—our villains were enormous and the heroes who slew them equally outsized; creatures swallowed men whole and monsters dragged entire ships down to the depths. Gigantic lumberjacks levelled mountains alongside their comically overgrown oxen. One determined gentleman planted all the apple trees in the Midwestern United States.
Eventually, of course, we started writing these things down, and got around to the hard details. I mean, obviously Paul Bunyan, if he existed, was not that big. And Johnny Appleseed (a.k.a. John Chapman) was actually planting trees to sell to settlers so they could claim land, and his apples were inedible, and were used to make cider, which was in turn used to make people quite drunk.
But nevertheless, those are good stories. A 105.5-mph throw from the outfield is not a good story, no matter how many vectors are used to track it or how many highlight compilations it leads. We have slowly incorporated so many numbers into our sports stories, and assigned them so much importance, that a single number can now be expected to stand in for narrative. It’s the inevitable culmination of our demand for verification. We invented the printing press to reproduce and disseminate first-hand accounts instead of passing on oral traditions; we also invented the camera, which offered visual confirmation. Later came the radio, the moving picture, wireless communication, the computer, the radar gun, the pedometer, the drug-testing process, the combines, the smart phone, the entire internet. And we subject every good sports story to the rigours of this machinery.
We fact-check all our best present-day stories, then we’re surprised when they don’t measure up to legends of the past. But still we continue to lop them down to size, piece by piece, fact by fact, by doing things like celebrating a number from Statcast as a story’s raison d’être. All too often, we let our thirst for certainty diminish our truly memorable tales.
When I was eight, I read a book about Mickey Mantle that described his 565-foot home run, the longest ever hit in baseball. The ball ended up in a yard across the street from Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and a (definitely totally unbiased) Yankees PR man grabbed a tape measure and went out to estimate the distance of the moonshot. Just a guy watching a ball go further than he’d ever seen it go and scrambling for some way to quantify it. I thought about that home run for years—and so did most fans, who honour it today when talking about “tape-measure home runs.” When I was 30, I read a series of pieces on the internet that conclusively debunked its distance—surveyors’ charts and mathematical calculations revealed that it couldn’t have travelled more than 510 feet. The guy with the tape measure was wrong, or exaggerating. But I still think about that home run.
As a small baseball fan, I heard stories of how fast “Cool Papa” Bell could run—nobody told me his top speed, or how long it took him to get to first, or where his route efficiency ranked among centre-fielders. I just remember that they said he could flip off the light switch and be in bed before the bulb went out. (Naturally, I tried that a few times.) These are the slivers of apocrypha that made me a lifelong baseball fan.
Tales, a famous author once said, grow in the telling. But they don’t anymore. And especially not in sports. Today, a tale is at its peak in its brief, broad-strokes first impression, and it shrinks every time we delve deeper into data. And we always delve deeper.
Of course this data is important. These details are essential and necessary to thousands of people on a professional level. Technical tools are the backbone of greater understanding, and every scout, front-office person, coach and player, as well as those who broadcast or write in-depth analysis of sports, should be grasping every resource at their disposal to do their jobs well. Statcast was developed originally as a way for MLB teams to gather data for their own purposes, and it was only last season that the league decided to share it with the public. Some fans love it, and that’s fine. But it’s not going to create legends. Ever.
Aaron Hicks’s throw, as a physical feat, is indeed impressive. There’s almost no arc, no apex. It begins on a line and holds that line well into the infield, and bounces just once. It might have been the fastest throw from the outfield of all time. But it didn’t feel like it—didn’t feel like a moment when the greatest throw in the history of baseball was required. And let’s be honest, Hicks is not the sort of player who will be etched into baseball history. He was hitting .050 at the time. And the Yanks lost anyway. So you see? The tale of the hardest throw in baseball history ends up being kind of a boring story.
To put the two approaches to baseball storytelling to the test, here’s a simple question: What was the exit velocity of the home run Jose Bautista hit in game five of the ALDS against the Rangers? And does it bother you in the slightest that you don’t know the answer?
