Four-seam fastballs across Major League Baseball averaged 94.7 mph through Saturday, up from 94.5 mph last year, and on track for a sixth consecutive record, AP's Ronald Blum reported at the All-Star break [1]. The comparison that fixes the trend runs back to 2008, when the league first began tracking pitch velocity and the average four-seamer left the hand at 91.9 mph. It stood at 93.7 in 2021 and 94.4 through the first half of 2025. Blum notes this year's final figure could rise by a tick.
The number carries names. Six pitchers now average 100 mph or better on the four-seamer, led by San Diego Padres closer Mason Miller at 101.3 mph and the Los Angeles Dodgers' Edgardo Henriquez at 100.6. Milwaukee's Jacob Misiorowski, a 24-year-old starter, averages 100.5, up from 99.3 as a rookie last season, and has thrown a big-league-high 670 pitches at 100 mph or higher [1]. Right-handed relievers average 95.6 mph; the Triple-A average, tracked only since 2022, has climbed from 92.7 to 93.6.
Players attribute the rise to training, not chance. "People are learning the biomechanics of the body a lot better and it's easier to figure out why people are throwing hard," said Athletics pitcher Hogan Harris, whose own four-seamer has gone from 92.6 mph as a 2023 rookie to 95.0 this year [1]. Mets three-time All-Star Marcus Semien, who debuted in 2013 when four-seamers averaged 92.7, put the shift in terms of expectation: "Definitely expecting anybody you've never heard of to throw a 95-plus." Boston manager Chad Tracy, whose last big-league at-bat came 13 years ago, remembered bullpens where trailing teams sent out arms throwing 88.
The same number splits in two directions. On X, triple-digit velocity reads as pure progress, a scoreboard number climbing toward a ceiling. In the injury discourse, it reads as self-evidently destructive, a cause waiting for its effect. The measured record supports neither. The Brewers skipped Misiorowski's Sunday start because of arm fatigue [1]. That is a single scratched outing, not a proven line from 100 mph to a torn elbow.
Miller, who leads all pitchers, named the tension without resolving it. "It's kind of just been that trajectory," the Padres closer said of hard-throwing in youth development. "But it's hard to be successful for a long time and healthy for a long time doing it" [1]. That is a pitcher's caution, not an epidemiological finding. The gap runs between a measured average and an unmeasured mechanism: the velocity is counted precisely, the injuries it might cause are not counted at all.
The hitters supply the other half of the ledger. Big-league batters are hitting .244, barely below last year's .245 and above the .243 of 2024, numbers that have moved by a single point while velocity climbed. Mets interim manager Andy Green, whose last full playing season was 2006, said the difficulty is not one fastball but many: sinkers rose from 15.5% of pitches to 16.6% this year, cutters from 7.5% to 7.8%, while four-seamers fell to 30.4% from 35.8% in 2019 [1]. "The game's gotten harder, there's no doubt about it," Green said. Cubs star Alex Bregman answered from the box: "Us as hitters have to find a good pitch to hit and put a good swing on it."
The velocity is documented year by year to a tenth of a mile per hour. The causal claims that circulate around it, that speed is simply better or simply dangerous, are not. The next real turn in this story is not a faster number but an injury count set against the workload, the measured effect that the 94.7 mph average, by itself, cannot supply.
-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo