April 17, 2021

Slow Works Too

Willians Astudillo pitched a clean inning for the Twins on Friday. He threw so slow, the radar gun sometimes did not register the speed:

It would have been hard for Astudillo to break a sweat, seeing as his slowest tracked pitch was that 46 mph strike and his fastest was a 72.5 mph offering on the outside corner that actually impressed the system enough for it to register as a fastball. His other tracked pitches clocked in at 59.0, 51.4 and 46.3 mph.

Two of Astudillo’s pitches to Luis Rengifo were so slow that the Statcast system didn’t register them as pitches at all — and as an unfortunate result, we’ll never know the true extent of Astudillo’s baseball-bending abilities, and the closest anyone has likely ever come to testing the boundaries of how slowly a baseball can be thrown and still put in play.

MLB.com

He pitches like he hits, with no walks and no strikeouts. His other stint in 2018 resulted in two home runs, so this inning was a big improvement.

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