Steve Johnson is a right?handed pitcher for the Class A Midwest League Great Lakes Loons, an affiliate of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Despite a losing record ? his club, quite frankly, isn’t very good ? he’s averaging better than a strikeout per inning, achieving many of those K’s with a outstanding 12-to-6 curveball that crosses the plate at about 69 mph. Therein lies the reason why Steve, a local product and the son of former Orioles’ pitcher Dave Johnson, is piling up stats in the Dodgers system, and not the Orioles.
Prior to the 2005 draft, Steve worked out for several clubs (including Baltimore), and while most scouts were impressed by the overall quality of his repertoire, that “69” on the speed gun for his curveball became a distraction. “Well, we like your stuff, but you really need to throw the curveball around 75,” he heard over and over. The Dodgers, to their credit, looked past the readout and drafted Steve anyway.
I’m not sure who introduced the speed gun into professional baseball, but there’s little doubt that its use has skewed the way organizations look at pitchers. It’s certainly true, as the old adage says, that you can’t teach speed. A guy with an 85 mph fastball isn’t likely to start throwing 95. The velocity with which a pitcher delivers any specific pitch has become such a talking point for the game that many ballparks now flash the number on the scoreboard within seconds of the ball crossing the plate. It’s even part of the graphic display in the corner of your TV screen.
Longtime pro scout Gordon Lakey says that, while he’s required to use the gun to measure pitch velocity and make it part of his report, he doesn’t believe it’s that necessary.
“I really don’t need it,” he said recently. “I know what I’m looking at. It’s what the hitter does with each pitch, the results that really matter.”
Former Oriole great and Hall of Famer Jim Palmer agrees. “I guarantee you that Mike Cuellar’s curveball didn’t go 75 mph,” he said. “It’s all about movement and location.”
Palmer also invoked the name of another former Oriole lefthander, one that the club let get away a dozen years back.
“Do you think that Jamie Moyer’s breaking ball hits 75 on the gun?” he asked. “He didn’t throw it that hard in his twenties. He sure isn’t doing it in his forties.”
Moyer, at 44, is part of the Phillies’ rotation, and has long understood that the name of the game is getting them out, not striking them out, though he has more than 2,000 K’s for his career.
“I feel the need for speed” is an oft-quoted line from the motion picture “Top Gun.” The minor leagues are full of pitchers who can rev up the speed gun, but whom, due to a lack of command or movement, may never reach the bigs. Steve Johnson, who throws harder than his dad but is no Roger Clemens, understands that his job is to disrupt the hitter’s timing at the plate. There’s a place for the speed gun in the game, but it shouldn’t be the last word in determining a young pitcher’s potential.
Phil Wood has covered sports in the Washington-Baltimore market for more than 30 years. You can reach him at [email protected].
