Missing Bats, a special series this week in The Athletic, explores how baseball’s profound metamorphosis over the past two decades traces back to one simple idea — maximizing strikeouts at all costs — that became an industry-wide obsession. Explore the entire series here.
From his earliest days on a pitcher’s mound in Reno, Nev., Christian Chamberlain worked out an unbalanced math equation in his head. How could he, the smallest kid on the team, throw as hard as everyone else?
Thus began Chamberlain’s quest to unlock every ounce of velocity his undersized frame could uncork. The gulf between Chamberlain and his bigger peers narrowed as he refined his mechanics, orchestrating a fluid yet explosive delivery, but no scouts came out to see the high school lefty hucking 82 mph heaters. He had no college scholarship offers until he hit a modest growth spurt as a senior and touched 90 mph. Then he got eight offers in a month. He was projectable now: a low-slot lefty with some juice and a nifty 12-to-6 breaking ball. He was kind of nasty.
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Chamberlain was 5-foot-10 but felt like the small kid again when he arrived at Oregon State. In the fall of his freshman year, throwing to starting catcher Adley Rutschman, a future No. 1 draft pick who had four inches on him, Chamberlain struck out nine batters in three innings.
“That,” he said, “was when I proved to myself that I belonged.”
Chamberlain, 24, continued proving that point. He set a College World Series record as a freshman, striking out 11 in relief, and put himself on the radar of major-league scouting departments. The Kansas City Royals drafted Chamberlain in the fourth round in 2020 because, undersized or not, he misses bats; he has struck out 13.4 per nine innings in the minors.
In January, the same month Chamberlain hit 97 mph in a bullpen session, the Royals invited him to his first big-league spring training.
To some, such an ascent has the makings of a modern baseball success story — a pitcher turning himself from nothing to something, on guts and stuff. Pitch-tracking data and biometric analysis are leveling the playing field for under-scouted and unsung pitchers. If they get whiffs, they’ll get a chance.
Others see it as emblematic of the demands placed upon young arms in an industry obsessed with increasing velocity and movement. They worry about the physical toll of pitchers straining to maximize their output. In the past, Chamberlain might have had a path to the majors as a crafty lefty, pitching to contact and leaning on command. But that profile isn’t what modern clubs covet, so his path is as a fire-breathing monster even if his body was not naturally built for it.
At last year’s World Series, Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark voiced concerns about the commoditization of pitchers in today’s game. “The fundamental premise to me is: We’re telling guys to run the engine in the red. We don’t care how long they do it. Once we’re done with ‘em, we’ll cycle them through and bring somebody (else) in.” Clark added, “At some point in time, the engine is going to blow.”
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Arms blowing out in baseball is nothing new. Pitching has shot shoulders, elbows, forearms and fingers since the days of Pud Galvin and Kid Nichols. “Throwing is like the most unnatural thing you can do to your body,” Tigers ace Tarik Skubal said. But the prevalence of arm injuries in recent years has sounded alarm bells in baseball circles and beyond, prompting the league to commission a study on the issue. According to an MLB spokesperson, injury-list placements for pitchers more than doubled from 2010 to 2021.
Dr. Keith Meister, the Texas Rangers’ head physician, lamented the rise of high-spin breaking balls, criticized clubs for managing pitchers poorly and compared the lifespan of a professional pitcher to that of an NFL running back. “Cynically from the ownership side of things, they’re never going to have to pay big bucks to any of these players,” he said. “Forget about them becoming free agents. They’re never even going to become arb-eligible.”
Major-league clubs employ a smoke-’em-if-you-got-’em approach, asking starting pitchers to sprint instead of going the distance. They incentivize swing-and-miss. They eschew chance, which was once considered one of baseball’s charms. Baseball’s value system in the missing-bats revolution rewards certainty. Nothing is more certain than strike three. Training has followed that logic. Mass is gas, and gas is hard to hit. Even the Dodgers have hit .154 against 99-plus mph pitches this season. MLB pitchers already have exceeded 100 mph nearly 400 more times in 2024 than they did in 2014. Over the past 10 seasons, MLB hitters have slugged .280 on pitches of at least 100 mph — that’s 10 points worse than pitcher Adam Wainwright’s career slugging percentage, as a hitter.
Eventually, the bill for all that gas comes due.
Pitchers know there’s likely a price for consistently throwing close to their bodies’ maximum capacity. Many are willing to pay. The thinking goes that their best chance to be a big leaguer is by doing what might make them break. Chamberlain is intimately familiar with that risk-reward calculation. He stepped on the mound for his first spring training game in March feeling stronger than ever.
He walked off three batters later with his elbow aching.
Bryan Harvey took pains to steer his sons clear of the arm injury epidemic.
Harvey, a two-time All-Star closer in the 1990s, threw a fastball and a splitter from an aggressively over-the-top arm angle. “I had terrible mechanics,” he said. Pitching through a sports hernia in his early 30s put extra stress on Harvey’s right arm, and his elbow blew in 1995. Harvey joined the list of Tommy John patients, back when only a handful of recognizable names were added each year. Harvey rehabbed at home in North Carolina, throwing off a wooden mound he’d built in the barn, but never made it back to the majors.
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Determined to keep his sons healthy, Harvey pulled his oldest, Kris, when he had a no-hitter through six innings in his first high school game. When the younger son, Hunter, reached high school, his dad was even more cautious; Hunter got two innings. Bryan tried to teach his sons about the art of pitching. Hitters, he said, will tell you how to get them out. The hitter is going to tell you what he wants to do. Just pay attention.
That’s one aspect Bryan has seen change from one generation to the next: “I think a lot of pitchers have stopped paying attention to the hitter. They’re trying to pitch to a spot on a piece of paper.” Hitters in his day didn’t want to strike out; hitters today swing from their heels with two strikes. But nothing is more drastically different, from the 1990s to the 2020s, than the frequency of arm injuries that knock out pitchers for a season or two at a time.
Pitching instruction evolved between the time Kris navigated the prep pitching universe and when Hunter followed, 11 years later. By then, velocity was king. Bryan came to see pitching development in today’s game as an ouroboros, a destructive and unbreakable cycle: Youth pitchers need to throw hard to be drafted, so they throw hard and eventually get hurt, and when they return they’re trying to throw even harder.
Still, Bryan could only do so much to protect his sons. Kris’ professional career ended in the minors with shoulder surgery. Bryan kept Hunter on a strict innings limit and a long-toss regimen in high school. He played different positions around the diamond. He cooled down properly after games. The Baltimore Orioles drafted Hunter in the first round of the 2013 draft out of high school. Then Hunter compiled a lengthy injury list early in pro ball: flexor mass strain, fibula fracture, forearm soreness, double sports hernia surgery, Tommy John surgery and a right shoulder injury sustained while avoiding a foul ball in the dugout. “He was like a black cat there for a while,” his dad said.
Hunter Harvey is now the set-up man for the Washington Nationals, slinging splitters — like his dad — and fastballs averaging 98 mph. He bears the stat line and the scars of yet another high-octane arm saved by surgeons.
Ahead of his first big-league camp, Chamberlain flew from Nevada to North Carolina for further refinement at the Tread Athletics training facility.
In college, strategizing to procure swings and misses was not part of conversations with coaches. Chamberlain fixated less on the individual outcomes of each pitch and more on three numbers: walks, strikeouts and velocity. That changed in pro ball as pitch-tracking technology fed him data about spin rate, extension, vertical break and horizontal movement. The numbers told Chamberlain his fastball, with its low release and high ride, was his best pitch. “Hitters say it looks like the ball is coming up from the ground,” he said. So Chamberlain heeded a missing-bats mantra and threw his best pitch more.
But in adding weight and velocity, Chamberlain lost some feel for the zone. Pro hitters have so far been more likely to walk against Chamberlain than get a hit — 98 walks to 85 hits. Wanting both velocity and strikes, he started training with Tread, a place founded by a former pitcher who knows what it’s like to be in Chamberlain’s spikes.
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Ben Brewster, 32, was a funky, low-slot lefty who started taking pitching seriously in the mid-2000s when the velocity trend was still gaining steam. Brewster was an early disciple of Paul Nyman, an engineer who studied the movements of the hardest throwers in baseball and inspired a generation of new-age pitching minds. Brewster came to believe that if he gained strength and perfected his mechanics, he’d get to his goal: 95 mph. “It seemed like a physics problem,” Brewster said.
But as a high school freshman, he threw 72 mph and weighed 155 pounds.
“The only way I’d even make it to pitching in college,” he said, “was trying to crack the code of how to throw a fastball as hard as humanly possible.”
Brewster focused on the minimum viable velocity threshold to be considered at each next level; figuring out command and off-speed stuff was secondary. “None of it mattered if I threw 72 mph.” Brewster walked on at Maryland with an 85 mph fastball, touched 90 mph when the Chicago White Sox drafted him in the 15th round in 2014, and reached his 95 mph goal while working out with Kyle Boddy at Driveline Baseball the next year.
But Brewster fell out of baseball as injuries mounted. Shoulder. Elbow. Back. Both hips. Many were weight-room injuries, as he discovered the downstream effects of taking every rep at maximum exertion.
Three hip surgeries and an e-book later, Brewster still throws 93 mph while barely using his back leg. He’s still working on that physics problem. He coaches pitchers about how to throw harder by becoming better athletes and improving their mechanics, and also applies lessons learned from his many injuries. At a time when velocity training is drawing some blame for arm injuries, Brewster believes trainers can balance keeping players healthy with helping them reach their goals. Some red flags for injury risk are obvious: fatigue, absurd workloads, mechanical flaws. But there’s a lot about which the industry is still in the dark.
“You’re threading a needle,” Brewster said. “You’re not going to fully prevent injuries. You’re trying to lower the probability of injury. It’s not certainties, it’s probabilities.”
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The pitchers coming to him are willing to play the odds.
“Every college player would trade their left nut to add three miles per hour,” Brewster said.
After an offseason spent smoothing his mechanics and adding 15 pounds, Chamberlain’s fastball was coming out hotter and his off-speed stuff was back in the strike zone. “I felt like I was back to my college self,” he said.
Tread tweeted a video of Chamberlain with a unicorn emoji. His induced vertical break (17-plus inches) and release height (5-foot-3) put him in the ballpark of major-league lefties Tanner Scott and Yusei Kikuchi.
Absolute ⛽️ from Royals LHP – Christian Chamberlain
🦄
IVB: 17+
Release Height: 5’3
Velo: 95+ (in a bullpen)
During the '23 MLB season only 2 lefties, Tanner Scott (Tread Athlete) & Yusei Kikuchi, threw FBs with:> 95 mph
< 65" Rel. Ht.
> 17" IVBPC: @turnergivens pic.twitter.com/BI9lNI3sYD
— Tread Athletics (@TreadHQ) January 20, 2024
“Stud,” one follower replied.
Another elaborated: “No hitches, the sequencing of his kinetic chain is immaculate, all the way to his fingertips where the baseball seems to explode out of his hand. Goosebumps.”
The Pitching Ninja wasn’t a pitcher.
Rob Friedman is an Atlanta-based lawyer who grew up playing tennis in New York. His days and nights are now filled with posting video clips of high heat, backdoor sliders and utter filth — treating each strikeout “as if he was cheering firefighters putting out flames,” as the New York Times once wrote — for 514,000 followers on X. Pitchers text him. They ask about grips. They wear his merch in clubhouses. Friedman has become pitching’s preeminent tastemaker; if Pitching Ninja says your stuff is nasty, it is.
Christian Chamberlain, 93mph Fastball and 78mph Curveball, Overlay (12Ks/5.1IP) pic.twitter.com/ax7sBKJGns
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) February 21, 2020
The origin of Friedman’s pitching expertise came when his son, Jack, started pitching in youth ball. Friedman’s legal background told him to seek answers from smart people. That search took him to message boards where he found pitching obsessives, including Nyman and Boddy and Brewster, talking about how velocity could be taught. “It was almost like the Big Bang of the pitching revolution,” Friedman said. Out of those forums grew three brands that dominate the pitching landscape today: Driveline Baseball, Tread Athletics and Pitching Ninja.
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Friedman started the @PitchingNinja account, he said, to pay the game forward. He’s not trying to teach. He shares what he’s learned from others. He thinks of himself as less of a coach than an objective judge.
Well, somewhat objective.
“I’m biased towards nasty stuff,” he said.
If there is an unintended consequence of a clearinghouse for baseball’s gnarliest pitches, it’s the normalization of nasty. The Pitching Ninja brand exists because of the idea of missing bats. “If it was just groundballs …” Friedman said, with a laugh. If MLB is to untangle the arm injury scourge in the coming decades, it will need to target the youth game — yet the gold standard youth pitchers see celebrated now on social media isn’t weak contact and three-pitch outs, but whiffs and strikeout struts.
Culpability extends far beyond tweets, of course. The Pitching Ninja feed is simply sharing the swing-and-miss intentions of each pitch delivered today, one fastball-splitter-sweeper overlay at a time. Clubs are obsessed with efficiency. Pitchers are driven by velocity and spin and the payday that combination can provide. Fans hold their breath whenever an ace winces, operating under the assumption an elbow injury is a matter of when, not if.
Cleveland Guardians starter Shane Bieber, whose embrace of analytics spurred his rise from so-so college arm to Cy Young Award winner, spent the offseason training at Driveline and hoping to turn around a decline in stuff and velocity. He pitched flawlessly in his first two starts this season, striking out 20 and walking one over 12 scoreless innings. He had recaptured his old self on the mound, he said, and had fallen back in love with pitching.
Then he was the latest pitcher in line for Tommy John surgery.
Bieber struggled to process what it all said about the state of the game.
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“It’s a very real elephant in the room, so to speak,” he said.
When Chicago Cubs starter Jameson Taillon underwent his second elbow surgery in 2019, there was a short list of two-time Tommy John guys he sought out: Nathan Eovaldi, Daniel Hudson and Tyler Chatwood. Now that list could include Jacob deGrom, Shane McClanahan, Walker Buehler and the greatest two-way player in history: Shohei Ohtani. “Clearly something is in the water,” Taillon said. He has come to see the arm injury crisis as the inevitable conclusion of a trend driven by how pitchers are valued. “If you’re not throwing your pen to a Trackman to optimize your pitch shapes, and if you’re not trying to gain velocity in the offseason, you’re just falling behind,” he said. “Guys don’t want to fall behind, so they’d rather get hurt than get devalued.”
Those who have experienced both the risk and reward of pitching are unsure an alternative exists. Even if a pitching wizard conjured the perfect delivery, one that could almost guarantee arms would remain healthy, pitchers would balk if it risked performance. Hitters are too good, and lineups too deep, to subtract stuff.
“I’m not going to be the test dummy,” Taillon said. “I’m not going to be the one that goes out there and says, ‘I’m just going to throw out 80 percent and see what happens.’”
“That is the safest thing to do,” Boston Red Sox starter Lucas Giolito (one Tommy John surgery, one internal brace procedure) said. “But you’re going to get hit around the park.”
Both of them were first-round picks. Players with lesser prospect pedigrees are far more likely to push their limits as they compete for a roster spot and a major-league contract. But it’s not just fringe players spending all winter airing it out. Year-round training has become the norm. Skubal (one Tommy John) trained throughout the offseason and threw 99 mph in his first live bullpen this spring. Now that workhorses like Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole have had elbow issues, Skubal said, “Nobody is bulletproof.” Arms are unpredictable. “I trust my routine,” Skubal said. “If I do get hurt I’m not gonna lose sleep, because I did everything I could to not.” His teammate Andrew Chafin (one Tommy John) said, “If it’s gonna go, it’s gonna go, so just give her hell every day.”
Charlie Morton had Tommy John surgery in 2012, back before he threw as hard as he could. He was a 33-year-old low-90s sinkerballer when the Houston Astros signed him in 2016 and asked him to air it out. He threw his four-seamer more and 5 mph faster. Later, the Tampa Bay Rays told him to fire four-seamers at the top of the zone. Next, the Atlanta Braves, Morton’s current employer (and the employer of swing-and-miss guru Mike Fast), instructed him to throw his breaking ball more.
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“So what am I doing?” Morton told Baseball isn’t Boring recently. “I’m throwing the ball close to as hard as I can at the top of the zone, and I’m spinning a breaking ball as much as I can spin it, anywhere from 2,800 to 3,300 rpm. It’s like, that’s not a good idea, if you want to stay healthy.”
Morton is 40 now. He’s a two-time All-Star with two World Series rings and nearly $150 million in career earnings, 80 percent of which has come since signing with Houston. “I’m speaking from a privileged position,” Morton said, “from someone whose UCL repair has held up — knock on wood.” But he finds it both undeniable and unfortunate that he’s at his best when running the engine in red.
Chamberlain felt no twinge. He heard no pop. When the ulnar collateral ligament in his left elbow tore during his first Cactus League debut this spring, Chamberlain wasn’t sure he was hurt. He struck out the first batter. He hit the next batter. He threw a fastball and checked that the radar gun reading was normal. He tried a breaking ball. Seemed fine. Then his left arm started feeling hot, and that’s when he was sure: “I just knew something wasn’t right.”
Chamberlain walked the third batter and left with an athletic trainer.
He had Tommy John surgery the following week.
As he later read articles about Bieber, Spencer Strider and Eury Pérez undergoing elbow procedures, Chamberlain did not assign blame for the current state of young arms in baseball. He instead thought about using the next 12 to 18 months to strengthen his base and fitness as he rehabbed his arm.
The missing-bats revolution was driven by the curious and the desperate. Chamberlain is both. The undersized kid from Reno brought himself to the cusp of the big leagues by getting the most out of his body. He’ll get another shot, with a repaired elbow, because he has what others covet: swing-and-miss stuff. “There are tons of guys at the Division I level that are great pitchers — know where the ball’s going, know how to pitch — but don’t get a look because sometimes the stuff isn’t where orgs want it to be now,” Chamberlain said.
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Chamberlain remains at the Royals facility in Surprise, Ariz., working out with other rehabbing players. He doesn’t plan on dialing back when he pitches again. “You can’t pitch with the fear of getting injured,” he said, “or you’re never going to get anything done.” He might come back even nastier than before.
— With reports from The Athletic’s Cody Stavenhagen, Zack Meisel and Chad Jennings
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic. Photos: Todd Kirkland / MLB Photos via Getty Images; Megan Briggs / Getty Images)
