Yeah, I've started the last three threads in the forum, but here's number 4.
If this guy can throw with control, he will be
awesome.Strasburg is on the all-time fastest track
By Steve Henson, Yahoo! Sports
4 hours, 47 minutes ago
SAN DIEGO – The radar gun blinks wildly. It’s not used to this. No one makes it strain to read out a third digit. It looks like binary code, not the speed of a pitch from a 20-year-old kid: 101.
It keeps showing up, 101 again and again, and as scouts peek at the number, they ask aloud what everyone else in the baseball world wonders: Will Stephen Strasburg someday throw a baseball harder than anyone has before?
Two men holding radar guns as well as his pitching coach said he has touched 103 mph this season. Only three others have done that, and all were major league relief pitchers, not juniors in college. Strasburg is a starter for San Diego State, and his velocity levels off in triple digits, something never seen, not from Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson or any of the modern fireballers since the advent of the radar gun.
So it’s no surprise that Strasburg is dominating college like no pitcher ever has. He has 74 strikeouts in 34 1/3 innings, meaning only 29 outs have come via batted ball. He fanned 23 batters in one game last year, and in seven outings with Team USA last summer, culminating with the Beijing Olympics, he struck out 62 in 41 innings.
And the stories about standing 60 feet away from Strasburg, apocryphal though they may seem, are more of the horror variety even if they sound comedic. His catcher, Erik Castro, tells of the time he thought a changeup was coming and Strasburg went fastball. Decapitation was barely averted.
I'd love to find out just how fast that changeup of his is. If it's 90 mph, it's still faster than Tom Glavine's (and Freddy Garcia's, and Jamie Moyer's) fastball.
I'd also add that crossing up your catcher generally does not sit well with said backstop.
The rest of the article is here . . . .
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=sh-strasburg032409&prov=yhoo&type=lgns103 mph! Wow!
