NEW YORK (AP) — Chad Tracy notices how much baseball has changed in the 13 years since he took his last big league at-bat.
“You watch a Triple-A game, most everybody that’s coming out of the bullpen left-handed or right-handed is throwing 95-plus,” the Boston Red Sox manager said. “Back in the day, it was you'd get a lead and you'd get to the lower part of a bullpen and you’d see some guys coming out throwing 88.”
Heading into the All-Star break, velocity is on track to set a record for the sixth straight season.
Four-seam fastballs averaged 94.7 mph through Saturday, up from 94.5 mph last year, 93.7 mph in 2021 and 91.9 mph when Major League Baseball first started tracking in 2008. The average was 94.4 mph for the first half of 2025, and this year's final figure could increase by a tick.
“Definitely expecting anybody you’ve never heard of to throw a 95-plus,” said the New York Mets' Marcus Semien, a three-time All-Star who made his major league debut in 2013, when four-seamers averaged 92.7 mph. “Before you'd know who the guys were who were throwing 98. Now, you just expect that this new guy is probably throwing 98. So that shows how everybody’s trained.”
Expectations have changed. In David Auburn's “Proof,” which won the 2001 Pulitzer Price for Drama, a mathematical research work is described as “streamlined: no wasted moves, like a 95-mile-an-hour fastball. It’s just ... elegant.”
That figure no longer is notable.
Right-handed pitchers are averaging 95.2 mph in 2026, up from 95.0 mph last year. Right-handed relievers are averaging 95.6 mph.
The Triple-A average of 93.6 mph is up from 92.7 mph when tracking started at that level in 2022.
“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 four-seam average has increased from 92.6 mph as a rookie in 2023 to 95.0 mph this year. “There’s so many young kids throwing hard now and then you see a lot younger people in the big leagues, so my thought is they see a guy that’s throwing 100 when he’s 22 and, boy, he’s not going to throw 100 when it’s 30, so let’s get in there now.”
Six pitchers are at 100 mph in average four-seam velocity led by a pair of relievers, the Athletics' Mason Miller (101.3 mph) and the Los Angeles Dodgers' Edgardo Henriquez (100.6 mph).
Milwaukee's Jacob Misiorowski, a 24-year-old starter, is averaging 100.5 mph, up from 99.3 mph as a rookie last year. He has thrown a big-league high of 670 pitches at 100 mph or higher. The Brewers skipped his start Sunday because of arm fatigue.
As velocity increases, so does pitch mix among fastball types.
Four-seamers are 30.4% of pitches this season, down from 31.8% last year and 35.8% in 2019.
Sinkers increased from 15.5% last year to 16.6% and cutters from 7.5% to 7.8%. Offspeed pitches rose from 13.6% to 14.3%.
“It is exponentially harder to hit and I hit .200 in my career, so that should show you how well I would do in the game today. The thing that I think gets me when I watch games is it’s not just one fastball anymore," said New York Mets interim manager Andy Green, whose last big league season with extensive playing time was in 2006. “It’s easy for us that played a couple of decades ago to malign the offensive players for not hitting from a batting average perspective what used to be hit, but there’s so much to contend with, so much information, so much awareness of what hitter handles what fastball shape. The game’s gotten harder, there’s no doubt about it."
Big league batters are hitting .244, just below last year’s .245 and above the .243 in 2024.
"At the end of the day, us as hitters have to find a good pitch to hit and put a good swing on it," Chicago Cubs star Alex Bregman said.
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AP Baseball Writers Jay Cohen and Janie McCauley contributed to this report.
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