Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander went on quite a tear after being secured from the Detroit Tigers a couple season’s ago, but imagine how dominant he returned from Tommy John surgery with his triple-digit heat back and then some?
LIGHT-SPEED FASTBALL
Randall Munroe, the creator of a popular web comic called XKCD, sometimes tackles hypothetical questions posed by readers and then illustrates the answer. In the following TED Talk he speculates what would transpire if a pitcher could throw at 90 percent the speed of light.
Randall Munroe: Baseball pitch at 90% speed of light. Result: Nuclear fallout = hit by pitch #ted2014 @TEDTalks #xkcd pic.twitter.com/Y2M9XSPpAP
— David Kwong (@davidkwong) March 22, 2014
Turns out pitching at near light speed doesn’t bode well for the pitcher, the batter, the catcher, the umpire, the ballpark, or the city. For the sake of Houston and all the MLB cities the Astros visit, Verlander will have to look for another way to intimidate opposing sluggers.
In the meantime, Verlander and the Astros remain under intense scrutiny (and scorn) after admitting to a pitch-stealing scheme early in 2020.
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