My report on the Jr Oly event.

Well Ag,

I have to tell ya that there were a whole lot of people who swore up and down that they had 4 or 5 guys that could throw in the mid 80's, our coach being one of them. But, when push came to shove, and guns that were matched were used on all of the pitchers, something different showed up.

I don't know for sure, but I'd lay money that there weren't more than 50 pitchers total that were consistently at 80! I don't know what on earth people think they're seeing out there, but I'm telling you as a person who catches a couple guys who do throw at 80, 80 MPH is damn fast! And as fast as that is, I'll tell you that the difference between 80 and 85 is almost unbelievable, and when you catch someone throwing 90, you know it!

But to the person away from the action, i.e. in the stands or the dugout, its a lot harder to tell. The .02 difference between 80 and 85 doesn't really have much meaning until its coming straight at your face!

As for the pitchers I saw, I think I can say with some assurance that they were all 75+ with the FB. The biggest difference wasn't in the speed though. As I sat there and watched, and I was watching very closely too, the difference was in the movement or lack thereof on the FB.

There's no way I could have seen all of the over 400 kids who threw that week, but I did get to see 30 who threw in our games and I did get to see another 20-30 who were finishing or starting games as we got there or were getting ready to leave. Of those I saw, not one in 10 had more than a smidgen of movement on their FB.

I don't know if they were all throwing 4 seamers trying to impress people or if they just didn't have the movement, but whatever it was, I was really surprised at the lack of movement. I anyone knows what good hitters do with pitches like that, it shouldn't be any surprise that it looked like BP at most of the games.

The other thing that was extremely noticeable was the lack of a really good 2nd pitch for all but a very small minority of the pitchers. They all had a hook and a few threw a change, but in my opinion, the quality was very, very low. That's not to say there were some kids who could buckle the knees of even the best hitters, but I can assure you that was not the norm.

I'd watch pitchers warm up or in the bull pens and see them glove signal for a hook, change, slider and even some splits. But throwing at 75% in a bullpen or warming up didn't translate to the mound during a game.

But, just to keep things in perspective, from what I could tell, all of the pitchers were at least starter on their JV teams and a large number were starters on their varsity teams. Of the 9 regular pitchers we carried, 6 were varsity starters and I'm going to assume most of the other teams were the same.

Since the people who run the tournament told me this year's group was about average, I have to guess that the tales of the school with 3 90+ kids or the league where the average pitcher throws at 81-84 is nothing but wishful thinking.

I guess the bottom line is, although there are a lot of good pitchers, running around, the difference between a decent HS pitcher and a good one is very little. That means there's hope for anyone who wants to bust their hump!

The very best 2 or 3% are very, very good. But after that, it goes down pretty quickly. The bad news for hopeful pitchers is, the numbers are so great. Even at 1%, that's still a very big number to get even with or pass.