Alex Wood had a revelation late last season, watching Washington Nationals star Stephen Strasburg. Strasburg had completely eliminated the windup from his delivery, and that clearly intrigued Wood.
For many years in baseball, the common idea was that pitching from the windup allows a pitcher to generate more torque from the motion of winding up and ultimately throw at a higher velocity than from the stretch. However, there isn’t any actual data backing up this theory. If you think about it, the most important pitches of any game come from the stretch anyway.