Throwing Hard is Good... Right?

I don’t have anything of incredibly great import to talk about today. Between John Gant’s pursuit of history and my farewell to Tommy Pham, I’ve gotten a lot of whimsy and sentimentality out of my system, so let’s get back to manipulating numbers and making broad claims that are only mostly supported by data! In all seriousness, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk about here for a while, and now seems as good a time to do it as any. I don’t know how much this is true and how much I’m just projecting on other Cardinals fans, but to my mind there are two extreme takes about Jordan Hicks this year, both of them wrong. The first is what I’ll call the velocity truthers. This is a pretty easy one- Jordan Hicks throws the ball so dang hard. How could he not be great? He’s got a shiny ERA too, and it used to be even shinier. Great pitcher. Let’s move on. I don’t think this view captures the full Jordan Hicks experience.

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