In baseball, it’s commonplace to judge early-career pitchers by looking at the velocity with which they throw. Faster pitches are harder to hit, the thinking goes, and speed is relatively easy to measure. And it’s true that, all else being equal, speed is a useful tool for a pitcher.
But it isn’t a perfect indicator. Knuckleballs move more slowly than any other nongimmick pitch, but they can fool batters with their distinct wobble. (They can fool catchers, too. Bob Uecker was a catcher in his playing days and one of his pitchers was a knuckleballer. When a reporter asked Uecker if knuckleballs were hard to catch, he responded that they’re easy: All you have to do is wait for them to stop rolling and pick them up.) A good knuckleballer will fail the velocity test every time. Yet some knuckleballers go on to Hall of Fame careers.
Velocity is a partial indicator, but it’s not the goal. The goal is getting batters out, and there are other ways to do that. Teams that mistake the indicator for the goal put themselves at a disadvantage.
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