Was playing around with the ol’ db and wrote a quick query to pull out average fastball velocities this season in Japan. These are exceedingly simple lists; I didn’t filter by number of pitches thrown or anything like that.
Here are the 15 fastest averages:
| name | max |
|---|---|
| Juan Morillo | 95.32 |
| Eulogio de la Cruz | 95.21 |
| Marc Kroon | 94.78 |
| Takahiro Mahara | 93.98 |
| Brian Falkenborg | 93.63 |
| Kyuji Fujikawa | 93.11 |
| Brian Wolfe | 93.07 |
| Takuya Asao | 93.01 |
| Shun Yamaguchi | 92.88 |
| Jon Leicester | 92.41 |
| Tatsuya Uchi | 92.17 |
| Tomoyuki Kubota | 92.14 |
| Yao-Hsun Yang | 92.14 |
| Yoshinori | 92.12 |
| Chang Yong Lim | 92.00 |
No surprises here, mostly relievers and many foreign pitchers, though I didn’t expect to see Wolfe. Morillo, de la Cruz, Uchi and Yang have all thrown very few innings so take their appearance on this list with a grain of salt for each.
And here are 15 slowest:
| name | max |
|---|---|
| Atsushi Kizuka | 83.89 |
| Masato Nakazawa | 83.72 |
| Hironori Matsunaga | 83.71 |
| Kazuhito Tadano | 83.71 |
| Tomoya Yagi | 83.69 |
| Shoto Takekuma | 83.66 |
| Koji Hiroike | 83.12 |
| Mikinori Kato | 83.08 |
| Yasutaka Hattori | 83.06 |
| Hayato Aoki | 82.82 |
| Makoto Yoshino | 81.93 |
| Tsuyoshi Shimoyanagi | 81.59 |
| Masato Kobayashi | 81.50 |
| Masaru Takeda | 81.36 |
| Shunsuke Watanabe | 75.51 |
No real surprises here either, though it is striking to see how much softer Watanabe throws than everyone else.
