83 and Deadly

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⚾️ 83 and Deadly

MLB hitters train for 98 every night.
Then Tyler Rogers crawls out of the basement and flips their world upside down.

Rogers throws the slowest fastball in Major League Baseball.

Eighty-three.
Miles.
Per.
Hour.

In a league where relievers are basically hired flamethrowers — 98 or don’t bother knocking — Rogers shows up with the same fastball velocity your nephew brings to JV tryouts. And he’s a coveted free agent. A valuable one.

It’s ridiculous.
It’s beautiful.
It’s baseball.

Rogers is a submarine freak of nature — the ball leaves his hand 1.18 feet off the ground. That’s basically bowling. His slider breaks up, his sinker looks drunk, and hitters swing late on 83 mph like they accidentally loaded the wrong scouting report.

And here’s the kicker:
He wasn’t just good in 2025.
He was the most valuable free-agent reliever by Statcast’s all-pitch metric.
No. 1.

Yes — the slowest fastball in baseball out-valued the top bullpen arms.
Baseball officially makes no sense.

This is the part I love:
Statcast is about to introduce a “late swing” metric — measuring how far behind the ball a hitter’s bat is — and the early leaderboard looks exactly like you’d expect: four-seamers from Chris Sale and Max Fried, plus the 100+ mph fire of Jhoan Duran and Seth Halvorsen.

And sitting just below those flamethrowers?

Rogers and his 83-mph heater.

He gets grounders by the truckload — almost two-thirds of his outs thud straight into the dirt.
He has one of the lowest walk rates in the league.
And hitters just… flail, stab, and guess.

Sure, he’s 35. Sure, every year brings the threat of his velocity dropping into “my kid throws that in Little League” territory. But none of that matters. He is an alien disguised as a reliever.

A cheat code hitters can’t practice for. The Trajekt machine can’t even simulate him. There’s no “Rogers mode.”

Some team is going to sign him and shrug:
“Yeah, we’ll take the guy who breaks the rules.”

Because in a sport obsessed with velocity, spin rate, and 99th-percentile everything…

Sometimes the nastiest thing on the planet is 83 miles an hour released from the basement floor.

John Boxley
High N Tight

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