If you think this...just know you couldn't possibly be anymore wrong. This is so unbelievably false.
Reposting because this is still one of the most misunderstood topics in baseball.
Velocity and spin rate didn’t magically explode. The technology changed.
The old JUGS guns read slower than Stalker. Stalker read differently than Stalker Pro. Then TrackMan started measuring velocity at or near release instead of farther down the ball’s flight.
That “86 mph” fastball from 30 years ago? In many cases it would show up in the low-to-mid 90s on today’s systems.
MLB has spent years convincing fans that every pitcher today throws harder than previous generations. Some do. But a huge part of the jump is how the ball is measured.
And here’s the funny part: in their own documentation, they acknowledge that TrackMan measures the ball out of the hand and can read roughly 2–6 mph higher than older radar systems.
The game changed. The measuring system changed. The athletes didn’t suddenly become superheroes.