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THE PITCHER'S MOUND — The fastball gets most of the attention in baseball, which isn't surprising. When a human is capable of hurtling an object at 105 miles per hour, that's a big deal.
But there's a different kind of pitch that can confound a batter in an even more dramatic way. Behold, the eephus pitch of Brock Holt.
31 MPH PITCH LETS GO
— Ben Verlander (@BenVerlander) August 8, 2021
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Turns out that Holt's high-arcing lob was the slowest-moving pitch to earn a strike since the beginning of the pitch-tracking era. It barely cracked 30 mph (for reference, that's roughly the same speed as molasses).
Earlier this season, Willians Astudillo unleashed a 41-mile-per-hour eephus pitch for the Twins. But that pitch from Astudillo has nothing on Holt's pitch, which looked more like a marshmallow fluttering through the air than a precision-engineered baseball launched by a professional athlete.
"The plan was to see how slow I could throw it and still throw strikes," Holt told MLB.com.
Well done, Holt. Mission accomplished.
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