The late J.R. Richard was a Major League Baseball phenomenon of the 1970s for the Houston Astros. If the radar guns were accurate, no one’s fastball traveled faster than Richard’s.
Where it perhaps gets interesting is that no one since has thrown faster than Richard. While records are made to be broken, the speed of the fastball apparently isn’t. The explanation that I’ve always heard is that the human arm quite simply isn’t designed, or hasn’t evolved, to throw the ball faster. Which is apparently why Richard was and remains the fastball standard.
This came to mind while reading Peter Ward’s new book, The Price of Immortality: The Race To Live Forever. While Ward’s book proved a disappointment, his subject isn’t. Though fastballs remain fast, but aren’t getting any faster, Ward writes with arguably not enough optimism that “Medicine has extended average life expectancy significantly in the past century, and scientists now turn their expertise to more extreme measures to stop people from dying.”
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