Oh

Hello and welcome to episode 1893 of Effective Wild, a baseball podcast from Bancrafts presented

by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rally of Bancrafts, hello, Meg.

Hello.

I know it's not the most pressing issue facing Major League Baseball or the World, but

I think we need to do something about the flames for 95-mile per hour pitches on the baseball

broadcasts because we're still getting flames, you know, the little gifish kind of animation

when someone throws a 95-mile-hour approach and you'd see the little flames up top to just

note that this is a fast pitch.

And these days, it seems like more often than that when I see 95 and I see the flames,

I think, oh, that was sort of a slow pitch because I was watching.

So, watching Shohei Otoni's last start and he was somewhat diminished, he was pitching

with some sort of stomach bug, so he was not his usual self, but when he would throw 95

and he'd get flames for that, I think, well, this is not flame worthy.

This is not particularly impressive for Shohei Otoni.

If he throws a 95-mile-proud or fastball, I'm thinking he took a little off that pitch

if anything.

And I think that more and more because obviously we've had velocity skyrocket and flames

have stayed on 95-mile-proud pitches, so there's been a great flame inflation.

And Sim wrote about this for BP, like in early 2016 and even then, he was picking up on

the fact that we needed to do something about the flame threshold.

...