Breaking the speed limit: Why fast bowlers have reached peak pace

Almost 50 years ago, cricket’s Jeff Thomson and baseball’s Nolan Ryan hurled a ball frighteningly fast. Quicker than anyone recorded before them.

Five decades later, no baseball pitcher has thrown, nor a cricketer bowled, much faster, begging the evolutionary question: why can’t a ball be propelled faster by a human?

Ryan pitched at 173.97km/h for the California Angels in 1974. Thomson bowled 160.6km/h in a Test match in 1975, and was clocked around the same speed several times between 1975-79.

The reassuring news for batters around the world who were, and many still are, traumatised by having faced Thomson without helmets (worn from 1978) is that they faced some of the fastest, and nastiest, cricket balls ever bowled.

Thomson’s quickest recorded delivery from 1975 places him, decades later, within one km/h of Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar (161.3km/h), and Australian pair Brett Lee and Shaun Tait (161.1km/h). Experts say given the margin of error of the various forms of speed measurement, these top four are effectively equal fastest.

The bigger mystery is why – despite improvements in sports science and evolution, in human fitness, size, strength, diet and training techniques – has no one pitched or bowled faster than Ryan and Thomson did in the 1970s?

Jeff Thomson bowling in 1977.Credit: Archives

And how is it that almost 100 years ago, a relatively short Englishman, Harold Larwood, is reported to have bowled about 155km/h – less than 4 per cent slower than Thomson. As did another Englishman, Frank Tyson almost 70 years ago, during England’s tour of Australia in 1954-55.

Larwood was only 171cm and weighed just 69kg. Current Australian pacemen – Mitchell Starc (196cm and 92kg), Josh Hazlewood (196cm and 98kg) and Pat Cummins (192cm and 89kg) – would have towered over Larwood, as would Lee (187cm and 90kg) and Tait (193cm and 96kg).

That didn’t prevent Larwood, the tormentor of Don Bradman’s Australians in the infamous Bodyline series of 1932-33, from bowling almost as quickly. And he was reported to enjoy a beer during the lunch break.

Tyson, dubbed “Typhoon”, was no fan of speed guns, saying: “I have always maintained the only true judge of a bowler’s speed is the batsman.”

On that measure, four bowlers stand out according to a panel of elite batters, captains and wicketkeepers from India, England, Australia and the West Indies spanning the playing period 1929-2012: Thomson, West Indies pair Michael Holding and Patrick Patterson, and Tyson himself.

Indian great Sachin Tendulkar – the one player on the panel who has faced Akhtar, Lee and Tait – still rated Patterson faster. As did former West Indies wicketkeeper Jeffrey Dujon, who could directly compare from gloving to Patterson and teammates including Holding, Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Colin Croft and Curtly Ambrose.

Unfortunately, there is no reliable recorded speed for Patterson (1986-93). If there was a way to record batting fear, then Patterson and Thomson would likely share top spot.

The man who conducted those early cricket fast-bowling tests and recordings in the 1970s was Professor Bruce Elliott, from the University of Western Australia, a world leader in biomechanics, high-performance sport and sports science.

Shoaib Akhtar celebrates the dismissal of Sachin Tendulkar in an ODI in 2004.Credit: AP

From a pure speed-capture methodology perspective, Elliott argues that their process in the 1970s of using high-speed film cameras from side on, and capturing the ball at its fastest – when it left a bowler’s hand – is more accurate than speed or radar guns.

Elliott says speed guns, positioned on the boundary sightscreen, picked up the velocity of the ball anywhere on its journey down the wicket, as it lost speed on its way to the batter.

“Depending on the quality of the radar and how quickly it picked up the velocity out of the hand, that’s where you’re going to get variations in speed,” Elliott told this masthead.

Now retired, Elliott says he also worked closely with Akhtar to analyse the Pakistani bowler’s action after accusations of illegally throwing (the results of Elliott’s studies helped clear Akhtar, showing he was born with a deformity of the elbow, enabling it to hyperextend).

Australian batter Ricky Ponting rated Akhtar’s spell in the Perth Test of 1999 as, “the quickest bowling I’ve ever faced”.

Does the variation of less than 1km/h between the top four fastest recorded bowlers – Akhtar, Lee, Tait and Thomson – give them equal claim to be the fastest, while also reinforcing there has been no increase in top speed in 50 years?

“I think it’s better to lump them together … that’s the right way to look at it,” Elliott said.

Nolan Ryan (188cm) managed to keep playing in the Major Leagues until the age of 46. He threw his fastest pitch at the age of 27, prior to stepping up his strength and fitness discipline. His final fastball was recorded at 158km/h – only 10 per cent slower than his record.

‘The muscles [get] bigger and stronger. But no one gets big ligaments and tendons.’

Biomechanics expert Glenn Fleisig

Injuries to fast pitchers and bowlers has become a crucial issue in both sports, triggered by the act of pushing the body for optimum speed, exacerbated by the increased stress of higher workloads in professional sport. In baseball, it coincides with a sharp increase in the number of pitchers who have broken the famed 160km/h (100 mph) barrier. In the last five years of Major League Baseball, the number of pitchers who can throw a 160km/h-plus fastballs has tripled, according to US Sports Illustrated.

So while Ryan’s top speed is not being bettered, a growing number are joining the leading pack. What’s stopping them going that little bit quicker?

Two body parts: shoulders and elbows, plus the ligaments and tendons holding things together. In baseball, that means the “Tommy John” ligament in the elbow and the rotator cuff tendons in the shoulder.

A US leader in baseball pitching biomechanics, Glenn Fleisig, has no doubt we have reached peak human throwing capacity, thanks to the limitations of those pesky weakest links – the ligaments and tendons in the elbow and shoulder.

Nolan Ryan playing for the California Angels in 1974.Credit: Getty

And no method has yet worked out how to strengthen them, instead settling for working on the muscles around them.

“We have excellent strength and conditioning programs to make the muscles stronger,” Fleisig said. “But you really can’t make your ligaments and tendons stronger. It has to do with biologically how they are.

“So muscles; you work out, you get sore and then your body flushes out the bad stuff, flushes in nutrients to make the muscles bigger and stronger. But no one gets big ligaments and tendons.”

In baseball, Fleisig says the pitchers’ ligaments and tendons are pushed to the limit, putting the focus on monitoring the build-up of wear and tear of the tendons and ligaments, regularly resting pitchers to manage their load before they get injured. It mirrors the much-debated rotation strategy adopted in cricket to manage fast bowlers: in the current Ashes, one Australian fast bowler has been rotated out of the line-up in each of the opening three matches – Mitchell Starc (first Test), Scott Boland (second) and Josh Hazlewood (third).

Josh Hazlewood was rested in the third Ashes Test.Credit: Getty

Fleisig, research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute, said at one of ASMI’s biomechanics labs they have run tests using the elbow and shoulder body parts of corpses to measure force and movement on muscles and ligaments.

From this cadaver research, they worked out that when pitching fastballs, the load on the arm is shared one third each on the ligament, the bone and the muscles. Fleisig says for an elite pitcher, there is 30 to 35 newton metres (measurement of torque, or tendency of a force to cause a rotational movement) on the ligament of the throwing arm.

“And from the cadaver research, we could tell that the ligament breaks at about 35 newton metres,” he said.

One of the fastest foursome, South Australian Shaun Tait, struggled with injury for much of his career, including chronic elbow issues. He was forced to retire from first-class cricket aged just 25 in 2009. He continued playing the shorter forms, requiring less bowling, to prolong his career.

In cricket, England’s quickest recorded bowler, Mark Wood, missed the first two Ashes Tests before his successful return in the third Test. His top speed is 156.65km/h last year against Pakistan. At Headingley during the third Ashes Test, he reached a top speed of 152.9km/h including bowling the fastest over of six consecutive deliveries at the ground since records began, according to Cricket England.

Their second-quickest bowler, Jofra Archer, has a top speed of 154.65km/h, against Australia in the 2019 Ashes, the series where one of his bouncers concussed Australia’s Steve Smith. But the dream rematch was cruelled by another injury to Archer.

The common injured body part for Tait, Archer and Wood: elbow ligament.

Archer has another of the fast bowler injury curses, a stress fracture of the lower back, also suffered early in the careers of Australians Dennis Lillee, Brett Lee, plus current trio Cummins, Hazlewood and Cameron Green.

For sports biomechanist Marc Portus, who has worked with hundreds of fast bowlers and had stints at both Cricket Australia and the International Cricket Council, the perfect fast bowler would combine athleticism, size and rhythm to achieve biomechanical effectiveness, for relatively low effort.

He named a foursome of three Australians – Lee along with Mitchell Johnson and Glenn McGrath – and the 2.03m West Indian, Joel “Big Bird” Garner.

“I reckon it’s a mix of Mitchell Johnson and Brett Lee’s athleticism with the stature of a Joel Garner and the metronomic efficiency of a Glenn McGrath,” he said.

For Ryan, still the fastest baseball pitcher of all time, neither best-in-class throwing biomechanics nor an ultra-disciplined fitness and recovery regime could prevent a ligament injury prematurely ending his long career.

Heading towards the end of his final season with the Texas Rangers, he noticed the warning signs of elbow soreness, the cue for the ligament needing a rest.

But with retirement looming, he decided to pitch on.

His elbow gave way two games away from his final appearance. He did try one pitch after his injury, and managed to throw a 158km/h fastball, despite a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow, which would have required tendon-transplant surgery and a year of rehabilitation.

“I heard the ligament pop like a rubber band,” Ryan said.

Fleisig’s decades of research, and work with baseball’s elite performers, has firmed his belief that while they’ve been able to improve the mechanics of pro pitchers, they have hit a physical wall when it comes to speed.

“Pitchers’ bodies are being pushed to the limit, but I don’t think the limit could go up,” he said. “Because I’m telling you, you can’t really make the ligaments stronger.”

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