Sometimes a baseball thing stops you in your tracks. You just kinda scrunch up your face and think, OK, well, wow. That is crazy. And if it’s a Cardinals player, it also makes you think, OK, well, that’s kind of annoying.
St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jordan Hicks throwing a 104.6 mph fastball – rounding up to 105 mph on the stadium gun – is one of those things. I can’t believe it:
That’s the fastest pitch I can recall since Ben Joyce’s ridiculous 105.5 mph offering.
Hicks, 26, has long had a super-premium fastball, routinely touching 103 mph. He hasn’t yet been able to put it all together into a particularly full and productive season (mostly for health and control reasons), but that kind of arm talent is inarguable.
The crazy thing on Hicks is that, because of the way his career has played out, he’s due to hit free agency after this season, despite throwing just 177.2 big league innings to this point. What an interesting case he’ll be, at age 27. He’ll have done a little starting, mostly relieving, and unless he dominates this year, his results won’t have matched the upside.