In Between the Lines
- ebotti0
- 3 hours ago
- 8 min read
Ed Botti
January 15, 2026
***
If you are reading this, you don’t need me to tell you how slow and uninspiring this 2025/2026 off season has been for the New York Yankees.
There are plenty of reasons for that, and we can certainly get into those reasons, if we have not done so already.
Unless of course you are fired up by the 4 for 1 trade for Ryan Weathers.
Something more interesting than the Yankee off season malaise came across the wires recently.
Some of you reading this may or may not remember MLB outfield/first basemen John Vander Wal.
I have a distinct and clear memory of John, having seen him play many times.
A lefty hitter, lefty throwing outfielder who played a little first base as well.
John was known for hitting the ball, as evidenced by his nearly 80% ball in play rate during his 14 year career.
He holds the MLB record for pinch hits with 28 in 1995.
John was actually a 1998 San Diego Padre and played in the 1998 World Series against the Yankees, where he hit .400 in the series.
John was a very good hitter, and a guy I always thought would have made a pretty darn good MLB hitting coach after he hung up his spikes. He became a scout for 10 years in MLB and then a minor league manager in the Tigers system.
He was originally a Montreal Expo but worked his way around the League with stops in Colorado, Pittsburgh and San Diego, for the most part.
In the mid-90s and early 2000’s he was a dependable and consistent lefty bat, who eventually was picked up by the Yankees in 2002 towards the end of his playing career, where he played in 84 games and hit .260.
I always though they got him a year or two too late.
He was a solid, no nonsense old school guy. He didn’t shoot his mouth off, he did not have a home run dance or hand shake, and he didn’t fraternize with the opponents.
He was just a good teammate that could play the game pretty well and kept his mouth shut.
The kind of player every star studded team actually needs.
I look at this way, if Tony Gwynn had respect for you as a player and teammate, that’s all I need to know.
I bring him up today because recently he has made headlines and attracted attention in certain baseball circles.
Below is a quote from a recent post John published.
“The game is in an awful state”.
“I scouted professionally for two organizations over a ten-year period, and a lot of what we’re seeing today is being misunderstood or flat-out misrepresented.
First, velocity. Pitchers are not throwing significantly harder across the board. The perceived jump in velocity is primarily the result of technology and measurement changes — specifically where the device picks the baseball up out of the hand. As radar and tracking systems moved closer and closer to release, the readings increased. The arm didn’t change — the measurement did.
Now hitting.
We’ve reached a point where “gurus” who never played the game at a high level are applying golf swing principles to baseball, largely because golf embraced analytics to identify the most efficient swing paths. The problem is that a baseball bat is not a golf club.
In golf, you dump the club to get it on plane.
In baseball, you cannot lose the barrel on the back side and still stay on plane consistently.
Yet the tech community began preaching backside barrel dump as the answer. Front offices filled with non-baseball “propeller head” GMs bought into the presentations, and this philosophy was pushed aggressively through the minor leagues. I saw this coming as early as 2014.
The result?
Hitters now dump the barrel in an attempt to get on plane, but they:
• Struggle to stay inside the baseball
• Lose adjustability
• Operate with slower effective bat speed
On the pitching side, it’s no better.
Pitchers are taught max effort on every pitch. Starters rarely exceed 90 pitches or five innings, work almost exclusively to either arm side or glove side, and live in deep counts. Relievers are almost universally max effort, arm-side only.
The consequence is obvious:
• Poor command
• Inconsistent control
• Little ability to sequence or adjust
Despite all the technology, pitching command and overall feel are as bad as I’ve ever seen at the big-league level.
More data didn’t make the game smarter.
It just made it louder — and in many cases, worse.”
For a guy that stayed out of the press and public eye during his career, I was surprised by his comments at first. But after thinking about it, I am not surprised at all.
Just like all of you, I see what the radar guns say. You can’t miss it. They post it on every pitch on the TV screen and on all the scoreboards throughout the League.
I am not sure why yet, but they want us to see how fast every pitch is thrown and how hard every ball is hit. It’s like they are obsessed with velocity.
But my eyes tell me something different almost every time. For example I can clearly remember what a high fastball looked like to the naked eye out of the hands of a prime year Dwight Gooden, Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson.
Fast forward 30-40 years and nearly every pitcher on nearly every roster has the same apparent velocity or even greater then Gooden, Ryan and Johnson.
They want us to believe that Clay Holmes throws harder than Doc Gooden.
Sorry, but no. Regardless of what graphic they put on the screen, he does not.
Has the human body evolved that much in 30 years?
Reports and studies by Anthropologists suggests otherwise.
Significant biological evolution in the human body is not possible in just 30 years, as true evolution takes thousands of years and many generations; however, rapid adaptation (individual, non-passed-on changes from environment/lifestyle) like "text claw" or changes from better nutrition can occur, and directed genetic engineering could cause much faster, intended changes in the future. 30 years is barely one or two human generations, far too short for natural selection to reshape our large, complex species.
It is difficult to state a precise number of players who officially threw 100 mph in or around 1985 because pitch-tracking technology was inconsistent and less advanced than today's systems. However, it is widely believed that only a few pitchers were capable of reaching or exceeding that speed, and it was a rare event.
Nolan Ryan was one of the few pitchers of that era consistently associated with the 100 mph mark. Dwight Gooden was also a dominant, hard-throwing pitcher during that time, considered one of the hardest throwers in the 80’s. Other pitchers mentioned in discussions about high velocity in that era include J.R. Richard, who threw as hard as anyone I can remember.
In 1985, a fastball reaching 100 mph was considered "mythical" or "exceptional", unlike today where dozens of pitchers allegedly can hit that speed in a single season. The average fastball in the 1980s was generally in the mid to upper 80s mph range, which would register much faster with modern measurement technology (an 85 mph fastball then might be 93 mph today when measured out of the hand).
But according to MLB in 2025, a significant number of pitchers reached 100 MPH, with Baseball America tracking 82 MLB pitchers and 140 Minor League (MiLB) pitchers hitting that mark.
Sure they did, and I have a beautiful bridge crossing the East River I'd like to sell you.
I am a person that never bought into the popular claim that athletes today are so much better than previous generations of athletes.
Numbers can all be manipulated, and that is what Vander Wal is talking about.
Ask yourself this, over the last 40 years has a heavyweight fighter even approached the level of Mike Tyson in his prime years?
Is anyone on an NBA court even in Michael Jordan’s class?
Is there a Wayne Gretzky skating around NHL rinks today?
Is there a Linebacker even worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as Lawrence Taylor?
Is there a Marvin Hagler, Ray Leonard, Ray Mancini or Alexis Argüello fighting today that I am not aware of?
No there are not.
So then, how is it that baseball players have evolved into such superior athletes?
Maybe we should call in the guys from Ancient Aliens and see if they have any answers?
The truth is they haven’t.
They are in great shape and most don’t have a spare tire in their mid-sections. However, they get hurt much more often, don’t they?
In my martial arts world, we have a words for guys that get hurt a lot; frail and absent.
Yankee Strength and Conditioning guru Eric Cressey has some interesting views. Some I agree with to a degree, and others I think are pure hyperbolic chatter.
So why should we care what John Vander Wal or anyone else says about stats being manipulated?
Because those fake stats are being used to alter the way the games are played. Altering the way the games are played has an imperceptible influence on the game because false data is being used in very complex calculations used by the teams, leagues and arbitrators.
They call it analytics. I call it nonsense (to be nice—this is a family friendly reporting site!).
Since technology (and MLB) says Mason Miller threw a 104.5 mph in the 2025 playoffs, doesn’t make it a true statement.
The Leagues love confirmation bias and they use it to sell, sell and sell some more.
But it comes back to bite them in the butt because these fake stats are then used by players to get more money.
Always follow the money!
Imagine when Mason Miller (just a hypothetical scenario) goes to arbitration and claims “I throw 104.5 MPH and I deserve to be paid more than Joe Blow”, and his GM looks at him and says “No you don’t. We tell people you do, you actually throw 94 MPH, but let’s keep that our little secret”.
Remember folks, it was only 3 seasons ago that the shift was widely accepted and utilized in the game, regardless of the damage it did to the very fabric of the game.
I have no proof, but I would not be surprised if the main reason, or one of the main reasons why the shift was outlawed is because some analytical analysis showed that gambling revenue would increase if the shift was made illegal.
We have seen other Social Media posts by ex-players condemning the current state of the game. Ex San Diego Padre player and coach Tim Flannery has been very outspoken on these matters, and a few years ago singled out the Yankees. Here is what he said after the Astros swept the Yankees in the 2022 ALCS.
“Congrats to the Yankees who struck out 50 times in 4 games. Tell me again how analytics work? It’s all a hoax, and fake boring baseball”.
It is not just in MLB. We see similar comments from Ex NBA players and Ex NFL Players such as Shannon Sharp, Jalen Rose and Mark Schlereth, to name a few.
I agree with Vander Wal, the league is in “an awful state”, and worse it’s because of self-inflicted wounds.
It appears to me that the root of many of the problems in the NFL, NBA, and MLB are the direct result of ineffective and greedy leadership.
He’s too old now, but I always thought a level headed and reasonable man like Joe Torre should have been made commissioner, not Bud Selig’s underboss Rob Manfred.
I’ll say this, you better enjoy 2026 because 2027 baseball (and beyond) are in serious jeopardy and MLB has no one to blame but themselves.
27 days to go before pitchers and catchers!!
RIP Bob Weir
