Who Hurt Thor?

Baseball asks the impossible of pitchers like Noah Syndergaard. Injury was inevitable.

- Will Leitch

One of the more absurd, madcap musical chairs of recent Mets vintage—and, boy howdy, have there been plenty—was April’s foofaraw involving an injury to pitcher Noah Syndergaard.

Last year, the Asgardian ace threw his fastball harder on average than any starter in baseball, a blazing, terrifying, that-doesn't-really-seem-fair thunderbolt that consistently ran to an almost-impossible-to-believe 97.6 mph, the highest in baseball history. This spring, he showed up to training camp boasting that he’d added 17 pounds of muscle that would allow him to throw still harder. And he was as good out of the gate as any Met has been in decades (three starts, 19 IP, 2 ER, 20 K, 0 BB). Then he began complaining of a “dead arm” but refused to submit to an MRI, declaring that he knew his godlike body best and that he was fine. The Mets believed him—partly because they wanted to and partly because, as Mets general manager Sandy Alderson put it, “I can’t tie him down and throw him in the tube”—and let him make his next start. You probably know what happened next: Syndergaard left the game early, in pain, and afterward learned he’d miss at least two months.

According to research by baseball writer Joe Sheehan, here are the 12 hardest-throwing starting pitchers in recorded Major League Baseball history (since 2002, when velocity was first reliably quantified and documented): Noah Syndergaard (97.6 mph), Yordano Ventura (96.5), Nathan Eovaldi (95.8), Gerrit Cole (95.6), Carlos Martinez (95.6), Garrett Richards (95.5), James Paxton (95.5), Stephen Strasburg (95.4), Matt Harvey (95.4), José Fernandez (95.2), Felipe Paulino (95.2), and Wily Peralta (95.1).