Noah Syndergaard brought the heat on the mound in 2015, and now he’s bringing that fire to the Twitter universe.
The flamethrowing righthander had an excellent rookie season for the New York Mets, posting a 9-7 record and a 3.24 ERA while tallying 166 strikeouts in just 150 innings.
Syndergaard is one of a number of hard-throwing pitchers who are starting to take over the Major League Baseball landscape, and stat man Daren Willman quantified this trend Wednesday with a pretty amazing stat.
That’s quite the incredible jump, but when Syndergaard caught wind of the stat Thursday, he followed up with an even more incredible response.
If the man they call “Thor” is implying he’s responsible for last season’s influx of fastballs, well, he’s right.
Syndergaard’s fastball had an average velocity of 97.1 miles per hour in 2015, the fastest in the league according to FanGraphs. Per Willman’s website, baseballsavant.com, nearly 60 percent of Syndergaard’s 2,380 total pitches hit 95 mph or higher on the radar gun, the highest percentage of any MLB pitcher who wasn’t a reliever or part-time starter.
In short: It’s fair to say the 23-year-old hurler is justified in saying he’s sorry but not sorry.
Thumbnail photo via Robert Deutsch/USA TODAY Sports Images
