And that means that from Sandlots stadiums, the great faceoff between pitcher and batter is back.

There are lots of pitches a pitcher can throw, but every picture is judged on their fastball.

The fastball is the best pitch in the game of baseball.

And that's because the heater thrown with precision is really, really hard to hit.

Everyone has a fastball and it's the pitch that gets thrown the most, the very fastest throws 105 mph and that can be havoc at the plate.

Batting legend TED Williams once said hitting a fastball is the single most difficult thing to do in sports.

He was probably right, Batters barely have time to see and swing at the ball before it reaches home plate.

They should not be able to hit the Damn ball is the interesting issue.

And there are more and more guys throwing harder and faster.

In 2008, only 18 pitchers were throwing triple digit fastballs and they collectively through 196 of them.

By 2017 there were 40 pitchers throwing that fast and they together through 1017 fastballs at or above 100 MPH.

But what if the fastball got even faster?

Today, we're going to look at why throwing and hitting a 110 mile per hour fastball is almost impossible to find out what it takes.

I threw my fastest fastball with a scientist who's been studying pitching for decades.

I tried hitting a former big Leaguers pitch and stepped into the virtual world to bat against a superhuman pitching avatar, nope.

Let's start with the pitch.

Baseball fans have long been thrilled by the pure speed of the fastball bob feller, pitcher for the Cleveland indians takes time off to demonstrate his cannonball delivery before radar guns, Army ordinance equipment had to be brought in to measure pit speed rockets along at a world record legends like bob feller and Nolan Ryan through incredible fastballs that left batters reeling.

Today's marvels of the mound.

Also sling serious speed at the top of the radar gun is Yankees, relief pitcher, Aroldis chapman who was once clocked throwing a stunning 105 mile per hour fastball.

He pitches an average of 101 MPH and last year through over 345 triple digit fastballs.

All right.

So what does it actually take to throw a ball that fast?

I talked to Glenn fleisig, one of the world's leading authorities on pitch mechanics.

So, do we have any sense of, of what is distinguishing people who have a range that peaks out at 100 miles plus?

Is there something different about them physiologically proportionally height wise?

Yeah, that's that's one of the cool things about baseball and the answer is no, they tend to be tall.

There are some guys who are six ft who are throwing faster than the guys who are six ft 10 classic, uses motion capture software to map and correct throwing mechanics, but that doesn't mean just anyone can hurl heat you and I do everything right.

We're not gonna throw 100 MPH.

Maybe your ranges.

You're gonna throw between 70 and 80 MPH and someone else's ranges is they're gonna be thrown between 90 and 100.

All we could do with proper mechanics is get you to the top of your range.

So I asked FLeisig, who works with pictures from little league all the way up through the majors to look at my mechanics.

The energy has now gone up your body.

The arm is in the cockpit position.

What I see here is your arm does not have enough.

What we call external rotation at the shoulder, meaning if I drew a vertical line up your trunk, I would want your forearm to be perpendicular to that to make an L.

Shape.

So I would want your hand to be much lower, maybe a foot lower, so that your arm is cocked back more.

Even with Glenn's advice, I was only throwing about half the speed of the pros.

So what is the outer limit in terms of velocity leaving the hand of today's pictures, the top pictures have always been about 100 MPH And I think that is the limit 105 mph.

I think the thing that could change is the average velocity could go up because more guys can optimize and maximize themselves and get to that limit.

But fleisig says there's been a price for such speed.

There are more injuries.

And part of the problem is that more pitchers are throwing at top velocity and constantly throwing a top velocity and the body can only take so much.

He and his colleagues measured the force required to actually rupture elbow ligaments, turns out it's actually the same force that a picture puts through his arm when throwing at top speed every time you go back and forward is about 100 newton meters here and here.

100 newton meters is the equivalent of holding 5 £12 bowling balls.

So imagine I hung £60 from your hand, but that's about the equivalent of what's happening on your elbow or shoulder at that instant.

That force makes for tiny tears in the ligaments.

And over time, a pitcher who throws too hard too often is basically throwing his arm off fly six says that fastball mania has led to a jump in Tommy johN procedures.

That's the surgery to repair torn ligaments in the elbow.

He says that is the limiting factor for fast ball speed.

And I know it would be very exciting to see the limits break.

Like for other sports where the ceiling keeps going up up.

I think we're at the ceiling, that the ligaments and tendons can't take it.

So why do pictures even bother throwing that hard?

Because a well placed fastball is the gold standard for striking out batters.

To understand what a batter is up against.

You have to look at this incredibly short period of time that they have to decide if a ball is even worth swinging at.

It's 60 ft 6" from the pitcher's mound to home plate.

But the actual distance is shorter.

The pitcher releases the ball about 55 ft from the plate and a fastball moving 100 mph takes about 4/10 of a second to make that trip.

And here's the thing, it takes 50 milliseconds for the iron brain to even register the pitch, another 150 milliseconds to swing the bat.

That leaves just a split second for the batter to decide if the pitch is worth swinging at.

The batter has to pretty much make his decision within 200 milliseconds.

That's why some people have argued batters should not be able to do it.

I can tell you that it is incredibly difficult.

That curved a little bit.

I went to Villanova University where kevin Mulvey, who was the baseball coach there and a former pro pitcher himself smoked a few fastballs past me.

I made contact twice.

I was just concentrating on keeping the ball away from him.

I didn't want to hit you.

I didn't want to come inside, I didn't want to get anywhere near you, which I appreciated he was throwing in the 80s and was incredibly consistent.

But here at Villanova, They've got a tireless pitcher who can throw everything from high school speeds right up to the truly impossible there nailed it.

So I am inside the cave at Villanova and right now it's a virtual batter's box inside a virtual stadium.

And I'm hitting against a virtual pitcher who can throw any style of pitch we want you can throw a change up, you can throw a fastball, he can throw a curveball or slider.

He can even do impossible pitches but no actual bats allowed.

This screen alone cost $50,000.

Engineer Mark Zhupina created the system by inputting actual MLB pitch data.

So what Battersea is a real pitch delivered virtually what we're doing here as much as we can is develop a training tool.

And then we're also looking at to add in E.

G.

Sensors to measure focus level I trackers to properly see how well the eye is moving with the ball.

We're developing something not only to help the baseball team but we're getting other scientists and engineers involved in this this project.

Subpoena can do things like freeze the ball midair and have batters identify the pitch.

It's gonna be high, yeah high.

And inside it's harder than it sounds.

But some of Villanova's players took right to it.

I was I wasn't right all the time but it was definitely very beneficial to try to pick up and really focus in on arm recognition and where the slot of the ball is coming out, strike fastball and we can even show you what realistically 100 and 20 mile an hour fastball would look like I tried one of those, Nope 1 20 121 mph for psychologist Jerry Long.

The cave batting simulator could answer questions about our ability to track moving objects.

121 mph.

You can hit that.

Yeah.

Like is it really true that you've got to keep your eye on the ball to hit it?

What if the ball disappeared after 200 milliseconds?

The presence of the ball should almost be unnecessary.

Is that true?

I don't know the answer to that.

I'd love to find that out.

I also tried one of Joe Pena's other creations, a hacked Oculus rift that he's rigged to.

A player can swing for the virtual fences.

The timing is completely different.

Alright, this is a fastball moving in 111 mph, fifth or sixth time is the charm.

Hey.

Finally right.

Yes.

All right.

Finally.

So on the sixth or seventh attempt knowing exactly when and where this ball is coming.

Standing way in the back of the batter's box so that my sweet spot is perfectly aligned with the incoming trajectory of this pitch, I was able to make contact with a 111 mile per hour impossibly fast fastball.

So will we ever see a pitch like that in real life?

Probably not.

But virtual reality could help us better understand how batters track and connect with the ball because what they're doing now is already almost impossible.