Covering 30 Rich Harden starts, going back to 2007, Harden's most recent outing was one of the worst yet in terms of velocity. It wasn't even the slowest he's been, according to PITCHf/x, but close. In other words, I'm not concerned until he repeats this. In the past, when he's this off in velocity, it improves the next time out, even just a little.
Taking Harden's velocity for his fastball only, measured both at "release" (55 ft. from the plate) at the front edge of the plate (technically 1.417 ft, as measured from the back of the plate) to add some level of control to park-to-park variance in pitch data.
Taking those two values, by start, and simply grabbing their max, min and average values, voila, you have a rank order of 30 games by six measures.
Release Speed
Max Avg Min
29 28 28
Plate Speed
Max Avg Min
29 25 21
He was slow, but nothing that we haven't seen before.
Error bars on the average speeds are +/- one standard deviation. Click to enlarge.
No, you're not imagining - his velocity is declining overall.
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