In honor of the MLB postseason I would like to reference Noam Scheiber's excellent article in Slate called Why can't anyone throw a baseball faster than 100mph?

It's a fascinating question, more so because the record for the fastest pitch has stood for over 50 years.  As cited in the article, we have the following listed on our database:

Fastest Baseball Pitch The fastest baseball pitch is 162.3km/h (100.9mph) and was achieved by Lynn Nolan Ryan (then of the California Angels) (b. 31 Jan 1947), at Anaheim Stadium, California, USA, on 20 August 1974. 

Scheiber actually refutes this saying that he believes Mark Wohlers is the king of the fastball at 103 mph.  We love and accept the information subject to confirmation (!).  We are nothing if not here to stimulate such superlative research which we hope does turn the heat of discussion into light. 

So as Scheiber asks, if athletic records have been tumbling in smaller or greater increments what's up with the baseball pitch record?  Being in the world record business it's a source of intrigue for me as it seems to be more and more difficult to tell when and where sports records will be broken.  Before the amazing Usain Bolt, we had no idea the 100 m record was going to be broken.  But it was.  Twice.  But Mr. Bolt and his 9.58 seconds aside, why hasn't anyone thrown a pitch faster than 100 mph? 

Scheiber says, the 100-mph ceiling is not an illusion - "it's a basic property of human physiology".

Turns out that if a ball were thrown any faster than 100 mph it could literally rip a pitcher's tendons and ligaments from bone and muscle.  He'd throw his arm off!  At the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, biomechanical engineer Glenn Fleisig calculated that when a pitcher throws a fastball it exerts around 80 Newton-meters of torque on the elbow.  Practising with cadavers, Fleisig found that anything greater than that actually caused the ulnar collateral ligament (the bones that meet at the elbow) to snap.

OUCH!!

I will leave you to enjoy the rest of the article (http://www.slate.com/id/2116402 - it is very good) but in the meantime, what are your thoughts?

Will we ever see the Guinness World Record for the fastest pitch broken in our lifetime?