Rich Harden’s Velocity

It seemed that one report about Harden's decreased velocity in his last start (July 6th) was picked up and reported by everyone who, you know, reports. My first instinct was to actually check it out as I did and found that the velocity in his last start was actually slightly higher than his season average. But since he's now a Cub and we're sure to watch these kinds of things with Harden as he is, to put it bluntly, injured quite often. I figured a start by start look at his velocity was appropriate. I used the gameday xml files to get the data. First of all, 2 of the games didn't have any pith type or velocity data. The first game of the year that the A's played against the Red Sox in Japan didn't have it and his 7th start of the season against the Tigers also didn't have any data. That left us with 11 games. So here it is… Fastball velocity in each game with data in mph below 91.11 93.37 93.25 92.3 92.16 92.68 92.04 92.01 92.14 90.57 92.8 The average is 92.22 mph. The velocity obviously was not down in his last start, but it was in fact down in his July 1st start (90.57 mph). Also, the 91.11 mph atop the list was the final game before he landed on the DL for a month. How about a graph? I think it's pretty much self-explanatory. The red line is the average velocity (92.22 mph). Nearly every start is within 1.5 mph with the exception of 2 starts. For the most part, the velocity seems pretty consistent to me. A couple starts seem a bit off, but there doesn't appear to be any trend.