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Even in winning, Miller’s box score line wasn’t that impressive: three walks and three strikeouts in those six frames. Watching the game, though, you could see him executing a plan. Miller’s four-seam fastball has a lot of what your grandma would have called “rise,” followed by someone like me wagging their finger and saying “you can’t make a baseball rise, old lady.” What you can do, though, is make it drop less than a ball thrown overhand from a mound 60 feet away should. This illusion of rise is now called “induced vertical break.” A good IVB on a fastball is 17 inches. Miller’s last night averaged 18 inches and touched 20, which is elite. As was your grandma.
