The fastball is having a moment in the 2024 MLB season, but whether it's a good one is a matter of perspective.

For pitchers and fastball enthusiasts, it's good. But for hitters who could have their lives flash before their eyes any time a radar gun lights up, less so.

What's for sure is that the 2024 season is making fastball history. Just on Tuesday, for example, Los Angeles Angels closer Ben Joyce notched the fastest strikeout ever recorded with a whiff of Tommy Edman on a 105.5 mph fastball:

That's just one of 2,783 fastballs of at least 100 mph in 2024. There were more in 2022 or 2023, granted, but it's still 10 times as many as there were at the dawn of the pitch-tracking era in 2008.

However, earlier on Tuesday, Atlanta's Whit Merrifield was reminded of how dangerous high heat can be.

It may not have been 100 mph, but the sound Jeff Criswell's 94.5 mph fastball made when it clanked off Merrifield's helmet still had the crowd groaning and the announcers saying, "Oh, gosh."

And Merrifield? He was pissed.

"Teams are bringing pitchers up that don't know where the [heck] the ball is going," the three-time All-Star told reporters. "They throw 100 miles an hour. So they're like, 'We'll see if they can get the guys out. Just set up down the middle and throw it as hard as you can.' It's [crap] and it's driving me nuts. I hate where the game is at right now with that."

Merrifield added: "Without being overdramatic, that was my life on the line right there."

He has a point, and for Major League Baseball, it means there's a problem that needs solving.

HBPs Are More Frequent and More Dangerous

Far from an imagined one, the threat Merrifield alluded to is as real as the welt on his head as he spoke with reporters.

Since 1901, only seven seasons have featured a rate of at least 0.4 hit-by-pitches per game. These seasons are as follows: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

That's right. MLB is 7-for-its-last-7 in achieving hit-by-pitch infamy.

On a rate basis, fastballs don't pose as big a threat as they used to. Whereas they accounted for 70.9 percent of all HBPs in 2009, that figure is down to 59.7 percent this year.

But for hitters, less-frequent exposure to risk doesn't necessarily mean less risk. In the late 2000s, fastballs that hit batters averaged about 91 mph. That average has gone way up, settling at 93.3 mph for the last two seasons.

There's a fair argument that hitters are giving pitchers license to pitch inside. Since C-Flap helmets became widespread in the late 2010s, many hitters have been going to the plate armored from head to toe. And at least in right-on-right matchups, it was also around then that pitchers started pitching inside more with their fastballs.

As Merrifield noted, though, the real problem may not be one of intent, but of inexperience.

"It's frankly pathetic that some of the pitchers that we're running out there don't know where the ball's going, at the major league level," he said Tuesday, per David O'Brien of The Athletic.

As he was hit by a 25-year-old rookie pitching in just his seventh game for the Colorado Rockies, you can see where Merrifield is coming from. And there's at least some truth to what he's hinting at.

Hit-by-pitches make up only 1.1 percent of plate appearances in 2024, but rookie pitchers (1.2 percent) are slightly above that mark and pitchers under 30 are generally more prone to hit batters than pitchers over 30.

There's No Putting This Genie Back in the Bottle

Then again, MLB can't make pitchers stop throwing fastballs. And even if it tried, it would be a "from my cold, dead hands" situation.

The decline in fastball usage is ongoing, but the same is not true on the effectiveness front. Fastballs have an overall run value of plus-116 in 2024. Every year leading up to this one, they had posted negative values while pitchers otherwise reaped steady rewards from breaking pitches and occasional rewards from offspeed pitches.

Predictably, velocity is one of the underlying causes here. The average fastball velocity (93.3 mph) is unchanged from 2023, but the standard deviation (i.e., variation from the average) between individual pitchers' velocities is the smallest in the pitch tracking era.

Translation: Everybody throws hard now.

It's an inevitable effect of MLB teams learning that velocity can be taught, yet fastballs are standing out not merely in miles per hour. At 2,267 revolutions per minute, the average fastball spin rate is the highest it's been in a full 162-game season.

This is happening despite MLB's three-year-old ban on grip-enhancing substances, which almost nixes the notion that the spin rate revolution was entirely ill-begotten. Spin, it seems, can also be learned.

For pitchers, all this is fine and dandy.

The advantage in all pitcher-hitter matchups was fundamentally on the side of pitchers, and now their go-to pitch is pretty much the weapon they want it to be. If this remains true, you have to wonder if fastball usage might reverse its decline.

Which, of course, is a thought that might scare the average hitter under the circumstances.

What Can MLB Do to Make Hitters Safer?

Merrifield knows he isn't the only one who's gotten a scare this year.

He rightly pointed to Mookie Betts and teammate Austin Riley, who suffered broken hands courtesy of fastballs that clocked at 98 and 97 mph, respectively. Merrifield also noted that Atlanta "almost lost" Michael Harris II after he was hit on the wrist by a 93 mph fastball shortly after Riley went on the injured list.

Stuff like this was cause for frontier justice back in the day, but those days are gone and not coming back.

"You can't hit a guy anymore [in retaliation]," Merrifield said, per O'Brien. "There's no fear that, 'Oh, if I hit this guy, our guy's going to get hit.' That's not in the game anymore. Pitchers don't have to hit anymore, so they don't have to stand in the box."

As a member of MLB's Competition Committee, Merrifield is in a better position than most to enact change. And as O'Brien reported on Thursday, he is "among many players who want a rule punishing pitchers for plunking hitters with fastballs that break hands and wrists or hit players in the head or neck."

And they might just get it.

"Yeah, we'll have something in place by the time the season starts next year," Merrifield said. "I'd be shocked if we didn't."

No magic bullet is going to get all pitchers to improve their control overnight en masse. Experience may be the only thing that can do the trick for the young ones. And for the next generation, a top-to-bottom culture change that hits on how pitchers are valued, drafted and developed is a better idea than gimmicky solutions like a six-inning limit for starters.

The league otherwise can't simply outlaw HBPs, and any rule that effectively incentivizes HBPs for hitters—like, say, a reward of two bases instead of just one—would inevitably have unintended consequences.

Tit-for-tat arrangements, on the other hand, seem feasible enough.

So long as the injury is a verifiable one (i.e., a fracture or a concussion) that necessitates an IL stint, MLB could require any pitcher who threw the ball that caused the injury to be automatically fined and/or suspended. Intentional? Unintentional? Whatever. The punishment is warranted either way.

Even in-game repercussions might be feasible. If a pitcher knocks a hitter out of a game with a wayward pitch, then his day is also over.

Because pitchers rarely hit batters on purpose anymore, such changes wouldn't stop HBPs from happening altogether. Ideally, though, the point would get across that those who lack control would do well to work on it. Especially, that is, for younger pitchers without a firm grasp on a major league roster spot and, accordingly, major league money.

The last thing MLB can do now is nothing. Not while fastballs are only getting more dangerous and not while hitters are basically out of new ways to protect themselves.

If they can't get further protection, the least they can get is justice.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.