By every account, Matt Wilkinson should not be able to get professional hitters out. The pitcher better known as Tugboat is a 250-pound left-hander with a 90-mile-an-hour fastball, an unremarkable slider, and a nickname so retro it is practically covered in pine tar — he got it as a kid because he looked like a small seafaring vessel lumbering around the bases.
And yet. Since being drafted in the tenth round in 2023 he has posted a 3.10 earned-run average and struck out eleven batters per nine innings. On Wednesday he made his debut for the San Francisco Giants against Cleveland, never topped 91, and worked two shutout innings. In other words, the Journal’s Jared Diamond writes, he was Tugboat.
The Invisiball
Tugboat has a secret weapon, and the secret is geometry rather than horsepower. He throws from an unusually low angle hitters are not used to seeing, with mechanics that hide the ball — his Team Canada pitching coach says it looks like it “comes out of his jersey.” The result is a pitch that does not light up a radar gun but that batters insist feels like 94 and seems to rise on its way to the plate. Baseball people call it an Invisiball. He throws it about 60% of the time.
“A short little bazooka at 90 miles an hour,” is how his Triple-A pitching coach describes it. His longtime coach in Alberta says it plays like 94.
In March he pitched for Canada in the World Baseball Classic and worked two hitless innings against Team USA’s lineup, retiring Alex Bregman, Cal Raleigh and Pete Crow-Armstrong before striking out two-time MVP Bryce Harper to end his outing.
What the models said
The sophisticated computer models and advanced metrics that run the modern game largely said no. At every level — the Little League World Series, junior college, the minors — Tugboat was told his magic trick would not work at the next one. “Tug’s heard that more than he cares to hear it,” Paul Quantrill, his WBC coach, said. “But it does play.” His sharper version: “Maybe our algorithms say this isn’t going to play. But apparently that hitter didn’t get the memo, because he’s not hitting it very good.”
The Giants believed enough to trade Patrick Bailey, a two-time Gold Glove catcher, to get him in May. With the season lost and a roster deadline looming, they promoted him rather than risk losing him. His old coach found out from a late-night phone call from Tugboat himself.
Why a financial planner is writing about a pitcher
Because the whole investing industry is built on radar guns. Screens rank companies by the measurable thing — growth rate, momentum, the velocity on the scoreboard — and a company that does not light the gun up gets passed over at every level, no matter what the results say. Tugboat is the stock that keeps producing a 3.10 ERA while the models keep insisting it cannot.
The honest caveat is that hitters eventually adjust, and so do markets. The Invisiball works because it is unfamiliar; the test is what happens in his fifth start, not his first. Which is also the rule for any holding that looks too good for its numbers: believe the results, keep watching the mechanism, and size it like it might stop working — because sometimes the algorithm is right late.
But the lesson stands. “When you realize that velocity isn’t everything, you know that different things can work.” That is a pitching coach talking. It is also the whole case for owning boring companies that keep getting people out.