merkin
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Pitch Counts Overrated?
Debate over pitch counts rages on
By Jerry Crasnick
Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon attracted some attention this week when he expressed a desire to coax more complete games from the team's starting pitchers this season. If that means avoiding a slavish devotion to pitch counts, he's game.
Maddon, an innovative guy, should be commended for straying from the time-honored practice of managerial butt covering. But time will tell if he's a visionary or overzealous in his approach. More than a few alarmists are wondering whether the Rays shouldn't just dispense with the preliminaries, call Dr. James Andrews and book the room for Scott Kazmir's inevitable Tommy John surgery.
Chris Carpenter ranked ninth in the NL with 3,395 pitches thrown last season.Pitch counts, as usual, are a trendy topic of conversation. The New York Times weighed in on the subject Sunday, and Keith Woolner of Baseball Prospectus wrote a piece on the correlation between pitches per plate appearance and workloads for pitchers. If today's hitters are more adept at working counts and fouling balls off, Woolner points out, 100 pitches aren't going to induce as many outs as they once did.
As spring training preparation morphs into regular-season intensity, it's tempting to look for omens amid April workloads. Boston's Curt Schilling has thrown a major-league high 231 pitches through two starts, which means he's been effective, but also that he's healthy enough to give manager Terry Francona the confidence to keep him in games.
Conversely, Cubs starters Mark Prior and Kerry Wood are still on the disabled list, which gives Dusty Baker bashers license to recall the pitchers' heavy workloads in 2003. It certainly doesn't help Baker's case for a contract extension.
Any discussion of pitch counts inevitably leads to remembrances of the good old days, when starters reported to the park ready to go nine and prepared to arm wrestle managers who might get in the way. Gaylord Perry loves to tell the story about how he was working in the 13th inning on an excruciatingly hot day and his manager came to the mound for a visit. "I think I've only got a couple more innings left in me,'' Perry told him.
St. Louis pitching coach Dave Duncan, who has heard the story firsthand, laughs at the recollection. "Gaylord said he must have thrown 250 pitches that day,'' Duncan said. That seems absurd until you consider that Perry once turned in a 15-inning effort for Cleveland at age 35.
Times change, and the notion of pitchers throwing forever seems as outdated as artificial turf or life without batting helmets. Dave Smith, founder of the Web site Retrosheet, keeps track of pitch counts over the past 18 years, and shows a drastic decline in how far teams expect their starters to last.
Consider:
• During the 1988 season, major league pitchers surpassed 120 pitches in a game a total of 599 times. Last year they did it 135 times. The number of 140-pitch games in a season declined from 65 in 1988 to a mere two last year.
• There were a total of 11 starts of 160 pitches or more during the 1988-89 seasons. But there hasn't been one since 1997, when Boston's Tim Wakefield knuckleballed his way to a 169-pitch outing against Milwaukee.
• After Ron Villone of Cincinnati threw 150 pitches against St. Louis in 2000, there was a five-year gap before Washington's Livan Hernandez duplicated the feat last summer.
The more cautious approach to handling pitchers reflects both medical and economic realities in baseball. Studies have shown that high pitch counts -- particularly at an early age -- can put pitchers at risk of injury or, at the very least, burnout.
When starters are making $10 million to $12 million a year, teams are bound to go to great lengths to protect their investments. And when clubs are carrying 12 pitchers and paying closers megabucks, they're going to be more inclined to use them.
PITCH COUNTS (GAMES)
Year _120+ _130+ _140+ _150+ _160+
1990__483___170___50___8___2__
1995__417___120___29___4___1__
2000__466___77____7____1___0__
2005__135___15____2____1___0__
For the managers who lean over the dugout rail and the pitching coaches who hold the clickers, several factors come into play in determining how far starting pitchers will go. Teams look at age, experience, personal track records, disabled list visits and the calendar and weather conditions, among other things. A 125-pitch outing on a frigid April evening in Chicago is a different entity from a complete game on a hot August night in Texas.
But when the rules aren't hard and fast, there's always room for disagreement. For every Rick Peterson who advocates closely monitoring pitch counts to protect pitchers' arms, there's a corresponding Leo Mazzone who says his eyes are the best judge of when a pitcher should be lifted from a game.
No one has a more personal take on the matter than Dodgers manager Grady Little. His legacy in Boston would no doubt be different if he had pulled Pedro Martinez after 101 pitches instead of 123 in Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series. But Little remains adamant that a manager must follow his instincts.
"When I'm watching a pitcher operate and I see as much velocity on his last pitch as the first one he threw in the game, that's what I look at,'' Little said. "Nobody knows better than the one sitting in the dugout.''
Hard-core ball guys aren't the only ones who adhere to that viewpoint. Baseball Prospectus writer Will Carroll, an authority on pitching injuries, has written extensively on the hazards of overuse, particularly for pitchers age 23 and under. But he's no proponent of hard and fast limits.
"Joe Maddon is echoing Earl Weaver, who didn't believe in pitch counts, but said, 'The batter will tell me when [the pitcher is] tired,''' Carroll said. "I'd agree with that to some extent. We're paying coaches, trainers, and managers to spot fatigue, effectiveness and mechanical flaws. They should be able to do that.''
From the first day of spring training, pitchers are conditioned to build stamina in increments. Milwaukee pitching coach Mike Maddux typically likes his starters to throw 35, 50, 65 and 80 pitches in their first four Cactus League starts. By Opening Day, Maddux figures 90 pitches is a reasonable target number.
Whatever approach the Brewers are taking, it's working. Last year, Doug Davis ranked third in the majors behind Hernandez and Oakland's Barry Zito in number of pitches thrown. Teammate Chris Capuano, three years removed from reconstructive elbow surgery, ranked fourth in pitches thrown on the way to a career-high 18 victories.
Maddux thinks the raw data can be misleading because not all pitch counts are created equal. A soft-tossing starter might incur less strain throwing 140 pitches than a maximum effort closer who throws 30. And a starting pitcher who endures a 40-pitch first inning is in a big hole, because he has tired legs and a tired psyche to go along with a tired arm.
"It's not the number -- it's how they arrive at the number,'' Maddux said. "If you threw 10 pitches an inning, you could pitch 13-14 innings because you're never taxed.''
Davis has several factors working in his favor. He throws with a low-stress delivery, and he's never been on the disabled list. When Davis experienced shoulder fatigue three years ago, doctors examined his MRI and told him he had one of the healthiest rotator cuffs they'd ever seen in a 26-year-old pitcher.
"You'll see guys with violent deliveries or herky-jerky arm motions, and they put a lot of strain on their elbow or their shoulder,'' Davis said. "I use a lot of my body and I think I'm pretty smooth with my motion, so I don't have as much torque on my arm as some guys who are throwing 95.''
“ It's not the number [of pitches thrown] -- it's how [pitchers] arrive at the number. If you threw 10 pitches an inning, you could pitch 13-14 innings because you're never taxed. ”
__— Brewers pitching coach Mike Maddux
Still, Davis isn't exactly a model of efficiency. He struck out 208 batters last year, so he routinely pitched deep into counts. And since Davis lacks teammate Ben Sheets' put-away fastball, he likes to work the corners and pick his spots instead of going directly for the kill. That'll add a few pitches here and there.
More than once last season, Davis would hit the 110-115 range and Brewers manager Ned Yost would give him one more hitter.
"Doug has a great knack for getting himself out of trouble, so we'd let him go,'' Maddux said. "Then son of a gun, the next hitter would foul off five or six, and Ned and I would look at each other and say, 'Oh my God, we're higher than where we want to be.' But if Ned ever felt he was in jeopardy of injuring himself, he would never throw the next pitch.''
Just as managers rely on pitchers to be honest, pitchers appreciate managers and pitching coaches who look out for their best interests. St. Louis' Chris Carpenter, who has a history of arm problems, ranked ninth in the NL with 3,395 pitches thrown last year on his way to a 21-5 record and a Cy Young Award. But he never thought that Duncan and Cardinals manager Tony La Russa were pushing him beyond his limit.
"Dunc and Tony are very firm, and they have their own feeling on pitch counts,'' Carpenter said. "When you get there, no matter how much you ask to stay in the game, you're done.''
Will the trend toward stricter pitch limits continue? Some front office people think that if young pitchers are gradually conditioned to go deeper into games in the minors, they'll become acclimated to longer outings in the big leagues. But there's always room for interpretation, from team to team and pitcher to pitcher.
The conventional wisdom is that Seattle is treating phenom Felix Hernandez like a precious Ming vase, but Hernandez threw an average of 101 pitches per start upon arrival from the minors last season. Kazmir, in contrast, was just a tick above that at 103 in Tampa Bay.
The leash could get longer this year if Maddon follows through on his pledge to give Tampa's starters more opportunity to finish what they start. The rest of baseball will be watching -- and keeping count -- to see if it works.
---
"...the best evaluation of players is subjective judgment...The real baseball world is inevitably going to be hundreds of times more complicated than the model that we construct...." -Bill James
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4/13/2006, 9:39 pm
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Monkey51
Bullpen Catcher
Registered: 02-2006
Location: hanging from the ceiling
Posts: 7581
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Re: Pitch Counts Overrated?
will read later..good 411
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Hamels started toward the dugout after what he thought was a strike. Lincecum didn't get the call & buzzed ump Dana DeMuth w. a fastball that slammed off the backstop & then froze Hamels w. another 3rd strike. 4/28/10 Timmy the ump killer.
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4/14/2006, 12:18 am
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Monkey51
Bullpen Catcher
Registered: 02-2006
Location: hanging from the ceiling
Posts: 7581
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Re: Pitch Counts Overrated?
pitch counts are a good hting. sometimes you can tell when someone is at their limit. and if we want to prolong thier pitching use pitch count as a giude or if they're stuggling.
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Hamels started toward the dugout after what he thought was a strike. Lincecum didn't get the call & buzzed ump Dana DeMuth w. a fastball that slammed off the backstop & then froze Hamels w. another 3rd strike. 4/28/10 Timmy the ump killer.
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4/15/2006, 3:19 pm
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