So you said you dont think its true, then you basically agreed with it?

Do pitchers/teams keep careful track of how many pre-game warm-up and side-session pitches are thrown, too?

EndlessSummer wrote:Cool stuff. As an aside, is there any site that tracks pitches thrown during a year? I feel like there probably is for majors, but not for the minors. It has always seemed odd to me, because pitch count during a game is such a huge deal, but then it gets measure by innings over the year.

Fangraphs does: in the third row of statistics from the bottom, above the WPA/LI statistics. I think they only go as far back as 2002 though.

If you want previous years, the only other way I know of is going through his game logs and adding them up. Baseball Reference lets you just click on two rows and it will add up all the rows between and including the endpoints.

phuturephillies wrote:I think he has a hard time throwing the changeup when its cold. That's based on nothing more than conjecture. Oh, and I really do disagree even more now that he's been used properly. Last year he averaged 99 pitches per start. This year, in 3 starts

103
103
111

I sense that Manuel is going to continue to do this. We need to pray that Gordon, Romero and Lidge are lights out and that Madson doesn't get hurt. Because if Charlie is afraid to call to the pen, we're in trouble, and Hamels is in trouble.

This isn't very telling at all. A couple tanked starts will bring the 'average' back down near last years'. I guess the real potential danger is when a pitcher never has fewer clunkers.

Ok. But there was no need for him to throw 111 pitches the other night. Its not smart management of one of the team's most valuable assets. And I don't really think its going to change. Hence my concern.

This looks like cherry picking to me. I am sure there are a significant number of pitchers who increased their workload by more than 30 innings and you aren't citing them as examples.

Also, all innigns are not the same. At the very least it should be batters faced or even pitches. However, I am still skeptical of all of this.

phuturephillies wrote:So you said you dont think its true, then you basically agreed with it?

I disagreed with your statement that innings are innings, while discounting age, type of pitches thrown, velocity, pitches per inning. I strongly agree that having young pitchers throw too much is bad and that they have to gradually increase season to season. I think maximum pitch counts per game are the biggest contributors to abuse.

Disco Stu wrote:This looks like cherry picking to me. I am sure there are a significant number of pitchers who increased their workload by more than 30 innings and you aren't citing them as examples.

Also, all innigns are not the same. At the very least it should be batters faced or even pitches. However, I am still skeptical of all of this.

Ok. I'm shocked that you'd misinterpret something I wrote. An inning pitched is an inning pitched. Unless of course you are trying to throw harder for a particular reason, then maybe that inning is equal to X + whatever. But kids in high school are gearing up to impress scouts, just like kids in the minors are gearing up to impress people in their org. The total number of innings thrown has an impact, whether its innings thrown in high school, college, the minors or the majors.

I can't believe that this is really all that controversial. Young pitchers have very high attrition rates, higher than pitchers with fully developed arms that have been conditioned to handle the vigors of a very grueling act, ie, throwing a baseball. Verducci isn't just pulling this out of thin air. When you drastically increase a pitcher's workload, it will have an effect on his arm. If a pitcher throws 150 innings, and then the next year he throws 200 innings, that's a huge increase. Thats where the damage is done.

Pitch counts matter. The type of pitches you throw matters. But the raw innings are a big deal.

I remember seeing this last year on SI's website. I think there was even a thread on it (not sure which board, though) because Hamels' name was on his list and sure enough he had to be shut down for a few weeks in September.

<side>.....apologies to PhatJ....I really didn't even continue reading the thread before posting my refutation of the statistical analysis....of course, now I see you'd already beaten me by two hours......

So this got me thinking a bit, and it's probably too mechanistic, but what the hell. You're a manager relying on 2-3 of your staff who are young and have had big leaps. coming into the offseason, do you take your rule of 30, rigidly apply it to the young lads who will be starting, then go and ask your GM to go out and find a fungible starter who you can guarantee a certain number of starts to?

Or do you say adhere to the strict pitch count in each game, then ask your GM to go out and fill out the staff with fungible relievers.

Seems to me in the first case, using your rule of 30 makes things a little easier to control - finding one fungible starter has to be easier than gambling on multiple relievers, right? Plus, if you're sticking with a strict number of innings, sure, you might have one or two games where you then have to yank them due to overrunning pitch count, but it makes it easier to have a back up plan - you know roughly how many starts you're going to have to get from mr fungystart, and your condreys and durbins fill in the gaps.

I think with a young starter, what I'd do is use them in relief for the first half of the season in the majors. It will depress their number of innings while also giving them a chance to develop major league work habits and work with the major league pitching coach on a regular basis. So in the Phillies case, maybe next year they use Carlos Carrasco, you use him as a 7th inning reliever for the first 3 months of the season. You have him working with Dubee every day, you have him learning how to prepare in the majors. Then you send him down to Lehigh Valley for 3 weeks, you gradually stretch him out, and then you can use him as a starter for the final 2 months of the season. So he might have this usage

April, May, June: 40 IP
July (minors): 25 IP
August, September (majors, starter): 50 IP

In this scenario, he'd throw about 115 innings his first full season in the majors. Thats not too much damage. This is the Yankees plan with Chamberlain, and whether they have the stones to go through with it, who knows. Earl Weaver loved breaking guys in via the bullpen, and it seemed to work.

phuturephillies wrote:In this scenario, he'd throw about 115 innings his first full season in the majors. Thats not too much damage. This is the Yankees plan with Chamberlain, and whether they have the stones to go through with it, who knows. Earl Weaver loved breaking guys in via the bullpen, and it seemed to work.

What you're basically saying is that I just tried to re-invent the wheel ass-backwards when it's already been perfected by a greater baseball brain than mine.

Dammit.

phuturephillies wrote:This is the Yankees plan with Chamberlain, and whether they have the stones to go through with it, who knows.

Bye bye Joba Rules?

"I want him as a starter and so does everyone else, including him, and that is what we are working toward and we need him there now," Steinbrenner told the New York Times. "There is no question about it, you don't have a guy with a 100-mile-per-hour fastball and keep him as a setup guy. You just don't do that. You have to be an idiot to do that."

Hank's turning into the George of the 70s and 80s. I love it.

I'm not sure it stands to reason that all innings are created equal. First, the proposition ignores the (very real, IMO) possibility that high-leverage innings take a greater toll on pitchers than lower-leverage innings. Second, I'd venture a guess that someone pitching one inning/game every game is more likely to develop arm problems than someone who throws 162 innings as part of a regular 5-man rotation. No one is suggesting the former, but the point is that which innings a pitcher throws and how they're spaced would seem, logically, to have a bearing on wear and tear on the arm specifically and the body generally.

Also, if younger pitchers have a higher attrition rate, it's due at least in part to natural selection, i.e., the pitchers most prone physically, mechanically and genetically to injury are weeded out first, leaving the stronger pitchers to advance.

And, in many physically demanding physical endeavors which also require unnatural motion (gymnastics, swimming, ballet, etc.) performers are considered over-the-hill by their early- to mid-20's and certainly by the time they reach 30. As they progress through their 20's, unnatural motions become even more demanding as muscles, ligaments and tendons become less flexible, need more time to recover and are more prone to breaking down, cartilage wears away and joints become arthritic.

I'm no doctor, so all this is just speculation. But I do wonder how much of the early attrition of pitchers is due to overwork vs. natural selection. Moreover (and this question dovetails with our other thread on pitch counts), I wonder whether one-size-fits-all artificial limits on IP and pitch counts leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of more injuries because, in fact, pitcher are undertrained physically and taught psychologically that if they throw too many innings/pitches they will injure themselves.

I don't think there is a tried and true one size fits all method of preventing injuries in young pitchers. What works for one guy doesn't work for another.

Hamels hardly pitched at all when he was young as he had borken arms and stuff like that and the Phils kept shutting him down as a young pro. He was going to bust the "rule of 30" regardless after pitching 16 innings in 2004 and 35 in 2005. If the club followed the rule of 30 to the letter does that mean he should have only pithced 65 innings in 2006 and 95 last year?

Also, how do you count winter league and AFL and simulated games and side sessions and spring games and all of that? Are actual league games the only thing that stress the arm? And what about the abuse the guy suffered when he was in high school and little league? There's no way to control for all of this and that stuff might very well have much more effect on apitcher's health than anything else.

I once read that the ideal way to develop a young pitcher would be to build him up slowly -- likening it to the old story of the father having his son carry a calf on his back and as the calf slowly grew the son slowly became able to carry a cow on his back. This falls in line pretty well with the "rule of 30." It makes more sense to me than a one size fits all strict 105 pitch count that hasn't been proven in any way to prevent injuries.

But still. When trying to conduct a study and listing pitchers who broke the "rule of thirty" and then got hurt it makes me wonder if you listed Lutheran pitchers or pitchers who were breast fed you wouldn't end up with the same number of hurt pitchers.

The "rule of 30" does make some sense though. Following it may help and it's probably worht trying. Teams don't have much control over how little league and high school and legion ball hurt their guys' arms before they even mad ethe pros. So they have to do the best they can.

I will say this. If a club ever does come up with a magic formula that keeps most of their young pitchers' arms injury free, they will have a huge advantage over the rest of baseball for a while.

By all accounts, the Red Sox are leading the field in this area. Not surprising considering how well the team is run.

Will Carroll had some interesting comments today regarding keeping pitchers healthy in the Ben Sheets entry. Again, I can't cut and paste it from BP but if someone else could that would be good.

He cites the Brewers as also being ahead to other teams in motion analysis and for having an outstanding medical team. Yet Ben Sheets is hurt again. I think the Brewers have had some other young pitchers hurt recently as well.

It's clear to me that teams who do the best job at keeping their pitchers healthy have a huge advantage over the rest of the clubs. And using advanced methods and lots of thought is better than just spitting and pining for the good old dayswhen pitchers were tough. but I think it's just as clear that no one has figured out the best way to keep ptchers healthy yet.

Or some pitchers are more prone to injury despite the best plans and training.

JFLNYC wrote:Or some pitchers are more prone to injury despite the best plans and training.

No doubt. That is the case with Sheets I'm sure. And that's part of what I'm wrestling with when determining how valid the 105 pitch count or the rule of 30 or any of that stuff is. Guys will get hurt anyway, regardless of what you do it looks like. So how do you control for that when you are coming up with rules based on studies? Add in the abuse their arms take before they even reach your pro team and it makes it even more difficult.

This has always been a hard question and the best we can do is to keep trying things until we find the stuff that works the best.

I think.