lethal wrote:The cutter has replaced the slider in a lot of repertoires.

Napalm wrote:Charlie Sheen did steroids during the filming of Major League. Apparently upped his fastball from 79 to 85.

yup

http://eye-on-baseball.blogs.cbssports. ... 2/30323291

The Nationals have signed veteran left-hander J.C. Romero to a minor-league contract and assigned him to Class AAA Syracuse, according to a club source.

jurassic5 wrote:

The Nationals have signed veteran left-hander J.C. Romero to a minor-league contract and assigned him to Class AAA Syracuse, according to a club source.

http://www.natsinsider.com/2011/06/nats-sign-romero-to-aaa-contract.html

While we can credit some common sense decisions about pitch counts—today a manager doing what Dallas Green did to a 23-year-old Al Leiter in 1989 would be tarred and feathered—with reducing injuries to young pitchers, it is foolish to say that we can know with any specificity that it’s the 751st pitch of the season that is going to break a kid and not the 603rd or the 811th and how much that particular pitch matters versus the pitcher’s mechanics, the weather he’s pitching in, the stress of any particular inning in that chain of 800 pitches, or if a butterfly is flapping its wings in Patagonia. There is really only one surefire way to protect a pitcher from injury and that is to seal him in Mylar, stick him in the basement with your comic book collection, and never let him anywhere near the mound.

In pretending that they have a handle on these interactions, teams may be acting in accordance with the so-called “Verducci Effect,” a wholly spurious invention of the sportswriter Tom Verducci, who posited that pitchers under the age of 25 who sustain an increase of 30 innings year over year tend to underperform. I say spurious because folks looking for the asserted correlation (here, here, here, here, and here, among others) have yet to find it.