Roy Halladay, the modern master of the complete game, on pitch counts:
Roy Halladay, Pitch Counts, And The Televised Revolution
“Everybody makes a big deal out of it, but 115 to 130 is an extra 15 pitches,” Halladay said. “When you’re talking about throwing -- bullpen, long toss, and in between innings, you’re throwing 350 balls a day. An extra 15, if you’re prepared, shouldn’t affect it.“That makes all sorts of sense, when you put it like that. When Halladay went for his second complete game in a row, it took a little cajoling from the ace to get his manager to send him back out, but out he went. And he’s the last representative of a bygone era. If that era were to come back, baseball would be much better, according to a vocal faction of fans and writers. It’s the Pitch Count Era, see. Pitchers are coddled and babied, even though some folks maintain that there’s no reason to do so:
And so it goes. The war rages on. In one corner, you have the old school, the people who insist that things were better back when pitchers finished what they started, regardless of the pitch count. They light incense in front of framed Nolan Ryan pictures and pretend he’s the rule, not the exception.
In the other corner, you have every organization in Major League Baseball.
See, the revolution has been over for a while. The pitch-count fanatics won. They burned down the palace, put up statues of Mark Prior’s rotator cuff, and rewrote the textbooks.
In 2000, per Baseball Prospectus, there were 286 starts in which a starting pitcher threw between 122 and 133 pitches.
In 2010, there were only 69 such starts.
That’s a significant drop, but nothing compared to what happened to the highest of the high pitch counts. In 2000, 34 different pitchers threw 133 pitches or more. Randy Johnson did it four times. The list of pitchers features a few who are still kicking (Livan Hernandez, Doug Davis, Randy Wolf) and many who have long since retired (Kevin Tapani, Chris Holt, Garrett Stephenson).
In 2010, two pitchers went over 133 pitches. Two. There was Edwin Jackson, who was going for a no-hitter, and Brandon Morrow, who was pitching one of the better games by anyone in the majors last season. There really isn’t a pitch-count debate anymore, at least not like there used to be. People follow some rough guidelines, and it’s not a big deal:
- 100 pitches isn't a magic number. It just happens to correlate fairly neatly with the late innings of a normal start.
- With modern bullpen usage the way it is, there really isn't any reason to let pitchers throw 140 pitches. A late-inning reliever just into the game has a good chance to be more effective than any pitcher going that deep.
- Why take a chance? You don't get a trophy made of chest hair after each complete game, and pitchers are a significant investment for every team.
That’s it. That’s the manifesto of the successful revolution. It’s really, really boring. Pretty much everyone is going along. Maybe there really isn’t a correlation between high pitch counts and injuries, but organizations don’t want to test that theory on their own. It’s really not that hard, and not that damaging to a team, to limit pitchers to around 120 pitches, at most.
But the articles will keep coming, bemoaning the Rise of the Sissy Pitcher. That’s fine. They’re kind of amusing, in a you-can-pry-this-telegraph-from-my-cold-dead-hands kind of way. Baseball, however, has moved on.
See More:
