OK, tonight's blog entry features a chalk talk on "pitcher abuse." For those who do not favor baseball analysis, kindly change the channel.
The folks at Baseball Prospectus (disclaimer: my brother in law, Gary Huckabay, works for Baseball Prospectus) have spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to understand the relationship between the workload placed upon a starting pitcher, their performance, and and the likelihood that they will get injured. In fact, they have done some very sophisticated computer modeling of this.
At the highest level, intuition and some time-honored rules of thumb hold true. A typical pitcher can throw about 100 pitches in a single outing without any downstream effects. Beyond that, every pitch above 100 tends to have a negative effect on their next start, and accumulates wear-and-tear of sorts that increases the likelihood of injury.
That's the easy part. The hard question: exactly how much damage is done by alowing a pitcher to throw more than 100 pitches? Answer: it correlates to the cube of the number of extra pitches. The Baseball Prospectus folks define this as Pitcher Abuse Points, or PAP. PAP = (NP-100)^3.
This is super important: it means that managers who leave their pitchers in for anything above 100-110 pitches are being incredibly irresponsible.
They keep track of accumulated PAP for every pitcher in the major leagues. Here is their list of PAP to-date this season. If you need a cheat sheet for the other columns, here you go. This gives a clear indication of which pitchers are due for a lousy second-half season, and are very likely to end up on the DL: Russ Ortiz, Livan Hernandez, Eric Milton, Vic Zambrano and Jason Schmidt lead the list.
Tony LaRussa and Lou Piniella have a reputation for brutalizing their pitching squads. It appears that they are being tame this year. Atlanta looks to be in trouble. Bryan Price, the Seattle pitching coach who kept Piniella in check for several years, seems to be losing his discipline -- which means that if you thought Seattle's first half was bad, wait until you see the second when the rotation craters.
Now, not all pitchers are alike. There are a few freaks of nature, if you will, that have proven to be capable of throwing a huge number of pitches with little or no ill effects. For a very long time, the two most obvious freaks of nature were Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez. Two years ago, it finally caught up with Pedro. And as Randy gets way, way up there in years, the Arizona coaching staff have eased up on him; he used to regularly pitch 140-pitch outings, and this year we hasn't even hit 130 yet. But it bears emphasizing that they are truly the outliers and it is completely unreasonable to expect any pitcher to throw 140 pitches in any game. (Eric Milton threw 150 pitches in a game this season). The long-term effects are stunning (remember, it's the cube of the number of pitches over 100) and accumulative.
The next time you go to the ball park, watch the pitch count.
10:38:57 PM  ; ;
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