Does anyone know if there is a stat for this? I’ve found number of batters faced, but not total pitches thrown. Anyone? In particular, how many pitches did Nolan Ryan throw in his major league career.
Thanks.
Doubt anyone’s tried to tabulate it. Pitch counts weren’t considered that important until a few years ago, and while box scores usually include them, they’re not that big a stat.
You’d probably have to sift through a ton of box scores at Retrosheet and do the math yourself, assuming they have scores for all his starts (which they may not.)
Unknown, and un-knowable. Nobody tracked pitch counts systematically until the late 1990’s, and they still aren’t an official MLB statistic. They’re available on a sporadic basis for earlier games if someone happened to be keeping a pitch-by-pitch log which survived, but you’d never get an accurate career total for Nolan Ryan.
Agreed. There is some good research on estimating picth counts, including this work by baseball analyst Tom Tango. The math gets a little complex, but the method for estimating seems to pretty good when he uses the method to generate esitimates for seasons where the actual pitch count is known.
Anyway, he has another article that presents the estimated pitch counts for about a dozen pitchers… which doesn’t precisely answer the OP’s question but points in the right direction.
Here’s a link to the article I mentioned in my previous post.
Based on the formula in the link, Ryan’s total should be estimated at 90,211 pitches thrown. That seems reasonable. It’s about four pitches per batter faced.