I’m not very acquainted with baseball, but watching the ALCS has me wondering about pitchers and the cross-purposes of presumably higher levels of conditioning and more specialized pitching styles.
It seems to me that athletes at the higher levels are better-conditioned thanks to better nutrition, more specialized training regimens and such. I’m basing this loosely on my understanding that modern Olympic track and field athletes, who have objective performance standards, outperform Olympians from earlier in the century. (Please feel free to correct me; also, I realize that track and baseball are very different sports, but the same forces seem to be in place with regard to training.)
A baseball-knowledgable friend of mine, though, suggested that the prominence of mid-game relievers and closers has reduced the number of pitches thrown in a game by MLB pitchers. As evidence he cited Cy Young’s 7356 innings and Roger Clemens’ 4493 in about the same number of years, 100 years apart, and pitchers starting 30-37 games a season now as opposed to 70 or so in the 1800s. He didn’t seem to put much weight to my idea that perhaps faster pitches lead to more fatigue, which was the only reason I could come up with to explain that sort of differential.
Is what my friend offered a pattern? Are MLB pitchers simply given more rest due to a glut of talent, with more high-level pitchers per team (as the number of starts might indicate)? Has strategy and the increasing use of specialized pitching styles affected this?
The standard explanation for this phenomenon the difference between the dead ball era and the “modern” era. Before about 1920, balls were rarely removed from play unless they were well and truly lost or completely fell apart. Thus, it was a lot harder for even the strongest players to hit one out of the park. Most pitchers were content to throw the ball and let the batter hit it – there are eight other guys with gloves out there, and the chances were good that one of them could catch it or at least get to it quickly enough to prevent serious damage most of the time. That did a couple of things: for one, it meant that most pitchers didn’t really bear down until they were “pitching in a pinch” (to borrow Christy Mathewson’s phrase), and for another it meant that instead of trying to work around a batter to make him swing and miss, perhaps throwing him two or three balls during a given at bat, most of the time pitchers averaged fewer pitches per at bat than today. All of that meant a lot less wear and tear on their arms.
There are a number of reasons why the “dead ball” era ended when it did, but by a year or so into the 1920s the game had changed forever. It took a while for players, managers, and fans to change their expectations of pitchers, but it’s not an accident that the period immediately after the dead ball era also saw the first pitchers to be relief specialists. They were still scarce until after World War II, and “closer” role didn’t really get defined until guys like Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage, Al Hrabosky and Bruce Sutter came along in the 1970s and 1980s, but the role of relievers had been growing all along, while the expectation that starters would complete a significant portion of their starts disappeared.
Another factor is the narrowing of the gap between the best players, the average players, and the worst players, at the major league level. The argument is that pitchers in the 19th and early 20th century had to face a few hitters who are the equal of anyone in the game today, but the average hitter wasn’t anywhere close to the average hitter today, and there are no truly terrible hitters (outside of other pitchers). Consequently, pitchers have to work harder on every at bat – they can’t kick back and coast until one of the big boppers comes up. If you really want hard data to back this up, let me know – I’ve made the argument before, on this very board in fact, but I’m too lazy to look up the old threads now.
Your question is actually more of a debate. But I can take a stab at it.
Here’s the difference between pitching in Cy Young’s era and today.
Strikeouts. Pitchers get more strikeouts today because hitters are swinging for the fences more. But to get a strikeout, you’re going to have to throw at least three pitches, if not more. So you’re going to throw more pitches.
Speed. Pitchers today may not throw harder than pitchers of yore, but they throw harder more often. For the most part, a starting pitcher (unless he’s Greg Maddux) goes out and throws the ball as hard as he can for as long as he can until he is too tired to go on and then the game gets turned over to relievers, who repeat the same procedure.
Cy Young could throw hard, but he would save up his really good fastball for an important situation. Say runners on base, two outs, big hitter up. But for most of the game, Young would just try to cruise through and hope that the batters would get themselves out.
Pitchers in the Deadball Era who had big strikeout totals were fairly rare. Or at least guys who got them at the same rate as today. Rube Waddell was a notable exception.
If you’re going back to the 19th Century, pitchers could throw more because until 1893, they stood closer to the plate, it was very hard to walk batters (8 to 9 balls were required) and there just wasn’t as much strain on the arm.
So if you’re looking at dominant pitchers in the 20th century: You started with Cy Young, then you went into a long era when Walter Johnson was the best, his place was taken by Lefty Grove, and then we segue into Bob Feller. After World War II, there were a few pitchers who stood out, but none were in the same class as Feller (in terms of K) until the 1960s when they raised the mound and guys like Koufax and Gibson took over.
And since then there have been a lot of dominant strikeout pitchers: Seaver, Ryan, Carlton, Palmer, Valenzuela, Gooden, Clemens, Johnson …
It has. There isn’t too much systematic documentation of baseball pitch counts prior to the 1990’s, but obviously, given the huge disparities in innings pitched by starting pitchers, pitchers are throwing far fewer pitches today than in earlier generations. There are isolated, anecdotal stories of pitchers throwing more than 200 pitches in a game as recently as the 1970’s. This would be absolutely out of the question today.
Again, there is little sysematic data on pitch velocity prior to the invention of the radar gun, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the fastest fast balls have topped out at around 100 mph for quite some time. The difference in pitching styles isn’t in velocity but in movement. Pitchers throw a much greater variety of cutters, sinkers, sliders, and split-finger fastballs today, and these hard breaking pitches put a huge amount of stress on the arm and elbow.
These new types of pitches led to a slew of arm injuries in the 1970’s and 1980’s, until managers learned to adjust to the new reality by letting their pitchers throw fewer pitches. No manager will let a pitcher throw more than about 125 pitches in a game today, and starters rest at least four days between starts.