Okay, I know the days of Cy Young pitching both ends of a double header are over.
But in the Pit-Det game, we have Gomez who has pitched 7 innings of shutout-3 hits ball, 73 pitches, and he is done for the night. American League game, no DH. Fucking why???
Also, the closer Grilli can’t pitch on 3 consecutive days. He pitches one inning per game. Why can’t a grown man, paid multiple millions per year pitch 3 innings on 3 days?
Maybe if the Bucs got into the habit of actually fucking playing every day, they might not suffer at 3rd consecutive end of the year meltdown. These are young guys in great shape. Why are they treated like 60 year old guys?
I had just looked up the numbers, and he’s not pitching especially well this year. He has a low ERA but he’s getting extremely lucky on batted balls (BABIP of .203 which is extremely low).
If I’m managing him, I’m taking the money and running rather than giving the house a chance to win it back.
For whatever reason, modern pitchers seem to have the physical fragility of 3-year-old Thoroughbreds, despite the fact that every team has a staff of skilled trainers and doctors, and every pitcher’s usage is painstakingly tracked. It suggests, at least to me, that modern training and pitching techniques have, in many cases, surpassed the ability of the human elbow and shoulder to cope.
Given the amount of money that’s tied up in even a mediocre pitcher, and the number of examples of young star pitchers whose arms failed due (at least in part) to overuse, I can’t blame managers for being overly cautious.
Part of it is that there’s some evidence that pitchers lose a lot of effectiveness on day 3 of 3. Here’s a 2008 study showing that pitchers who are pitching on the third day in a row lose nearly 2 miles an hour off of their fastballs:
Look at it this way: closers are horrifically overpaid, and unlike most teams, the Pirates are paying their closer a reasonable amount The internet says Grilli is making $2.5 million this year, and I think that’s lower than the average major league salary, nevermind whatever the salary for closers must be.
I doubt this has anything to do with that stuff, and they look better this year. On top of what Tom Scud said, Grilli is a 36-year-old guy with a long history of injuries. To me, he has all the makings of a guy who gives you one good year as a closer, and if you are winning in the ninth inning, you have around an 85% chance of winning whether you user your closer or not. Considering all of that, why pitch him three days in a row?
Also, what day was Grilli held out because of a three-days-in-a-row policy? He pitched Sunday and Tuesday and wasn’t used Saturday and Monday.
I can’t remember the last time, but no Grilli tonight since he pitched the past two nights. But I think kenobi 65 may be on to something. Even though guys in the old days like Walter Johnson were great pitchers, they weren’t super-human freaks of nature clocking 106mph fastballs.
I think that the conditioning and training has gotten to the point that the mechanics and the muscles are strong, but the bones and joints are still human. Therefore, they can’t go 9 innings anymore.
I mean, Harvey Haddix pitched 12 2/3 perfect (and Lew Burdette pitched 13 shutout innings the same night) but those were regular, albeit gifted, human beings. They didn’t hang out in the weight room with coaches all of the time. They also didn’t throw over 100mph. So they had regular endurance. These guys today flash, crash and burn.
I think I agree with this for the most part. In the case of the Reds, a skinny guy like Bronson Arroyo, if he didn’t consistently give up the meat in the 6th inning of so many games could easily pitch complete games just about every outing. The rationale in my mind being the guy has really good endurance, at least partly due to the fact that his fastball tops out at around 86-88 mph and he regularly throws off speed pitches in the mid 70’s. That has to be less stressful on the moving parts of a pitcher’s arm than slinging it with everything you’ve got to reach 100 mph and beyond (or throwing nasty curveballs very often).
I’ve asked this same question many times, and never really heard an objectively convincing answer. For all that baseball teams today are protective of pitchers, they aren’t getting any healthier. If there is the slightest bit of evidence that pitch counts and conservative use of pitchers has helped make them more durable, I’ve not seen it. Pitchers appear to be every bit as prone to injury as they ever were - and that’s with them pitching fewer innings.
Is it that they’re throwing harder? Well, maybe, but history does not support the notion that hard throwers are more injury prone. Indeed, it is quite objectively the case that many of history’s really durable pitchers were fastball kings; Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Roger Clemens, all were power pitchers. There are some soft tossers up there too, like Phil Niekro or Tommy John, but they don’t own the list. It’s full of guys who could really bring it. The longest lasting Negro League pitcher was Satchel Paige, who for most of his career was noted for the ferocity of his fastball, which in some games he would use pretty much exclusively because his command enabled him to do that.
Isn’t the entire issue of pitch counts one of survivor bias?
Back in the good old days, pitchers seemed super durable because the ones that weren’t blew out their arms and were never heard from again.
Nowadays, pitch counts, especially in high school/college and the minors, may very well allow those non-durable pitchers to reach the majors whereas before they may have suffered some catastrophic injury and never made it to the Show. But still, if these pitchers are truly injury-prone, that could explain why there are still numerous injuries at the big league level; pitch counts were merely delaying the inevitable.
At any rate, pitch counts and pitcher attrition is still not particularly well understood and it’s a matter of much debate. But for many pitchers, performance tails off considerably after about 100 pitches. For those pitchers, it makes sense to remove a pitcher after 100 pitches, even if he’s throwing well and it’s only the 6th inning.
The question is which is better for the team: the starting pitcher going nine innings, or the starting pitcher going six or seven and the bullpen doing the rest. Since strikeouts keep going up and scoring and batting average keep going down, it’s hard to argue that there’s something wrong with this. Closers are still used stupidly and overpaid, though.
But here’s my argument when the starting pitcher has gone 7 innings and is pitching a shutout. We know he has his stuff working today. He is dominating the opposition. Now maybe I have a quality set up man in the bullpen. Maybe it isn’t his day. Maybe he found out last night that his wife is leaving him.
We know the guy out there is doing well. Why take a chance on the guy who we don’t know will do well or not?
So a guy should be able to pitch 9 innings of baseball every 5 days, but asking him to pitch just one inning of baseball every day or so is too much? Which is it?