Crack of the Bat
By David Rawnsley
What Would They Do In The Major Leagues
The subject of pitch counts/innings pitched by young pitchers is always a hot topic in baseball, whether you are in the Major Leagues or Little League.
At Perfect Game we see some pretty outrageous examples of coaches abusing young arms every year. Although we’ve talked about pitch/inning limits for our events, nothing has ever been settled on. That’s more because PG isn’t positioned to be a police organization over the teams in our events as much as anything; it’s certainly something we care about and notice when abuses happen.
Many organizations across baseball, from state high school associations to Little League Baseball, have attempted to establish limitations on pitcher’s use, most of those constructed around innings pitched over a period of time. Those efforts are admirable, but they amount to adults trying to control other adult’s behavior and are frequently compromised.
However, there is a very easy and accessible standard out there for all coaches to follow at all levels. At least a page is devoted to it for over half the year in all major city newspapers. It’s called “What do they do in the Major Leagues.” You can follow it closely in sports pages or on-line through the magic of box scores.
I’m not saying that the use guidelines for a 12 year old Little Leaguer should be the same as for a 30 year big leaguer. But what happens in the Major Leagues should be the absolute extreme of what any pitcher should be asked to do.
Think of it this way. The average big league pitcher is physically mature and highly conditioned. He has access to all the best when it comes to equipment, training and diet. A Major League game is the pinnacle of competition in baseball. It would be difficult to argue that the effort and importance involved in winning a Major League game can or should be matched by any other level of baseball.
So here are some basic guidelines of how pitchers are used in the Major Leagues. If you are a teenage pitcher, a coach or a parent, think about whether you, one of your pitchers or your son has ever exceeded any of these.
1) The long term is more important than the short term.
RHP Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners has been in Seattle’s pitching rotation since last summer. He turned 20 years old in early April and there has been a concerted effort by the Mariner’s management to stay aware of his age and work load. There have been grumblings that this has been done at times at the cost of the best interests of the Mariners, as if those interests ended tomorrow morning.
The idea, as far as I can gather, is to have Hernandez average around 100 pitches an outing. He’s never started on less than 4 days rest and did skip a start around the All-Star game. Here are Hernandez’s pitch counts for each month of the season.
April: 5 starts/491 pitches
May: 6 starts/594 pitches
June: 5 starts/498 pitches
July: 4 starts/420 pitches
August 5 starts/505 pitches
Through the end of August, Hernandez had thrown 151 innings. The Mariners want to keep him under 200 innings for the year, including Spring Training, so they’ve skipped 2 of his starts in September.
Seattle has done a disciplined and admirable job of using one of their best long term assets.
2) Three Innings Today, No Work Tomorrow.
I was pretty sure when I thought about this that it was a rare, rare event in professional baseball that a pitcher ever pitched 3 innings one day, regardless of pitch count, then came back again and pitched again the next day.
I can’t imagine it ever happening in the minor leagues. Someone would be fired before the clean up crew had got the lights turned off at the stadium.
I asked Perfect Game’s Ben Ford, who has pitched for 4 different Major League teams, about this. His answer:
“There is definitely an unwritten rule on any pitching staff in the Major Leagues that if you throw three innings one day, you are unavailable the next day. I can’t remember ever seeing it happen otherwise, although I can imagine if there was some long extra inning game it could happen.”
So I looked through every Major League pitcher’s game logs for 2006 to see if there had been a single incidence of a pitcher throwing 3 innings one day, then pitching again the next day. I found exactly what I’d expected: 11 times a pitcher threw 3 innings, then came back on 1 day’s rest, with varying success, but not a single time did a pitcher throw 3 innings, then come back the next day.
Here is a complete list of those 11 “3 inning, day off, “Pitch” sequences.
RHP Jesse Crain (Min)
4/20: 3 innings/32 pitches
4/22: 1 inning/24 pitches/2 runs
RHP Matt Guerrier (Min)
5/14: 3 2/3 innings/49 pitches
5/16: 2 1/3 innings/40 pitches
Note: Guerrier didn’t suffer any fall off in performance after this short hard ride. He also hasn’t pitched on back to back days all year.
LHP Jimmy Gobble (KC)
5/24: 4 innings/59 pitches
5/26: 1/3 inning/1 pitch
RHP Chad Harville (Oak)
5/31: 3 innings/35 pitches
6/2: 1/3 inning/20 pitches/4 runs
Note: Bad idea to bring Harville, a career short reliever, back on short rest after 3 innings.
LHP Odalis Perez (LA)
5/31: 3 innings/45 pitches
6/2: 1 inning/25 pitches
Note: Perez’s next outing was a start on 6/7. He allowed 11 hits and 7 runs in 3 innings.
RHP Travis Harper (TB)
6/1: 3 innings/46 pitches
6/3: 2/3 inning/15 pitches
RHP Jose Capellan (Mil)
6/11: 3 innings/26 pitches
6/13: 1/3 inning/4 pitches
LHP Ron Villone (NYY)
7/2: 3 innings/63 pitches
7/4: 2 2/3 innings/36 pitches
Note: After 99 pitches in 3 days, Villone only pitched once in the next 11 days. It’s easy to surmise that either Villone was tender or Joe Torre realized that he’d overdone it and needed to rest his most dependable middle reliever if he wanted him late in the season.
RHP Julian Tavarez (Bos)
7/5: 3 innings/32 pitches
7/7: 1 inning/11 pitches
7/9: 4 innings/49 pitches
Note: The heavy workload came back to get Tavarez, he allowed 8 runs in his next 4.1 innings.
RHP Leo Nunez (KC)
7/30: 3 1/3 innings/40 pitches
8/1: 1/3 inning/ 1 pitch
LHP Ron Mahay (Tex)
7/31: 3 innings/39 pitches
8/2: 2/3 inning/13 pitches
LHP Ryan Franklin (Cin)
8/7: 4 1/3 innings/65 pitches
8/9: 1 inning/11 pitches
Note: Franklin hadn’t pitched in 10 days before his long outing on the 7th.
RHP Sean Green (Sea)
8/11: 3 1/3 innings/38 pitches
8/13: 1 2/3 innings/35 pitches/3 runs
3) Single Game Pitch Counts
Most Major League box scores nowadays list the number of pitches that each pitcher throws in a game. In fact, most college teams use a statistics program that list pitches thrown, although some college coaches probably aren’t entirely happy with that.
So it’s very easy to see that it is rare for any Major League pitcher to throw over 125 pitches in a single game. There are instances each year when someone will throw between 130 and 140 pitches, that pitcher usually being Livan Hernandez, but that is very rare and might only happen a half dozen times in 2,400+ games per year.
The best starting pitchers in the Major Leagues generally average around 110 pitches per start over the course of the season.
The White Sox Freddy Garcia has twice pitched 8 innings during the second half of the season and left games with one hit shutouts, both times throwing less than 110 pitches. His manager felt that a final inning of work wasn’t worth Garcia’s potential performance level for the next game in exchange for a complete game shutout. The White Sox were in a pennant race at the time, it’s vitally important that they won their next game that Garcia pitched , too.
If it is important for a 6-5, 250 lb 28 year old pitcher to keep his pitch counts down, even by an inning or two here and there, in the interests of winning, wouldn’t it be even more important for a 17 year old?
4) If you don’t keep pitch counts, keep track of batters faced
It’s hardly scientific, but there is a pretty steady ratio of pitches thrown to batters faced. A Major League pitcher will usually throw about 3.8 – 4.0 pitches per hitter (NOT per out). That number will generally rise at lower levels, as hitters are less able to make contact and the pitchers themselves are less able to throw strikes. I’ve always felt that 4.5 pitches per hitter at the teenage level is a good guesstimation.
So if you are 17 years old and your pitch limit is in the 100-110 pitch maximum range, that means that you would regularly be limited to 22-23 hitters. That’s the middle of the line up the third time around. If a young pitcher ever sees the leadoff hitter a fourth time, that’s not a good sign.
5) You can’t bring back a starting pitcher after an extended rain delay, or to start another game the same day
There doesn’t seem to be any hard and fast rule on bringing a starting pitcher back after a rain delay, but it would be considered very unusual to wait out more than 45-60 minutes of delay time, then continue on with a game. After that period, regardless of the amount of pitches/innings a pitcher has throw, he has “cooled down” and his arm has entered the process of recovering. To bring a pitcher back in such a circumstance is vastly increasing injury risk.
In fact, Florida Marlins manager Joe Giardi, amongst all his other problems, did that very thing to rookie RHP Josh Johnson (second in the NL in ERA at the time) in early September. He put Johnson back on the mound after an 82 minute rain delay. Johnson has been out with bicep tendonitis ever since and Girardi has been criticized for his handling of a very promising young pitcher.
Those are just some examples that come to mind of what the de facto rules are in the Major Leagues. As said before, if it’s what they do in the Major Leagues with mature, well conditioned, world class athletes, that should be the extreme of what any teenage pitcher should be asked to do.
This column represents the thoughts and opinions of the author and are not necessarily those of Perfect Game.