The game began on a Thursday, with Chukyo High posting a 3-0 victory over rival Sotaku High on Sunday morning.
“Yes, both starters stayed in for the entirety of the game — Chukyo’s Taiga Matsui threw a total of 709 pitches and Sotoku’s Jukiya Ishioka threw 689.”
“Velocity and power remain the game’s most prized attributes, but in a league where most guys can throw the ball hard or slug the ball far, the changeup keeps them honest,” writes Sports Illustrated’s Joe Lemire.
“Indeed, many of the game’s best pitchers are among the heaviest practitioners of the changeup: Justin Verlander, Felix Hernandez, Stephen Strasburg, David Price, Max Scherzer, Anibal Sanchez, Jarrod Parker, James Shields, Chris Sale, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, Mike Minor, CC Sabathia, Zack Greinke, Matt Harvey, Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz, Kris Medlen and Chris Tillman all throw the pitch more than the league-wide average of about 10 percent.”
With all the discussion during the ALCS broadcast about pitch counts, Peter Gammons looks at the 2013 season performance of John Lackey and Justin Verlander as their pitch counts increase.
They both have held opposing batters to a .219 batting average after 100 pitches but Verlander’s home run rate sees a steady increase from 1.4% (1-50 pithches), 2.7% (51-100 pitches) and 3.8% (101+ pitches). Unlike Verlander, Lackey’s home run rate decreases over time but it also starts at 3.9% (1-50 pitches) and eventually drops to 3.1%.
Clayton Kershaw threw 124 pitches, the third highest total of his career, in the Dodgers 6-1 win in Game 1 of the NLDS in Atlanta.
“It’s the postseason. You can kind of throw pitch counts out the window,” Kershaw told Craig Sager on the TBS broadcast after the game. “This is what you get taken out early for earlier in the season, for games like this.”
Maybe that’s true, but Kershaw went 0-2 with a 6.30 ERA in his next two starts against the Cardinals in the NLCS. Coincidence?
ESPN The Magazine’s Chris Jones has written an amazing piece of sports journalism exploring Japanese baseball culture, with a focus on the overuse of 16-year-old Tomohiro Anraku, who threw 772 pitches over five games in nine days. For now, Anraku is the greatest teenage pitcher in Japan. How long will his arm stay healthy?
In America, nagekomi, like throwing 772 pitches in a single tournament, would be considered child abuse. Scientists would debunk it, and surgeons would decry it. But in Japan, nagekomi is important. It’s maybe even essential. It is many things all at once, but mostly it is an exercise in remembering, and it is beautiful.
Jeff Passan writes about 16-year-old Tomohiro Anraku thowing 772 pitches in one week during a high school baseball tournament in Japan.
During the final game Wednesday, Anraku, whose fastball reached 94 mph earlier in the tournament, labored to crack 80. It was his third consecutive day starting a game and his fourth in five days, and those came after his first start of the tournament, in which he threw 232 pitches over 13 innings.
When word of Anraku’s exploits filtered out from Koshien Stadium, the reaction depended on proximity. Nearby, in the Japanese baseball culture that equates pitch count with superiority, Anraku was a hero. Far away, in an American baseball culture that has seen more elbows and shoulders blow out than ever before, Anraku was the picture of excess. For a man who bridges the societies, Anraku represented something much more unsavory.
In the 2003 season, there was only one pitcher who threw at least 25 pitches 100 mph or faster (Billy Wagner). In 2012, there were seven, according to Baseball Info Solutions.
In 2003, there were only three pitchers who threw at least 700 pitches 95 mph or better. In 2012, there were 17. There were 20 pitchers a decade ago who threw at least 25% of their fastballs 96 mph or faster. Last year there were 62, including Carter Capps, the Seattle Mariners’ 22-year-old right-hander, whose average fastball travels 98.3 mph, tying him with the Royals’ Kelvin Herrera for the top spot in the game.
There were more strikeouts in 2012 than at any other time in major league history. Why?
Strikeout rates have been trending upward for most of the past century, but what has happened in recent years seems to indicate something more. Big swings often result in home runs, yet homers peaked in the majors in 2000, three years before steroid testing began. It could be that the generation of hitters raised in the glow of chemically fueled sluggers still tries to hit like its heroes.
From the Baseball America story.
Tomohiro Anraku’s intense workload has sparked discussion in Japanese media and social media about whether it’s right for a coach to use a 16-year-old pitcher this way. In the U.S. baseball community, even those who believe that pitchers should throw a higher volume of pitches are uneasy with Anraku’s workload and lack of rest. Some major league scouts and front-office personnel have been fuming, calling Anraku’s usage dangerous, reckless and abusive.
Widely considered one of the best pitching coaches of all time, Leo Mazzone, who last summer famously deemed the Nats’ Strasburg shutdown plan ‘pathetic,’ has strong opinions on how to take care of pitchers. These quotes are from an interview he did on KFNS 590 AM in St. Louis on March 29, 2013.
“What professional baseball is doing now with pitchers clearly does not work because baseball has set a record for DLs and arm surgeries. We were proud of the health of our (Braves) pitching staffs. We rarely missed starts and we only had a couple of Tommy John surgeries on the Bobby Cox-Leo Mazzone watch.”
“That was because we tried to teach pitchers to throw more often with less exertion. Now they say not to throw or you can’t do this or that. When they go out, they throw as hard as they can because they are not throwing as much.”
“It is basically common sense and that is how you take care of a pitcher’s arm. You better be able to read a pitcher’s mechanics or read his body language. If you have to have a number for an inning or a number for a pitch count to determine whether you leave somebody in, then you shouldn’t be coaching.”
What about long toss?
“Long toss is anything further than sixty feet, six inches. If a pitcher can learn how to make his pitches do something without maxing out his effort, he creates longevity. I had our guys throwing more often but with less exertion. The critics would say I had them throwing too much. No, I’m controlling the effort. If they can learn how to do that, they lower the risk of arm injury.”
“This ain’t old school. If I wanted you to run seven miles in a week, would you feel better if you ran one mile a day to get your seven miles or if you ran your seven miles, took four days off, and did it again. It is common sense.”
Does the type of pitches they throw have an effect?
“It isn’t a particular pitch that hurts your arm. It’s a fallacy that if you throw a split it hurts your arm, or if you throw a slider when you are younger. That is a bunch of BS. What hurts your arm is when you max out on every pitch you throw.”
“A starting pitcher has to learn the amount of effort to put forth on a pitch to get the end result that he wants. That comes in trust in one’s self. How do you acquire that touch? You have to go down to the bullpen and work on it a little. Nothing crazy. I wanted to teach them how to change speeds and get a little touch on their fastball, get a good feel for their pitches. It was my job to regulate their effort.”
Here’s a pitch count resource for parents and coaches of young pitchers from the American Sports Medicine Institute (ASMI).
Kansas City Royals pitcher Luke Hochevar attempted to get one past Detroit Tigers MVP candidate Miguel Cabrera. Watch what happened on Yahoo! Sports.
Does anyone know of any follow-up reports on pitch counts? Discuss this, Mideast violence and replacement NFL refs on a baseball-fever message board.
In 2009, retired St. Louis Cardinals catcher Mike Matheny agree to coach a St. Louis-area youth baseball team. STLToday.com’s Derrick Goold reports that it had to be under his terms, which were faith-inspired and without parent intrusion. The result is the TPX Warriors club, a principles-based baseball program that is helping to change the tenor of local youth sports by focusing more on developing the players into excellent young men than on winning games. And they play in a Field of Dreams-ish field carved into the corn, which is pretty cool.
Here’s how Matheny starts his Manifesto:
I always said that the only team that I would coach would be a team of orphans, and now here we are. The reason for me saying this is that I have found the biggest problem with youth sports has been the parents. I think that it is best to nip this in the bud right off the bat. I think the concept that I am asking all of you to grab is that this experience is ALL about the boys. If there is anything about it that includes you, we need to make a change of plans. My main goals are as follows: (1) to teach these young men how to play the game of baseball the right way, (2) to be a positive impact on them as young men, and (3) do all of this with class.
Read Derrick Goold’s STLToday.com story.
Read the Matheny Manifesto (PDF).
Image from Wikipedia user UCInternational
Wendy Sanny, PT, ATC, from the Athletes’ Training Center in Omaha provides simple guidelines for protecting the arms of youth baseball players. She believes potential superstars, who can be identified as early as eight years old, are at greater risk.
After years of talks and crunching numbers, the Rockies attempted the four-man experiment because their free-fall by June made it a plausible path. It wasn’t so much a failure — the Rockies’ starters numbers improved slightly — as a model impossible to sustain for the season’s first five months.
An army of arms in Colorado Springs — all with minor-league options — would be necessary to make it work. Even future Hall of Famer Tony La Russa, who set a record for bullpen moves in the last World Series, said he didn’t see how a four-man staff on a 75-pitch count could be pulled off long-term.
The idea was to force starters to become more efficient, to understand the value of pitching to contact. Instead, they became prisoners of the pitch count.
MLBDepthCharts.com has something called a “Tommy John Surgery Counter.”
Here is how the surgery works.
After all these decades of baseball, the best way to preserve and use a pitcher’s arm still is a remarkably inexact science. Injury rates continue to rise, even as methods become more sophisticated.
Pitch count was tracked for the first time in 1988 by Stats, LLC. Since that year, the number of times a starter throws more than 125 pitches has shrunk progressively … and dramatically.
There hasn’t been a season with more than 74 of those games since 2001, after years of triple digits. Still, injury rates climb. So simply limiting the bullets in the gun is no panacea.
Author Matt Spiegel leans toward fusing what Nolan Ryan and the Baltimore Orioles are doing:
You have to throw to be strong, while using something like biomechanics to save your ace from himself.
Read Spiegel’s Daily Herald story.
ESPN’s John Kruk revealed Matt Moore’s tell on Baseball Tonight.
Moore’s tell is pretty simple: When he taps the ball in his glove as he’s getting ready to pitch, he throws a fastball. When he doesn’t tap the ball in his glove, he throws an off-speed pitch. This trend holds true whether Moore is pitching from the windup or stretch.
Read the Larry Brown Sports post and watch the video of Moore.
Writing on Grantland, which we don’t find quite as interesting as Fake Grantland, detail-oriented dermatologist Rany Jazayerli expends 5,000 words explaining why the Nationals were wrong to shut down Stephen Strasburg.
Concludes Jazayerli:
But the main reason the Nationals are wrong to shut down Strasburg is simply this: The risk they’re trying to mitigate has already been mitigated for them. Major League Baseball has changed the way it uses starting pitchers, and has succeeded in reducing pitcher injuries. The Nationals’ failure to recognize this is putting them at needless risk for something else — a quick exit this October.
A Baseball Prospectus post on “12 Stats We Wish Were Readily Available” features a contribution by John Perrotto, who wishes he knew how many pitches Pud Galvin and Old Hoss Radbourn threw in 1893 and 1894, when Galvin threw 1,292 2/3 innings and Radbourn logged a whopping 1,331 innings.
He also links to Radbourn’s Twitter feed.
Read the Baseball Prospectus post.
Bias Free Sports lists the top 30 pitchers in both the AL and NL ranked in order by total pitch count through August 26.
The top five are:
1. Justin Verlander — 2,964 total pitches, 2.50 ERA
2. James Shields — 2,842 total pitches, 4.01 ERA
3. C.J. Wilson — 2,797 total pitches, 3.83 ERA
4. Johnny Cueto — 2,780 total pitches, 2.47 ERA
5. Jake Peavy — 2,747 total pitches, 3.09 ERA
If using a traditional clicker or a smart phone app is just too complicated, you can download the (Ontario) Intercounty Baseball Association’s pitch count log sheet (PDF).
Writes David Martin:
The news of the day, besides the Rockies sweep, came from the dugout before the game. Rockies manager Jim Tracy announced before the game that the club will return to the conventional 5-man rotation. It sounded like the first step toward rationality that anyone had heard from the Rockies since they announced the hair-brained idea. However, the happy news was quickly squelched when Tracy announced the next part.
A four-man rotation is done, but the starting pitchers will still be limited to 75 pitches. The logic makes no sense. The idea behind the pitch limit previously was that if the starters were going to be going every fourth day, they would need to not throw as many pitches so that they would be fresh for their next time out.
Pitch Count 