The Y2K Pitching Bug

Dave Paisley

One aspect of the game that's been receiving a lot more attention these days is the use and abuse of young pitching arms. The history of baseball is littered with "dead arms", but it's typically been written off as an Act of God or the luck of the draw. The recent, more scientific scrutiny can be attributed to the demise of Jason Isringhausen and Bill Pulsipher in the Mets organization a few years ago, when they were expected to break in as phenoms and were overworked to death.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth reached fever pitch late last season when Kerry Wood was shut down and eventually had to have major surgery. He may or may not ever be the pitcher he once was, but one thing's for sure - it was foolish to play Russian roulette with his arm. The Wood fiasco was merely the cherry on top of the sundae for pitcher abuse opponents, and the off-season saw two methodologies proposed for tracking such abuse.

The simplest is that of Baseball Prospectus contributor Rany Jazayerli. He allocates Pitcher Abuse Points (PAP) for crossing certain pitch thresholds -- the higher the threshold crossed, the more points per pitch -- and adds extra points for pitchers under 25. It does seem that the physical maturation process for pitchers takes until then to complete. That isn't so surprising when we note that hitters don't tend to reach their full power potential until age 27 or so.

I don't want to get into the specifics of that particular method, as my primary interest is in Mariners Rookie of the Year candidate Freddie Garcia. He came over from Houston in the Randy Johnson trade last July. With the dearth of Mariner starting pitching in spring training, Garcia was given a long look and proved to be the best starter in camp, and was handed the number-three spot going into the season. Young pitchers haven't fared well under Lou "Ride 'Em Hard " Piniella, and so I was curious to see how Freddie would do under pressure. Still only 22, Garcia is a big strong kid (6' 4", 210 lb.) from Venezuela and may have the kind of build suited to surviving the rigors of major league expectations.

Freddie stayed away from the Piniella doghouse by being fortunate enough to win a few games early. He didn't always pitch well, but he got run support when he needed it. Since then he's been up and down, but more up than down so that he currently sports a 4.24 ERA and a 13-7 record. Of more importance is how he's been used. Piniella sees him as a young horse who must learn how to throw 140 pitches and win complete games, even though there are few pitchers today of any age capable of doing that. And one of those, the semi-immortal Curt Schilling, just bit the dust.

Here is Garcia's workload for the year, with outcomes:

W = win, L = loss, N = No decision

It's an interesting picture. One, two or three high-pitch-count games followed by a brief flameout. But it's far from a compelling story. The results don't really tell the story, as the Win/Loss situation is obscured by run support. Here's another way of looking at his season.

Here, I've plotted individual game ERA against the previous outing's pitch count. The vertical red line shows where I'd set a reasonable maximum pitch count, and the horizontal red line sets a mark at 5.00 for reasonable game ERA performance. If there's a significant correlation between heavy workload and subsequent poor performance, the high points should cluster over to the right side of the chart. To a large extent, they do, with 105 pitches being the point beyond which there is s significant chance of a really crappy outing.

There are, however, those two poor games following 80-pitch games to wonder about. The other pitcher abuse method floated over the winter was that of Don Malcolm, of Big Bad Baseball Annual fame. He proposed a method that looks at a three-game average pitch count. The next chart shows Garcia's performance plotted against the three-game average.

While again not being a compelling picture, it does imply that awful outings tend to occur beyond a cumulative pitch count average of 95 pitches or so. It seems to bear out Jazayerli's hypothesis that 100 pitches is the threshold for pitcher abuse.

Garcia's three-game pitch count average going into his next start is 104 -- roughly middle of the pack for his starts this year. But one of two things will happen:

1. He'll pitch poorly, in which case he'll get yanked early, bringing his pitch count average down. This will help him pitch better the next time out.

2. He'll pitch well, in which case he will be allowed to pitch well past 100, raising his three game average to the point where failure is almost inevitable the next time.

Whichever happens, Garcia is trapped in the Piniella cycle: ride him till he breaks, let him recover, then do it all over again.

The $64,000 question is can Garcia (or any young pitcher) survive the cycle indefinitely? Will he even survive intact till the end of the season? And is anyone going to pay for his inability to pitch in 2000, if it comes to that?

about the author

Dave Paisley plans to spend New Year's Eve in the Strikethree.com secret bunker, next door to the Yahoo secret bunker and across the street from the Microsoft secret bunker. Let him assure you that the computers will all be A-OK at drdjp@strikethree.com.