When Baseball Prospectus was first getting started more than a decade ago, we ended up helping add a certain pointedness to the question over what sort of workloads starting pitchers could handle by creating a statistic, Pitcher Abuse Points. Controversial at the time because of the inference that it was a predictive tool, what PAP was in fact was a counting stat, sort of like a warning light on the dashboard of your car-it gave you cause for concern, but it wasn’t telling you that a complete breakdown was incipient. However, when PAP was first published, the baseball industry was perhaps better typified as relatively indifferent on the subject. Previous warnings about workloads had been aired-perhaps most famously in Craig Wright’s and Tom House‘s The Diamond Appraised in the ’80s-but generally speaking, pitcher workloads weren’t as carefully monitored as they are now.
Fast-forward a decade, and that has changed almost industry-wide. Organizations monitor their pitchers from the highest level to the lowest, count pitches in games, on their throw days, warming up in the bullpen, even throws to the bases, if it involves a pitcher and a baseball in flight, it’s being charted. In A-ball leagues, several teams use adaptive workloads with an eye towards keeping younger pitchers from being overworked-instead of a normal starter/reliever split in assignments, you’ll find groups of pitchers pitching in tandem, paired off to handle the first six or seven innings together, and throwing 60 to 90 pitches, and trading off the honor of starting or following in that ballgame. As much as possible, teams are not sacrificing any of their pitching prospects for the greater glory of pennant race in Binghamton.
The extent to which there has been an overcorrection in terms of pitcher usage patterns is perhaps best reflected in the recent adaptations made by several teams in the last couple of seasons. Nolan Ryan‘s announced determination to make the Rangers‘ pitchers more durable hasn’t led to 140-pitch starts or relievers on a pace to appear in 90 games. More teams are moving are realizing that the five-man rotation isn’t so much an inflexible quintet as much as a five-day rotation in which you keep your four best rotation men working on their regular rest, and if the odd offday affords a team the opportunity to skip the fifth starter, then he gets skipped, or shipped to Triple-A to take a turn there until he’s needed back on the big-league club. This isn’t revolutionary or even evolutionary as usage patterns go-this is where we were 25 years ago. Similarly, the obsession with the nice roundedness of “100” has become less a line of death as much as a suggestion-as Rany Jazayerli noted in 2004, it’s better to think of 120 pitches as the count at which people should really be concerned.
How much have matters changed? In 1999, the pitcher who averaged the highest pitch count per start on the season was Randy Johnson, with 120 pitches per game; he topped 130 pitches in a game eight times. Today, the per-game leader is Justin Verlander, with 109, which would have ranked 14th in 2000; he’s thrown over 120 pitches all of four times on the year.
Consider this list of the highest single-game pitch counts of the last five years:
Pitcher, Team Date Pitches Livan Hernandez, Nationals 6/03/05 150 Livan Hernandez, Nationals 7/31/05 145 Livan Hernandez, Nationals 6/15/06 138 Tim Lincecum, Giants 9/13/08 138 Carlos Zambrano, Cubs 5/05/08 136 Livan Hernandez, Nationals 7/15/05 136 Aaron Harang, Reds 7/08/06 135 Carl Pavano, Yankees 5/17/05 133 Roy Halladay, Blue Jays 6/02/09 133 Curt Schilling, Red Sox 4/25/06 133
Livan Hernandez is and was a physical freak; the heaviest workloads in the industry didn’t break him, but he’d also demonstrated the capacity to handle it. Roy Halladay is still with us. Tim Lincecum scared teams off in the draft because of his build, but he had demonstrated a remarkable ability to throw without getting sore in college, and his arm has not fallen off. On the other hand, Carlos Zambrano’s had issues with his durability in recent years after establishing a brief reputation as a workhorse; he has also managed to avoid a complete breakdown. After his big ballgame, Carl Pavano subsequently became a watchword for fragility, breaking down later that season, and missing most of the next three.
The unhelpful suggestion is that not all pitchers are created equal. Pitchers like Kerry Wood-heavily overworked in high school-and Mark Prior might be the signature warnings of pushing any one pitcher too far since their breakdowns since 2003. Not pushing pitchers too hard before they’ve matured physically is generally well understood. The Dodgers won’t push Clayton Kershaw too far down the stretch, just as the Rays have been careful with David Price, because they want to bank on the futures they’ll get from those pitchers towards the tail end of their initial six years of service time. Clubs are actively protecting their investments in their talent. The general rule of thumb has been for pitchers to avoid getting worked too heavily before their age-24 season, but as Wood’s experience reflects, there’s only so much control teams have over younger pitchers. Because of service time considerations (not to mention overspecialization in bullpen roles), clubs are also reluctant to follow the old Earl Weaver rule of breaking in future starting pitchers in middle relief, instead targeting the age range in which they’ll get those first six seasons before free agency with any premium prospect.
Similarly, there’s a better understanding that not all pitch counts are created equal. Throwing 100 pitches in three innings is a lot more taxing than 100 pitches over seven-it’s pretty obvious that kind of tally in that short a period of time means the guy’s struggling, allowing baserunners, and dealing with the added stress of throwing from the stretch. That said, there’s not necessarily a predictive element involved. Take the highest individual pitch counts in a single inning thrown this season: the 57 thrown by Francisco Liriano in the third on May 30, and the 56 thrown by Chris Young in the third on April 27; both pitchers made early exits, both made quality starts their next time out. Liriano’s trying to salvage a season that started badly; Young’s on the Disabled List.
A version of this story originally appeared on ESPN Insider 
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Similarly, a pitcher's mechanics at age 21 will usually not be as refined, regular, and disciplined as it will be at age 25. It's as much about the experience as the age of the body.
Today's hitters would light up Christy Matthewson like a Christmas tree.
And the bit about Christy Mathewson is just ridiculous.
I think this is an interesting idea, but this article was too short to be an article and too long for a blog post. I think it needs further analysis.
It's unlikely Mathewson threw fast in the context of today's pitchers. But Mathewson also didn't lift weights; undergo extreme conditioning programs; take dietary and other supplements; have access to legions of physiologists, kinesiologists and other motion experts; etc., that would strengthen his muscles and allow him in theory to throw faster even without necessarily applying more effort (and thus bodily stress) in each pitch.
He discussed something in his autobiography, about how he (and many of the other pitchers of his era), only really bore down in key situations. In the dead ball era, you could do this - most hits were going to be singles, so you could give up two hits before worrying about giving up a run on the next pitch. It's generally believed that Livan Hernandez did something like this as well in the modern game. This is a big part of why comparing dead ball records to modern records isn't particularly meaningful.
AS for the list above, Zambrano went on the DL the next month with a right shoulder strain; Schilling pitched crappy in his next two starts, then completely broke down and was out for a month-and-a-half; Pavano went on the DL the next month with an injured right shoulder ... Is there a correlation? You tell me.
Given that it takes time to understand what kind of pitcher you have, doesn't it make sense to limit their pitches until you're absolutely sure, that is, to give young pitchers strict pitch counts in case they're not Livan Hernandez? Alternatively, you could think of different people having constant, but different, risks for injury on every pitch of the night. Rich Harden might have a 1% chance of getting injured, and Livan Hernandez a .001% chance, for example. After getting through 85 pitches with Harden without him being injured, would you really want to continue to take your chances, or would you then opt to go to the bullpen with fewer innings to cover? Either way, pitch counts are justifiable from a number of perspectives, whether it be information gathering, possible reduction in likelihood of injuries, or even simply diminishing performance by pitchers as they throw more making it no longer worth the constant chance of injury.
By the way, making blanket dismissals of workload based on a couple hall of fame anecdotes and attributing the entire causation to something unobservable and relatively undefinable like "good mechanics" and "good training" is counterproductive to actually illuminating the problem.
The increased performance of hitters today means that you can't run a guy out there who is pitching while injured, whereas in the pitching dominated past, it didn't matter so much. Look at how Jim Bouton and other pitchers were treated in Ball Four, for example.
The point is that we don't know a whole lot about injuries right now, but it makes a lot of sense that overusing your arm can increase risk. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence of overwork preceding poor performances (Carlos Zambrano, Aaron Harang) and breakdowns (Kerry Wood). It's absurd at this point to just throw away data because some guy in the 1920's threw a lot of pitches at a young age and became a hall of famer. It's not the same baseball, it's not the same speed, it's not the same demands on the body...it's not the same game.