from Amazon
Thursday, March 18, 2010
To count or not to pitch count
Good article overall, and he quotes some pieces I wrote in the THT annual:
I’m sorry I can’t find it online, but the best study I’ve found about this issue comes in a Tom Tango piece, “Miles Per Starter,” in The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010. (Remember books?) In it, Tango — if that is his real name — looks at different generations of front-line pitchers and the workload (sorted by batters faced) in their formative years and the rest of their careers, and how long they pitched. His conclusion, paraphrased, explains my ambivalence: Nolan Ryan may be right, or Nolan Ryan may be wrong.
OK, that’s not what he said. What Tango writes is this, which harkens back to the generation in between Ryan’s day and today, a generation of careers that are to this point devoid of Hall of Fame recognition:
This becomes the balancing act that managers face. If you allow a pitcher to pace himself, like the pre-Clemens/Maddux-era pitchers were more inclined to do, then they can pitch longer, but less effectively. If you want your pitcher to throw harder every pitch, then you have to pitch them less (and they’ll be more effective on a pitch-for-pitch level). If you try something in between, like the [Dave] Stieb-led era, you risk losing on both ends.
In the current era, where home runs are a big weapon, a pitcher pacing is not much of an option. So, the conditions of the era really force the manager’s hand. And, he seems to be deploying his starters as effectively as possible. It’s either we continue with the careful handling as is happening, or we go back to the all-out era of Ryan’s time. Both have worked.
From earlier in the same essay:
…In order to give a pitcher the best chance at a long life, [teams] either have to severely curtail his usage when he is young or they have to pitch him very hard. It is the indecisive in-between that is the worst of all worlds.
Which leads to Tango’s next point, which I echo here: Money changes everything.
However, teams do not control the contract of a pitcher in perpetuity. In fact, it would behoove the teams to not think of the pitcher’s arm after age 33, if the pitcher is only 25.
I think what Tango is saying is this: If you’re a small-to-mid-market team and you’ve got a young stud pitcher, you should work his ass off while you have him on the cheap. Use him up and, when he hits the open market, let the Yankees or the Red Sox or the Dodgers or the Cubs, or whatever team can afford him, pay out the nose for his decline years that will come too soon because of youthful overindulgence.
Like I said, we’ll see. One thing’s for certain, though: Nolan’s old-school thinking will be a test case over the value of new-school sabermetrics.
certainly brings up an interesting moral question, as well.