THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Greg Maddux as the biggest workhorse of all time?  Somewhat surprising until I gave it a bit of thought.  20 30+ start seasons is quite remarkable in this age, and a guy like Maddux who throws strikes keeps his pitch count per batter down. 

Maddux is maybe my favorite pitcher ever--it’s a shame that I wasn’t much of a baseball fan during his prime--and it’s nice to see yet another item in my growing list of reasons to claim Maddux is the best pitcher of all time.

Tango - if you opted for either the rose- or sepia-tinted lenses at the optometrist, you might find it easier to understand this point of view.

But I think the unwillingness to recognize the modern athlete’s ability is broader than you think.  The top home run hitters whose careers started in my lifetime are Bonds, Griffey, Sosa, McGwire, Palmeiro and A-Rod.  The press doesn’t exactly extol their commitment to the game (compare to the drunks of the 50s) and certainly didn’t talk about their superior training regimens (prior to steroids, of course.) Ironically, the only guy who escapes the ire of the press is Griffey because he fell so far short of his ceiling that he’s presumed clean.  But no need to call modern hitters lazy or claim that they face weak competition once you’ve discredited all these stars.

Some of this is fleeting - didn’t we hear in 1998 from every media outlet that Canada was no longer producing skilled hockey players?  All those sports reporters born in the 40s and 50s just want evidence that the stars of their youth were better than the stars of today.

I suspect that the reduced workloads of modern pitchers have little or nothing to do with how strenuous pitching is. Some points to consider:

1. Modern pitchers are not necessarily removed from games because they are exhausted by the effort required. Ineffectiveness aside, every manager is now using pitch counts to determine when to remove starting pitchers. That, combined with the 5-man rotation, is what is limiting the workloads. Managers obviously have differing ideas of when to remove a pitcher, but the 150+ pitch game is a thing of the past. 130-pitch games are extremely rare. For the most part, effective starters are removed before 120 pitches.

2. A side effect of this is that starting pitchers may believe they can exert more effort, since they know in advance that they will not be required to throw a huge number of pitches. It is more likely that limited pitch counts have led to increased effort by pitchers rather than increased effort leading to fewer batters faced.

3. Pitch limits have probably extended the careers of modern pitchers. It used to be unheard of for pitchers to retain their grade-A fastball past age 35 or so. Most power pitchers suffered enough wear and tear on the arnm to sharply reduce their effectiveness by their early 30s (and lesser pitchers forced into retirement). Even Nolan Ryan was placed on a pitch count when he was in his 30s.

4. The reason teams began limiting pitcher workloads is free agency and guaranteed long-term multimillion dollar contracts. Teams now have an interest in protecting their pitchers. When 1-year contracts were the standard, even for superstar players, teams were content to allow the manager to run a pitching staff as he saw fit. Normally that was for short-term success. if a Billy Martin or Walter Alston decided to let a pitcher throw 13 innings or complete 30 games a season that was up to him. Long-term contracts have forced teams to take a longer view.

5. The deadball era was so different from post-1920 baseball that it might as well be treated as a different game. Pitchers really could coast along back then and let their fielders do the work until they got in a jam. That changed suddenly in 1920, and pitching became much more difficult. But I doubt that the effort required to pitch today is much different from the 1920s. I do think that modern pitchers are generally more skilled due to better conditioning and coaching. But I think that most of the differences in the game between then and now are a result of the playing environment rather than skill levels.

#3: I’m not sure I understand your point 4.  Teams under the old reserve clause could control their players forever—they would seem to have had a maximum interest in preserving the long-term value of their pitchers under contract.  With free agency it would seem that a team will rarely have a financial interest in the long term career health of a pitcher.  If I’m paying a pitcher a lot of money for a few years, why not wring as much as possible out of that pitcher for as long as I’ve got him and let him worry about the long-term consequences.  Now this may be not be true in the case of very long term contracts, but how many of those are there for pitchers in the majors at one time—a handful? I think the reason for lesser workloads by pitchers in terms of IP lies elsewhere (the trend toward ever-lighter IP workloads has been more or less ongoing since the 19th century, and long predates free agency).  One thing to keep in mind is that the BFP numbers discussed above do not take into account increased pitch count per batter faced.  Lower BFP numbers don’t necessarily mean lower total pitch counts.

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For most of baseball history the field manager had almost total control over how the players were used. Since a manager’s tenure was related to his ability to keep his team competitive he was under daily pressure to win. If a manager was secure in his job he might take a longer view.

While the long-term trend has been toward starting pitchers working less, individual managers had their own ideas. There were always a few pitchers around who could absorb enormous workloads, seemingly without breaking down (at least in the short term), as well as managers who would let them.

The one period in baseball history when this trend reversed for a while was in the 1960s-1970s. While the enlarged strike zone of 1963-1968 may have been a factor, I believe managers were simply copying the success the Dodgers and Walter Alston were having with Drysdale and Koufax. The success of the Dodgers in the early 1960s using a 4-man rotation and allowing their 2 best pitchers to complete over 50% of the games triggered a 10-year period of increased workloads as other teams jumped on that bandwagon.

With free agency sending salaries into an upward spiral in the later 1970s teams began cutting back on the workloads again. I don’t think it is a coincidence that after Nolan Ryan signed his million-dollar cantract with the Astros he was placed on a pitch count. Ryan had some elbow issues in his history and the Astros wanted to make sure he lasted the length of his contract.

While we don’t know exactly how many pitches per season the top hurlers were throwing before the late 1980s Tango’s pitch count estimator can provide a reasonable guess. Even if it is off by 5% or even 10% it is clear that Feller, Lolich, and other pitchers of the 300+ inning club were throwing many more pitches than recent pitchers.