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Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The magic of 100 pitches is new?
Poz seems to think so:
And make no mistake: 100 pitches is the magic number. This year, going into Sunday, there were 1,543 starters who went at least five innings in a game. Their average pitch count: 99.2. Can you believe that?
As Woolner pointed out ten years ago, based on the data provided by Retrosheet of the Dodgers pitchers of fifty years ago:
For the 2,690 starts we have on file, Dodger starters threw a total of 253,513 pitches, an average of 94.2 pitches per start. As our modern standard, we took the 1998 NL data, to keep the comparison between non-DH leagues (save a smattering of interleague games in AL parks). In the 2,588 starts made by NL pitchers last year, they threw a total of 247,197 pitches, an average of 95.5 pitches per start.
The difference is that pitchers of old would be pulled ALOT before they even got to 70 pitches. The distribution was simply far wider:
Keeping in mind that the average pitch count per start was about 95 for both groups, look at the percentage of starts made between 81 and 110 pitches: whereas last year, 61.1% of starters were pulled in that range, just 35.7% of all starts in the other group--barely one-third--fell into that range. To describe the differences between the two eras in a sentence: Pitchers in the 1950s came out of the game when their performance dictated it; pitchers today come out of the game when their workload dictates it.
I have the numbers somewhere, but not handy. From what I remember, the average number of pitches thrown per start for Koufax and Drysdale was something like 105-110. Podres was around 100, and everybody else was in the 85-100 range. And that’s pretty much what’s happening today. The difference is that managers would pull Koufax before he even got to 70 pitches, and would leave him in past 130 pitches. But the average is right around what current top starters do.
The wisdom that Woolner and Rany tried to impart on us is that it’s not the average number of pitches that’s the problem, but the games with high pitch counts that is the problem. I do not believe in that wisdom, since, as I have shown in the past, the number of pitches left in a pitcher’s arm for his career, is the same whether you take a group of top starters born 50 years ago or today.
I’ll give Joe major props for referencing my pitch count estimator later in that discussion. Unfortunately, he did not go directly to my site, where he would seen how many pitches Koufax threw per start, by year, and his game-by-game log. If you go half-way down the log page, you will see the same data, but sorted by pitches thrown.
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