You can see how it might be that the smart money is stockpiling a stable of decent arms who can go 2 or 3 times the order than making any top dollar investments in starting pitching. A staff of Whitlocks instead of spending 9 figures on a single arm.
It's just too damn stressful on the arm. Giolito and Cole were 30 starts a year guys and boom. It almost seems completely unpredictable.
Are soft-tossing junkballers the next market efficiency for clubs who want to mitigate financial risk on pitchers?
Or maybe completely predictable.
We should probably have a thread about the frailty of the modern pitcher, but I'd have to do a deep dive before even thinking about coming to any supportable conclusions. I will say that it seems that most of today's pitchers reach the professional level with a hell of a lot more mileage on their arms than pitchers did a generation or two ago. A lot of these guys throw and throw hard before they're even teenagers, and a lot of the ones who make it to that level are in year-round baseball programs, and play in multiple leagues on multiple teams. I have to think that all takes a toll, and anecdotally, I've seen it with a couple of local kids whose arms were a mess by the time they got to college. One in particular who had real talent, great hitter too. By the time he played Legion ball, he couldn't effectively throw from short to first.
Believe it or not, NIH is on the job!
We recently had some good discussion in the Bailey thread, including injury-list placements for pitchers rising from 241 in 2010 to 552 in 2021. I was also hoping to get some discussion going about whether ability to throw a first pitch strike is an underrated/appreciated skill since that seems like a major focus for Bailey as well.
I talked to a scout in 2015 at a game my AAU team was playing. He said he was suspicious of starters from Florida because they had played so much AAU ball - and this was a thing among MLB organizations. At the time Chris Sale - from Lakeland - w as at the top of the game. In retrospect though it is interesting. My kid played 80 games a year at 13.
Agreed, it's worth another thread.
Yeah, like Garrett Whitlock, Tanner Houck, and Brayan Bello.
IMO, every team should have a knuckleball pitcher at every minor league level. If you can develop a decent knuckleballer that would be huge for the whole staff. Though maybe one reason that teams don't seem to be looking for knuckleballers anymore is that they are afraid that big league hitters would hit too many HRs off them now with the launch angle swings?
Baselining the proper throwing mechanics in a biomechanical model might provide the next market efficiency. There was concern that the so called inverted W arm action was leading to elbow and shoulder injuries at a faster rate than the so called L arm action. I can't imagine this would be an easy solve. Retraining pitching mechanics of elite pitchers with established arm actions is probably a fool's errand.
Bullseye. Yes, I pitched Division One, but yes, I also played three different sports. Like most New England kids in the 1960s and 70s, I didn't play in the other two while I was actively in season for a third. Ken Dryden, who was a pretty good hockey goalie, was also a shortstop, for instance, and his hand-eye skills were enhanced by playing baseball throughout his childhood to college because of it. It also has him at least seven months off from hockey, which he then approached with renewed vigor as a result. As Mom used to say, moderation in all things. Specialization should be the thread.
Seems to be. I wonder if targeting starting pitchers with 20 to 40ish or so healthy post-TJ starts in trade and free agency may be a better bet than a guy who just put up 5 healthy seasons.
As fun as that sounds, the knuckleball has never been "plan A" for anyone. It's either been something that was a last-ditch effort to keep a career alive or a pitch an already established major leaguer started dabbling with, so you can't really go out and scout for potential professional knuckleballers or guess in rookie ball which kid is going to be better off scuttling everything he's worked for to try a completely different approach. It's also been a fraternal or familial tree sort of thing. I doubt most pitching coaches know what to do with a knuckleballer or would be enthusiastic to work with one. With the passing of Wakefield, the ones who were highly successful and best equipped to teach it are probably at an all-time low number... Candiotti, Dickey... then two or three fringe guys with Steven Wright probably being the most noteworthy of the bunch unless I'm forgetting someone.
Right on cue, Marlins announce Edward Cabrera is getting a shoulder MRI. A lot of folks here wanted to trade significant pieces for him, but there's so much risk in all these arms. I'm much more comfortable with the approach the Sox seem to be taking in getting minors arms and focusing on development.
Dr. Keith Meister, the Texas Rangers’ head team physician, does 230+ elbow ligament repairs a year. He recently noted that post-TJ injuries are also becoming more common: “We used to say, you get your one TJ, you’re good. Then it was, you get 10 years out of one. Then it was seven to eight,” Meister said. “Now guys break down in three to five, depending upon who they are, the stuff they have, what they throw.”
This sums it up for me. I would add that catchers probably don't want to learn to catch knuckleballers and those catchers who do are doing it because they are forced to or also trying to learn a new skill to hang on to a team.
The Vanderbilt baseball coach, Tim Corbin, talked about why he likes to recruit multisport athletes, with some of the same reasons that mirror what you shared. I also appreciate that he recruits kids from New England (he grew up in NH). I pitched into college (DIII) and think my arm health was due in large part to rotating from sport to sport throughout the year. The pressure now on my kids to join a travel team and play non-stop is relentless.
Is this happening? I hadn't realized. I thought the clock largely accomplished what it was supposed to last year; rushing things further seems like a recipe for disaster, pitcher-injury wise.
Why? I mean, you may be right. But is there something about the flow of blood to the tissues that needs a minute to revitalize between pitches? Or just guys losing their mechanics more often by rushing? The latter seems like a decent guess.
All the physical modeling available to teams has been used to increase velocity and spin rate with no consideration of stress on the body. It's just like pitch limits, innings limits, and extra arms in the pen. Those tools could be used to help pitchers stay healthy, but instead they're used to push max effort on every pitch.
That was conventional wisdom for the first century plus of baseball. Start out throwing just fastballs and keep the other stuff in your back pocket for later in the game. And that idea has actually been confirmed by modern metrics. The guys who did Stuff+ found that a pitcher's stuff doesn't really drop off the third time through the order. The only thing that explains the lack of success starters have going through the third time is in-game familiarity with the pitcher. Two at bats are enough for a major league hitter to get an advantage if they see all of a starter's pitches. It also explains why a reliever becomes less effective the more times you see him in a series.
Even before the pitch clock hard-throwers were maxing out at 5-6 innings and getting hurt a lot, so I don't really buy the pitch clock argument yet. Plus one year is a very small sample. Part of the blame has to go to imaginary numbers (i.e. "metrics") that overvalue strikeouts.
I don't think this is "smart." "Smart" would be coaching pitchers to pitch more to contact, not maxing out your effort as often (unless you're a freak of nature like Nolan Ryan). Lean more on your advanced batting charts to position fielders optimally.
Good question. Intuitively I think the mechanics thing is probably real, and obviously the more you do something without adequate rest the more fatigued you get. That said, in an attempt to answer your question I couldn't find any real evidence. This Fangraphs piece from last year basically says not enough data but what data there is shows no material difference. I was aware that Ohtani for example used to take a ton of time between pitches; sure enough he was a top-5 "hurried" guy last year and ended up getting hurt. Of course he was also in the WBC and probably ramped up earlier in the year than he otherwise would have, so who knows.
Thanks vm for this.
So sign a guy long term young (Bello) or get them on a good Post TJ surgery contract for 3.
He can bring his buddy, Concord's own Tom Glavine with him. Over 20 consecutive seasons, he had one down year, when he only threw 165 innings. The other 19 he threw at least 183, and was over 200 innings in 14 of those seasons.
It was a different (better) time.
Agree. Key word is "intuitively," until someone conducts a study of tissue reactions to stress -- which undoubtedly exists in great depth -- and overlays it with the baseball question about that type of stress at those time intervals. It's probably some stew of those things, exacerbated by psychological discomfort from rushing... or some chicken vs egg stuff. I really wish I could wake up one morning to discover that I'm a fully trained orthopedic surgeon.
I looked up the innings stats for 2022 and 2023 for a post the other day, but didn't go back further. Holy shit, that's just bananas. Fallen off a cliff, indeed.
It's really hard to wrap my head around it.
A friend of mine who was supposed to play in the Manchester feeder system but blew his ACL out on his first day on pitch told me that the reason that there's a bunch of American keepers playing internationally is that America is a nation of hand sports.
Food for about four seconds of thought, how many pitchers exactly are on this staff? What happens when one of them sucks in their first or second inning of action? The reason this has never been tried is that it makes no sense.
