April 17, 2012

Verducci on Pitchers

Via BBTF, Tom Verducci complains about how the current ways pitchers are used does not reduce injuries. This echoes Ron Darling’s rant from the other day.

I suspect the answer lies not in medical science, but in changing the types of pitchers baseball uses. Who lasts a long time in the majors? Knuckle ball pitchers and Tommy John like soft-tossers. Hulking pitchers like Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan, Curt Schilling, and Randy Johnson did fine also, although there were injuries along the way. Greg Maddux was somewhere in the middle, a control pitcher who wasn’t a soft-tosser, but forced batters to swing at a bad pitch. It strikes me that teams are not scouting for the pitcher who throws 80 MPH and gets batters out. Maybe that’s the next inefficiency to exploit.

3 thoughts on “Verducci on Pitchers

  1. James

    Very interesting. I think the problem is that right now there may be no realistic way to scout for that pitcher. The problem is that if you pick a guy who throws 80 and is getting batters out, there’s a really good chance that you picked a guy who just happened* to be getting a lot of batters out, and it won’t project. Now if there are pitchers who throw 80 and get a lot of Ks (or a lot of swing-and-misses, or very few homers…), that would be worth looking at hard. But I guess my point is that those soft-tossers don’t usually have impressive secondary stats, and secondary stats are the ones you can scout reliably.

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  2. David Pinto Post author

    James » You could use their home run rates as a proxy for their ground ball tendencies. It certainly would be more work to scout that type of player. Maybe it would be worth MLB putting PITCH f/x at every high school and college field.

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  3. Plank

    Career longevity doesn’t seem like something that would be beneficial to a team. Teams get control of a pitcher for 6 years (more like 7 or 8 on average) so the ability of a pitcher to pitch beyond that time frame doesn’t help the club drafting and developing them.

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