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.
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.
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.
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.