What Is It About 100 Pitches?
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By Jim Nettleton
Is anyone else as tired as I am of hearing endlessly about pitch counts in major league baseball? Today’s multi-millionaire pitchers are apparently so fragile that throwing anything over 100 pitches is considered an act worthy of a Congressional Medal.
These players are supposed to be the most well conditioned, most well trained in history, yet they cannot equal the pitching performances of countless players that have gone before, in the days when conditioning meant having only 4 hot dogs instead of eight and two fewer beers than the day before.
Never before have we seen such constant injuries, tendonitis attacks, and aggravated hang nail epidemics. Today’s pitchers do not remotely possess the sustainability of their predecessors. We can’t, I suppose, place all the blame at the feet of the pitchers. It is management that has, in its ultimate wisdom, decided that these tender players need to be completely coddled, lest they become irked and moody.
Okay, let’s do some constructive comparisons between today’s pitchers and those of days gone by. Today, 100 pitches is the panic point and complete games are almost unheard of. In days gone by, nothing could have been more the opposite. Let’s take Hall Of Famer Robin Roberts, for example. Roberts, in a career that spanned nineteen years, pitched 676 games. Of those, 305 were complete games, nearly half of all games he pitched. Every season, Roberts was present and accounted for, without those arm problems that modern day pitchers seem to develop as regularly as summer rains.
Nolan Ryan’s career covered 27 incredible years. He pitched in 807 games and, of those, 222 were complete games. Need we point out that he participated fully in all of those 27 years?
Steve Carlton’s career spanned 24 years, during which he pitched 741 games. Of those, 254 were complete games. There was no significant down time during those years, just continual top-level performance.
The 21 year career of Warren Spahn is another example. He pitched 750 games during that career and completed 382. That is truly an amazing total. And again, during all those games there was never significant down time.
These are just a few examples, but there are many, many others throughout baseball history. Why is it that pitchers of yesteryear had the stamina and ability to perform at a far higher career-long level than those of today? They had none of the training and conditioning advantages that today’s players enjoy, yet they were more durable and consistent than the vast majority of today’s pitchers.
It seems that sometimes the more we learn, the less we know. Nearly every team in the major leagues these days has pitchers on the disabled list, pitchers slated for Tommy John surgery, pitchers with sore elbows, shoulders, and on and on. It seems as though the baseball upper echelon, on both the league level and the individual team level, is thoroughly mishandling the situation. There has to be a reason that today’s pitchers can’t stand up under the durability spotlight when compared to those that came before. Pitchers of the past sometimes threw both ends of a double header, or pitched on consecutive days, or on only two days rest. Today, five days is the norm and pitchers simply aren’t available on any less rest.
Perhaps today’s practice of throwing less leads to weaker arms, not more durable arms. Doesn’t more repetition build more lasting strength? Yesterday’s pitchers threw much more often and maybe that’s the reason that they didn’t break down like a cheap watch.
Something is rotten in Denmark. Baseball needs to find the answer to this perplexing durability problem, because at today’s ridiculously inflated salary levels, fans deserve more than over coddled, under achieving pitchers.
About the author:
Jim Nettleton is a radio and TV professional who is a lifelong baseball addict and who played the game for decades. He highly recommends a proven training aid designed to vastly increase hitting prowess, Rotational Hitting - http://tinyurl.com/69e7ce and a training aid to develop a psychological advantage in the game http://tinyurl.com/6zxqcx.
Tags: baseball, baseball pitchers, baseball pitching, pitching, pitching baseball