The Futility Infielder

Whether your a fan, analyst, player, manager, or GM, few topics within baseball are as hotly contested as pitch counts. Crusty codgers may sneer about how today's young whippersnappers are babied with their five-man rotations and specialized bullpens, bemoaning the death of the complete game and the 300-game winner. But the history books are littered with tales of promising pitchers whose careers were cut short by excessive workloads and medieval management techniques. It's not hard to envision an unsympathetic skipper telling his starter, "We'll stretch you on the rack until you can throw 160 pitches on a rainy night in early April, then we'll bleed your arm with leeches." That's because -- less the Dark Age imagery -- the story isn't so farfetched; Yankee manager Dallas Green (my least favorite baseball personality ever) did exactly that to a young Al Leiter back in 1989, a story recounted in "Wings of Fire," a recently-collected Roger Angell piece. The pitcher needed rotator cuff surgery later that season, setting his big-league career back about four years.

Organizations differ greatly in their approaches to pitcher handling. Some keep their pitchers on a strict pitch count system, especially in the minor leagues, where they may even so far as to pair starters in tandem. Others run their pitchers' arms ragged in the name of some macho code, then litter the disabled list with the discarded carcasses of those who aren't tough enough.

In the analytical community, the past few years have seen an attempt to quantify the impact of pitcher use and abuse. Baseball Prospectus' Rany Jazayerli introduced a metric called Pitcher Abuse Points in 1998 which focuses on high pitch-count outings and their correlation with both short-term ineffectiveness (following a high-count outing) and long-term predisposition to injury. The metric, which has been refined over the years, has as its basis an exponential relationship between the number of pitches above 100 and an increased injury risk; the current version is called PAP^3 because the relationship is more or less cubic. While there's plenty that PAP doesn't measure (such as the type of pitcher, the soundness of his mechanics, and the number of days rested between starts), and plenty of flared tempers over just what exactly PAP does measure, the metric remains the most comprehensive attempt to grasp the subject.

Christian Ruzich, the Cub Reporter, has done an excellent job summarizing PAP and its evolution. With new Cub manager Dusty Baker's reputation as an old-school hardass when it comes to pitcher management, Ruzich is keeping a close eye on the Cubbies' precious young arms such as Kerry Wood and Mark Prior. He's created a small chart in the upper right-hand corner of his blog showing each Cub starter, the number of pitches thrown in their last outing, the average number of pitches per start, and their current PAP^3 ranking. Ominously, Wood and his surgically reconstruced elbow rank 3rd in baseball, with two out of his five starts falling in Category IV (122-132 pitches) where the risk of short-term decline is "significant." Prior, who's throwing just 1.2 fewer pitches per outing, is down at 20th place, with no Category IV starts to date. Last year Prior ranked 9th while Wood was down at 44th.

As Ruzich points out, the Prospectus folks have been onto Baker for a few years. Last season saw the Giants with three pitchers in the PAP top 20 (Livan Hernandez 3rd, Russ Ortiz 4th, and Jason Schmidt 18th). And according to Ruzich, the early returns from the Windy City are not good:

So far this year, the Cubs have had four pitchers hovering around the top twenty. While age is no longer an explicit part of PAP^3, lots of earlier research (most notably in Craig Wright's book A Diamond Appraised, which was the jumping-off point for Rany's original study) considers age to be a very important part of the equation. Since three/fifths of the Cubs rotation is age 25 or under, I think it's especially important to pay attention to the workload shouldered by the Cubs' youngsters.

In a more recent post, Ruzich has some additional input on the topic, including an exchange with BP's Will Carroll, a quote from Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci, who appears to yearn for a return to the Dark Ages, and some serious science from Thomas Kuhn. Definitely worth checking out.