Comments on: Pitching Health, Part 2: 2008 Workload

By: giveml

giveml — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:27:02 +0000

I think most of these guys are conditioning and throwing long-toss/bullpens during the break between college and summer ball, so they actually probably come back stronger after the break. The guys who get lazy during their breaks are either immensely talented or never make it very far.

I think most college pitchers throw some kind of a fall season as well. My son pitches D-1 and the only time he gets completely off from throwing is from mid-November to early January.

By: fewgoodcards

fewgoodcards — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:04:38 +0000

i don’t know how many people got to see it, but jaime garcia was nasty today. 2 shutout innings on a hit, a walk, and 2 strikeouts. he ran his fastball up to 94 while also showing a good hook, and one of the strikeouts was on a nasty 90 mph cutter in under the hands of a righty.

By: Eckstreem

Eckstreem — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:49:46 +0000

I think these guys are thinking along the lines of healing more than losing form. Although I don’t know where the info came from, I read that any overhand throwing motion does some sort of damage to the rotator cuff. However, most people heal quickly from those microscopic injuries. Give a man 3 weeks, and he would heal from most of those minor injuries rather completely.

By: SleepyCA

SleepyCA — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:53 +0000

“…a lot of pitchers get 2-3, maybe even 4 weeks off from baseball before the summer leagues begin. … So Ottavino got 3+ weeks of rest before going out for another 51 more innings.”

Is that really a good thing? I’m totally talking out the arse here but it seems like taking 3-4 weeks off would allow the pitcher to get out of shape while not thinking he’s out of shape, and then stepping up a level exacerbates it.

By: UncleBuck44

UncleBuck44 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:15:32 +0000

And really you can apply what I just said to the college to pro transition, not just college season to summer season.
When I said Mortensen pitched his last game on May 25, that was his senior year. His first game in the Cardinals system was sometime around June 20th. So thats even more time off. While his inning total took a big jump last year, he had a nice long break to build his arm back up and ready himself for the 2nd wave of innings.
Of course the break doesn’t always work for some. Look at Nick Schmidt, the Arkansas LHP drafted by San Diego. He needed TJ surgery after a month into his pro debut. Of course a lot of the damage had probably already been done at Arkansas.

By: UncleBuck44

UncleBuck44 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:05:52 +0000

Hey,
While summer league stats do add to the total amount of innings a pitcher throws in a year, a lot of pitchers get 2-3, maybe even 4 weeks off from baseball before the summer leagues begin. The Cape Cod league’s first game is around June 15. Northeastern’s last game in Ottavino’s soph season was around May 23. So Ottavino got 3+ weeks of rest before going out for another 51 more innings. Mortensen was in the same situation. The WCCBL starts around the same time as the Cape Cod League. Mortensen pitched his last game on May 25.
That rest, even if its just 10-12 days, is huge. You look at Braden Looper last year, spending two weeks in June on the DL gave him a shot in the arm for the second half.
In the minor leagues, pitchers don’t get that rest. They have to pitch every 5th day(or 4th day in some systems) and they are training their arms to handle that continuous workload.

By: roarke

roarke — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:36:10 +0000

FGC - I had to limit the analysis at some point, because some of the information (and value of the information)becomes unreliable. You can see that I included the 8 innings of instructional league for Garcia after the draft, but I quickly decided just to stick with college and minor league innings because a line had to be drawn somewhere (similarly, I don’t think that Will or Tom Verducci consider Spring Training innings in their analysis).

Frankly, if we really want to do a complete and in-depth analysis of workload, we probably should be looking at pitch counts rather than innings. Innings becomes a proxy for that because over a large enough number of innings the average pitches per inning levels out. In the same way, I am taking minor league and college innings and using them as a proxy for all innings pitched by these prospects because an assumption can be made that most of these guys are in some kind of summer league during college, or instructional leagues, or Team USA camps, or whatever. Instead of endlessly searching for all of those innings (which could be futile in some situations) I assume that most of those will level out year to year. The college and minor league innings become a proxy then for total workload for each year. It certainly isn’t an exact science, but I think that it works reasonably well for this exercise.

By: fewgoodcards

fewgoodcards — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:56:12 +0000

while it is hard to come up with these stats, you are missing some innings on some of these pitchers and it doesn’t make their innings increases look quite as bad. in 2005, ottavino also threw 51 innings in the cape cod league, so his total was really 147 and he only jumped 12 innings. in 2006 tyler herron spent the spring in extended spring training before going to short season ball. i don’t remember the exact numbers, but i think he threw something like 30 innings in extended. adding that in, he did only jump the 30 or so innings. clayton mortensen also threw 61 innings in the west coast collegiate league in the summer of ‘06 bringing his total that year to 141 innings, so while it still was a pretty big jump, it wasn’t as dramatic as it looks.

By: siddfynch

siddfynch — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:47:34 +0000

Jeff, after keeping an eye peeled on this for a couple years, I think you are probably correct - it may not be total innings that is doing it, but rather, total innings is a proxy for or is correlated with things that really influence things. Maybe it’s # of pitches thrown per month, for example….and total innings in full season ball is just a surrogate for that.

Like most things, it’s probably not that simple - probably an interaction among physical development stage, pitching rate or total, change in rate (e.g., difference from prior year), mechanics, and inherent arm health. Whew.

By: siddfynch

siddfynch — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:42:08 +0000

Nice post, Roarke.

I did a similar thing last year for a few guys I was considering for my minor league FBB draft, and saw the Brewers did THIS with Yovanni Gallardo

2005 - 122
2006 - 155
2007 - 190

When looking at Manny Parra, it also seems like there might have been some modulation (though this was confounded by his arm injuries a few yrs ago).

Bottom line is, I wonder if some of our in-division competitors are paying attention to this - and if they are, how does their rotation health compare to ours? The Brewers strike me as staying pretty healthy over the years - they’ve lost Rogers, but have nursed guys like Sheets and Parra along so far, and have had good luck with guys homegrown talents like Capuano, Davis, Eveland, Gallardo, Inman, Hammond, Jeffress, etc.

I wonder what teams definitively use this, and how their arm health has been?