The 2017 LSU Baseball Season

Let's put it like this. Your job is to pitch baseball games. You pitch a game that starts at 7 PM Friday. You pitch 7 or 8 innings and throw 100-110 pitchs. When you leave the game it is about 9:30 PM. By 9:30 PM on Saturday you will have rested exactly one day. On Sunday 2 days and on Monday 3 days. If you pitch a game on Tuesday you will have only had 3 days rest, not 4. Lange pitched on Friday night so by Tuesday he will have rested 3 days. Pitchers have pitch on 3 days rest and sometimes pitched very well to great. But it's very unusual for them to do so and nobody does it on a regular basis, only on special occasions like a playoff or World Series game.

Why can't pitcher pitch more than once every 5 days? This might explain it. Maybe if tiga reads this he will stop comparing girls tossing a softball underhanded to real men playing hardball.


Here’s the important thing to understand. Pitchers don’t throw the ball. That’s what you or I do. Pitchers throw their arms. This is why it’s so damaging to their bodies that they can only safely and successfully do it once every five days. Pitchers don’t generate force with their arms, they generate force with their legs and hips and torsos and use their arm as a lever and guiding mechanism. This means that their arms are subjected to however much force their bodies can generate. Bodies can generate a lot of force. Way more than arms can. Arms however, aren’t really evolved to handle that much force. What ends up happening is a little bit like what happens if you try to use a plastic knife to open a can of paint instead of one of those little metal keys or, if you’re like me, a screw driver. Here are a couple facts about the force pitchers generate from a Popular Mechanics article on the topic by Jeremy Repanich:

When a pitcher cocks his arm, where it is turned back to the point where the palm is facing toward the sky, there’s about 100 Newton-meters of torque on the arm, which subjects the arm to the same amount of stress as if the pitcher had a 60-pound weight hanging from his hand in that position… From that cocked position, the arm snaps forward to its release point in 0.03 seconds, and at its peak speed, an elite pitcher’s arm rotates at upward of 8500 degrees per second.

A baseball team uses its pitchers like medieval armies used those rock flinging machines, the trebuchets. Seriously. Compare the motion of these two hurling entities.

First, Madison Bumgarner




Next, the Trebuchet:




The amount of torque needed to throw in excess of the century mark is greater than the amount of force the ulnar collateral ligament (the elbow ligament Strasburg tore) can withstand before giving out, according to tests Fleisig has done on cadavers.

Indeed, pitchers injure themselves frequently. The amount of force they use in their pitching motion tears things in their elbows and shoulders. Every pitch they throw strains their arms a little more, pulling and stretching ligaments to their limits and beyond. The more they pitch, the more likely they are to injure themselves. Starting pitchers may pitch up to around 120 times in a game. After a game, they do everything they can to heal the damage done during the game. They ice, they rest, and they wrap, they probably do all sorts of other stuff too that we don’t know about and maybe don’t really want to know about.

What Madison Bumgarner did by pitching perfectly on two days rest was prove that he could will his body to perform when it shouldn’t have been able to or prove that his body is unlike everyone else’s. Either way, it was pretty impressive.

Hope this makes more sense now,
Ezra Fischer

 

Nolan Ryan would disagree and disproved the theory of wear and tear on your body with each pitch. As have many others. The more he threwthe stronger he got. I think most are babied so much they aren't used to throwing. And they aren't in game shape as they should be. But it's not gong to change bc better safe than sorry with millions on the line.

 

Changing the subject, I know its nothing new, but OSU is still bitching about the strike zone. Also crying conspiracy because ESPN owns the SEC network and they wanted an all SEC final, so they put an SEC ump behind the plate. I understand they're frustrated but enough already. The shitty strike zone impacted BOTH teams, not just one. Yeah, they had a called strike that appeared to be in the opposite side batters box, but that's ONE pitch and one pitch in the 3rd inning does not decide a ball game. Give it a rest!

 

True, if I'm off work Friday morning then I've had 4 days off. If it's Friday at 17:00 only 3

 

So did they say it was reviewable despite the rule that said otherwise. I guess I shoulda read the link CO posted.

 

Crying about an all SEC final is a bit premature considering the gators hadn't even played their game yet.

But you're right and I've pointed the same thing out to beaver fans since. We had to play the same zone and a couple of out bats got sat for the same calls. It was a shitty zone, but it wasn't exclusive to just them. We actually got a few hits for swinging at balls out of the zone. We adjusted. They just sat there with bats on their shoulders like they always do taking pitches. Even their coach said that.

 

I thought you lived in Oklahoma but you are in a totally different time zone.

 

Lsu is - 150 fu +130

Guess I'll lay a hundy on singer and hope I lose.

 

That's not how the baseball God's have decreed it.