I agree with your subsequent posts, but I disagree with this part. Most high school coaches, and many college coaches, are completely ignorant about what causes pitcher injuries. Pitching is not what hurts pitchers. Pitching while tired is what hurts pitchers. Pitch counts are indeed a necessary tool for monitoring pitcher workload. You are correct that not all pitches are equally taxing on the arm, and not all pitchers tire at the same rate, but a coach who begins with pitch counts as the foundation for his pitcher workload evaluation will find himself ahead of the game. There is a lot of work being done in this area. Will Carroll's Saving the Pitcher is a fantastic read for those who want to dig deep into the cutting-edge research being done to study what keeps pitchers healthy. It is being discovered that more pitching injuries are preventable than common wisdom would lead one to belive. Leo Mazzone's "throw more, pitch less" mantra has spread through the levels of professional baseball in recent years. A good long toss program between starts has been found to effectively build arm strength in a way that bullpen sessions do not. Bullpen sessions are more optimally used for fine-tuning mechanics and sharpening command and offspeed pitches. There were old horses from the early 1900s, who used to throw 200 pitches each outing, and 350+ innings a year. There were some guys who could do it, but the road is littered with guys who broke down well before their time under such heavy workloads. For the ones that could do it, there is a ton of anecdotal evidence that these pitchers did not use maximum effort on each pitch. Through their own writings and accounts, pitchers would talk about throwing free and easy, half effort, saving themselves "for the pinch", to face the big hitter or get out of a jam. Now days, the game is different in that many big league teams have guys 1-through-9 that can take a pitcher deep. No more .220-0 middle infielders - now days a pitcher must use max effort for just about every hitter, or find the ball being hit back at him harder than he threw it. The same holds true in the college game - with aluminum bats and nearly every position player being a threat, a pitcher cannot afford to save his best stuff in a way that pitchers 100 years ago could. The title of this thread is "When it rains, it pours"; but rain is a fairly random operation. The injuries to Olvey and the others, thanks in part to the dangerously high pitch counts for pitchers their age, are hardly random.
pitching coaches are unfairly criticized on all levels. chances are 99.9% of any pitching coach has been blamed for destroying a player's arm if an injury occurs even if not at fault. my point was that there's no way to determine what exactly caused or when the injury occurred. its easy to speculate and gather an educated guess but very unscientific from the outside looking in. And my point was pitching and throwing are completely different when it comes to taxing an arm. the reason players today wear out much sooner is because they throw and pitch less and less as the dollar signs continue to go up. So, to protect their investments the pitch count became an issue for the reason you stated that lots of coaches are ignorant to the fact of their kid's arms or simply ignore it, especially when the state title is on the line. add to that a dad who wants to re-live what he couldnt achieve through said son and you have a sad ending before it begins. but, as you are aware there are tons of guys who have storied careers with many flamethrowers yet they racked up obscene numbers of innings. don drysdale threw 300 innings for like 14 years. gibson lasted 17. seaver, ryan, spahn and the like were the greatest ever and threw as hard as anyone and complete games were the norm. cy young was throwing over 400 innings a season for a while..nearly 7400 total...and he lasted 22 years i think with more than 500 wins. all these guys have two things in common. the were dominant pitchers of their era and they didn't have some stat geek overanalyzing their pitch counts to manipulate numbers to come to their conclusion. A more scientific approach has been taken but its still early in the process so i guess pitch counts are more of a stop-gap measure before or if any pertinent conclusions can apply. what I do know through personal experience is breaking balls can ruin a kid's arm quicker than anything. i've coached and umpired from little league on up and its a sad thing to see but its clear when it happens. Do I think pitch counts are necessary? yes because of the stamina issue i mentioned above. Do I think its overdone? far too much but i understand its an insurance policy to protect a multimillion dollar investment though it is far too overanalyzed and overdone by people like myself because its easy to look at a number while ignoring many other variables that are causal. one big issue that can't be accurately factored into a formula is mechanics. there will always be guys like kerry wood who have such a violent delivery that no pitch count or any amount of throwing will ever help prevent his arm from being injured. One day wood is going to actually throw a pitch while his arm is going to rip off from shoulder and hit homeplate flopping like a fish at wrigley field. I just hope im there to witness it. anyhow, thanks for the reminder on the book. i'd heard about it and will give it a look see. one thing i think we can agree, regardless of the stressful pitches olvey threw, upwards of 300 pitches in b2b outings is not smart for a guy who throws so manybreaking balls.
This isn't 1960. Pitchers are not the workhorses that they once were. We are in an era of multimillion dollar contracts and guys that are lucky to go 6. Gone are the days of Bob Gibsons and Sandy Kaufax's. These guys nowadays just don't do that. Its a thing of the past. Olvey is a breaking ball pitcher who has a history of arm problems. There is no reason for him to be throwing almost 300 pitches in a two game span. This is especially the case considering that LSU led by 4 runs in that Tennessee game. I agree with some of the stuff that Tirk says. I think many of the problems with injuries for these college and highschool kids comes from the fact that they are out there throwing breaking balls at the age of 9,10 or 11 years old. Parents and coaches take the game way to seriously and it destroys there kids in the long run. I know that when I was 9 and 10 I was competative, but I never had coaches out there trying to show my teammates how to throw breaking balls and change ups and all that.
Well all right smartass :grin: . Actually, I was inferring to how once things go bad, IN GENERAL, for LSU, it's usually a torrential downpour. :hihi:
Perception can be almost as bad/good as reality sometimes. If word gets around that Smokeball includes overuse of young arms to the point of damaging them, then LSU will have a difficult time recruiting pitching. This could negatively impact on our chances of winning the College World Series this year, and next year. . . and perhaps future years.
I've forgotten where I read this but there was an article very recently that addressed pitching injuries. It goes all the way to Little League where a coach finds a hot pitcher and plays him every game...with little or no way to teach correct technique. Accordign to the article more and more kids are arriving in college with half of their throwing life over due to improper mechanics and overuse.
