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TIME TO ABANDON THE 5-MAN ROTATION?

 

Yu Darvish, Zack Wheeler, Alex Cobb, Homer Bailey… so many pitchers continue to go down with an elbow injury that requires Tommy John surgery that it’s almost a foregone conclusion that everyone will have the surgery at some point. That’s obviously not true, not everyone does of course, but we all know the feeling of doom, right? I’ve argued all along that something is wrong with this picture. Some data points.

 

 

  1. Pitchers train year round and their bodies are in better shape than at any point in history.
  2. Medicine is better than it has ever been so that when a pitcher is injured his odds of a full recovery, not to mention a speedy one, are as good as it’s ever been.
  3. Pitchers mechanics are better than ever before with all the fancy pants analysis that video and computers bring.
  4. Teams are more cautious with their pitchers than ever before. So much do they worry about pitchers that we often call teams “moronic” or the players “soft” when a guy is pulled out of a game because of innings pitched or pitch counts.
  5. Speaking of that last point, at no time in history have pitches and innings counts mattered more. It hasn’t helped.
  6. In the old days some teams used two or three main starters. That was like 100+ years ago though when the game was a completely different beast. The game changed and teams adapted turning to four man rotations. It was decided in the mid 1970’s that four men were not enough so teams went to five man rotations, a position that has held firm to this day though some teams have gone with six man rotations from time to time.

 

Despite all of the above, all of the advances in medicine/training/care, there are more season ending injuries today than there ever were before for pitchers. What are we doing wrong here? Obviously pretty much everything. Some thoughts on how to address the epidemic of pitching injury.


(1) Stop giving pitchers 40 year contracts. In the old days players rarely made enough money to be just a baseball player unless they were a star. It was quite normal for players to have offseason jobs to help augment their baseball salary. When a player knows that his family depends on him being out there, earning that short term pay check, doesn’t it stand to reason that such a player would push himself a bit more when a minor issue came up? Why would a pitcher push himself today with massive amounts of job security?

 

(2) Stop the athletes from training so hard. Might sound counter intuitive, but how many photos do you look at from players in the 1970’s that look like the fella could rival Sylvester Stallone, in his heyday, for muscle definition? Today, guys are too jacked up physically. It’s not just about being huge, being “buff” really isn’t a bonus in baseball (especially for pitchers), it’s just that the athletes have stretched themselves to the absolute brink of the human body. Tendons/ligaments often cannot keep up with the muscle strength these athletes have, and that often leads to the breakdown. I know this seems a bit foolish to say since here is no way that you’re going to be able to convince most athletes that 90 percent might be better than 100 percent, but that doesn’t make it any less true.


(3) Help the mechanics of pitchers that are putting themselves at risk. Stephen Strasburg is the poster boy for this. His mechanics were bad but he was so dominant that his high school and college coaches just let him throw. When he got to the Nationals they did the same thing – nothing. Eventually he had Tommy John surgery. I would encourage everyone to read the following about the mechanics that lead to elbow injury and Tommy John surgery. Guess what? Back from Tommy John surgery Strasburg still has… basically the same mechanics other than before except for a minor adjustment with his feet. His arm will go again at some point, it’s just a matter of time. I get not wanting to mess with someone who is having success and all, but if you want a guy to pitch long-term folks, work on solidifying the foundation of each pitch – the mechanics.

 

(4) Stop focuses so heavily on pitcher workloads. How many times is a pitcher cruising along through six innings only to be taken out because he threw six innings? How many times is a pitcher removed cause he’s hit 90, 95, 100, 105, 110 etc. pitches? Some people can’t throw 100 pitches without issues arising (health or performance). Others can throw 120 an be fine (Nolan Ryan averaged 127 pitches a game in 1989 the highest officially recorded mark since pitch counts weren’t officially kept until 1988). The fact is all those numbers are arbitrary. Is there any real difference between 95 and 105 pitches? It certainly seems likely that the more pitches a guy throws the more dangerous it is to the health of the player, I get it. Still, what if that pitcher throws 90 percent fastballs versus a guy who only throws 65 percent heaters because he works more off-speed stuff – should the guy throwing more fastballs be allowed to throw more pitches because there is less stress throwing a fastball instead of a curveball? What if the pitcher is 23 or 29 years old? What if the pitch limit was reached in five or seven innings? See what I’m saying here?

 

Whatever people believe, guys are getting hurt on a daily basis in baseball, sometimes catastrophically so in situation that requires surgery. What we are doing isn’t working, I think we can all agree with that. What should we do to try and stem the tide of injury? Leave it to the one and only Bill James to throw out an oddball idea that, when you think more about, starts to make more sense than your initial reaction suggests. James suggests that we scrap 5-man rotations. He further posits that going back to 4-man rotations isn’t the answer either. He gets radical and suggests that the logical thing to do at this point is to turn to 3-man rotations. Click on the link to read his thought provoking essay.

 

 

 

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