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| A grand experiment
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Team president Nolan Ryan and pitching coach Mike Maddux are changing the way the Rangers do things:
"I haven't been pleased with the direction baseball's taken pitching over the last 15 or 20 years, and I felt like we needed to regain some of what we had lost," Ryan said. "I felt like we had a lot of pitchers that have been on pitch limits ever since Little League, and we don't know what their genetic potential is as far as the number of pitches and workload they can handle" . . .
. . . "Guys that train for a mile ain't running more than a mile," Maddux said. "That's kind of my take on it. Go out there and go as long as you can, and the hitters will let you know when you've had enough.
There's a tendency among folks who think about baseball the way most of us here at CTB do to criticize managers who let their pitchers throw what we have come to think of as too many pitches. Just this week alone I've already made at least two or three references to guys throwing a lot of pitches in a given game, and it's only a matter of time before I unload on Dusty Baker or someone like him for "abusing" his pitchers. And in fact, I'm pretty sure I voiced some skepticism the first time I heard about Ryan's plan to stretch his pitchers earlier this year.
But upon reflection, I can't say that I have any problem with what Ryan and Maddux are doing with the Rangers. This does not sound like some throwback, though guy thing in which management is simply telling pitchers to go longer and suck it up. They seem to have a plan in place: focus on conditioning, monitor their pitchers closely, and rather than be a slave to a pitch count, pull a guy when he truly seems to be tiring. That may be at 120 pitches for some guys on some nights, it may be at 90 pitches for other guys on other nights. Critics assume that such an approach will lead to more injuries, but nothing I've read suggests this to be a given. Indeed, some folks have made a pretty convincing case that an overreliance on hard pitch counts is counterproductive in this regard.
Will it work in Texas? So far so good, but the really useful evidence won't start to roll in until September when we see how the Rangers' arms have survived the brutal Texas summer. As for ultimate proof? Let's look back in a year or two and see how many of Ryan and Maddux's young wards are on the disabled list. The parts of me that (a) admire Nolan Ryan; and (b) like seeing pitchers pitch longer into games hopes that this works out well and is emulated across the game.
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I think this plan is long overdue. Pitchers now are far too often pulled because of the pitch count, allowing more innings to be throw by middle relievers. It is especially disturbing when the high-pitching innings come early in the game and a pitcher settles down in the third or fourth only to be pulled in the fifth. The manager then hands the ball over to a trio of pitchers that are on the fringe of major league pitching. I wonder, too, if this experiment will spill over to bullpen usage. I can't understand for the life of me why Rollie Fingers could throw 140 innings as a relief ace, but Mariano Rivera can't top 100 ever. Bring back the two-three inning save Nolan, PLEASE!
My guess, Matt, is that if the Rangers had anyone that could pull that off, Ryan would do it. I don't know that there's anyone in that pen, however, that you'd want to go 2-3 innings in a close game. For now, I think they're content to stretch the starter to at least 7 or 8 and then always have a fresh, if not dominant arm ready to go.
For all Nolan's smarts, he sounds like the cranky old guy who tells the kids "in my day you pitched a complete game every fourth day, and if your arm fell off you just used the other one, and that's the way it was and you liked it!"
The problem is (and always has been) that the MANAGER makes the call to pull a starter, not the pitcher.
And do YOU trust Dusty Baker or Jim Riggleman to understand arm overuse?
Really?
I definitely think that what they are doing is a good thing. As long as they are smart about it and help condition their pitchers, I think it will work.
It's no wonder guys have to be babied and kept to a pitch count when a lot of them don't work on conditioning during the off-season (or season for that matter). I remember Francisco Liriano said that before his injury in 2006 he had never lifted weights. Also, someone this year said (I think it was Buehrle?) that he was upset that his manager was chastising him for being out of shape in the spring; winter was his time off and he didn't think he had to throw at all if he didn't want to.
What?! How can you be a professional athlete and not lift weights or condition your body during the off-season? Appalling. With teams making such large investments in these guys, they should really be monitoring their health and conditioning more than they do now.
Kudos to Texas, and I hope it works!
Nolan and Maddux are also advocating working faster. Matt Harrison, two inings into getting SHELLED, picked up his pace on the mound mid-game. Since then, he has a CG SO, BACK-to-BACK complete games, and, absent the fiasco against the Evil Empire the other day, a microscopic ERA. I don't know about any of you, but when the older brother of one of the best pitchers of our time, as well as, arguably THE greatest pitcher ever, tell you to try something, you try it! So far, so good.