Dusty Baker Is Throwing Caution, Pitch Counts to the Wind
Washington left-hander Gio Gonzalez pitched into the seventh inning on Sunday in San Diego. His 120th pitch of the late afternoon was ripped into right field by Manuel Margot for a single. It was his last pitch of the outing, as Nationals manager Dusty Baker strode to the mound, gestured to the bullpen, and took the ball from Gonzalez.
Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have been a noteworthy event. The sequence would seem rather innocuous, in fact. But we live in an age marked by an unprecedented number of pitching injuries, an age in which teams and players are more often turning to science to better understand performance and injury prevention. We live in an era when pitch counts routinely accompany the game data in the corner of a telecast. No team of which I’m aware has figured out how to significantly reduce pitching injuries, but there is a general sense that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
And this is where Baker stands out from the crowd.
While pitch counts are crude metrics, only 10 teams have allowed a starting pitcher to exceed 120 pitches this season; only two teams have allowed it to occur on multiple occasions.
Baker and the Nationals have accomplished it four times.
Baker is lapping the field.
| Team | Number |
|---|---|
| Nationals | 4 |
| Padres | 2 |
| Red Sox | 1 |
| Indians | 1 |
| Rockies | 1 |
| Tigers | 1 |
| Diamondbacks | 1 |
| Cardinals | 1 |
| Rangers | 1 |
| Rays | 1 |
| Everyone else | 0 |
The Nationals under Baker also rank second in average pitch count per start (100.5 pitches), one of only two teams averaging more than 100 pitches per start. They also rank second in number of 100-plus pitch outings (76). The Nationals are trailing only the Red Sox (101.1, 81) in each category, according to the Baseball Prospectus data.
It’s not curious just that Baker is leaning on his starters to an unusual degree relative to the league in 2017, but that he’s doing so at a time when the Nationals have a 14-game lead in the NL East and a 100% chance of reaching the NLDS according to FanGraphs playoff projections entering Monday. This would seem like the time to give players more rest when possible.
Here are the full standings of starting-pitcher usage:
| Rank | Team | Avg. Pitch Count | 101-Plus Pitches |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Red Sox | 101.1 | 81 |
| 2 | Nationals | 100.5 | 76 |
| 3 | Rays | 97.1 | 70 |
| 4 | Tigers | 96.3 | 61 |
| 5 | Indians | 94.3 | 58 |
| 6 | D-backs | 96.6 | 57 |
| 7 | Giants | 97.3 | 55 |
| 8 | Orioles | 95.8 | 54 |
| 9 | Mets | 94.1 | 43 |
| 10 | White Sox | 93.8 | 40 |
| 11 | Cardinals | 93.5 | 38 |
| 12 | Blue Jays | 91.4 | 37 |
| 13 | Braves | 94.3 | 36 |
| 14 | Twins | 90.3 | 34 |
| 15 | Yankees | 91.4 | 33 |
| 16 | Athletics | 91.5 | 29 |
| 17 | Cubs | 92.0 | 29 |
| 18 | Rockies | 92.0 | 27 |
| 19 | Pirates | 90.5 | 27 |
| 20 | Brewers | 90.2 | 26 |
| 21 | Phillies | 91.4 | 26 |
| 22 | Padres | 89.2 | 25 |
| 23 | Royals | 91.1 | 25 |
| 24 | Mariners | 89.1 | 25 |
| 25 | Rangers | 93.6 | 24 |
| 26 | Reds | 87.5 | 23 |
| 27 | Astros | 92.0 | 23 |
| 28 | Dodgers | 88.5 | 20 |
| 29 | Angels | 89.7 | 19 |
| 30 | Marlins | 86.9 | 18 |
Said Baker to reporters after the Gonzalez start:
“I think he had [91] pitches his last start, so we took him a little longer this time because I didn’t have four guys in the bullpen.”
Baker has also let Tanner Roark exceed 120 pitches. (He threw 125 pitches in a start on June 2.)
Ace and Cy Young-contender Max Scherzer, meanwhile, has recorded more outings of 120 or more pitches than 28 other major-league teams this season.
Scherzer threw 121 pitches on June 21 at Miami. And for what it’s worth, his 121st pitch was a hanger and Giancarlo Stanton rifled it into left field for the go-ahead run.
Like most pitchers, Scherzer typically loses some effectiveness the deeper he works into a start. For his career, the first time through a lineup, opponents have posted a .622 OPS against him; his second time through, opponents have OPS’d .685; and his third time through, opponents have posted a .712 mark. (The fourth time through, Scherzer has held opponents to a .544 OPS, though that is a relatively small sample of 580 plate appearance throughout his career.)
Scherzer also threw 120 pitches at home against Atlanta on July 7.
It was after his 117th pitch of that July 7 start, an errant full-count offering, that Scherzer expressed disappointment, probably thinking he had just faced his last batter of the evening.
But perhaps even to Scherzer’s own surprise, Baker allowed him to face another batter. He allowed a hit and then left with men on the corners.
His 120th pitch:
One might suppose that, with such a formidable division lead, a manager would take greater caution with an arm owed nine figures by the club, a pitcher whom the club needs to be near 100% to make a push through the postseason.
While Stephen Strasburg — no stranger to the DL — hasn’t reached the 120-pitch mark this season, he did throw 118 pitches on May 5th and 119 on May 21st. And while it’s possible that overuse wasn’t responsible for the injury that led him to the DL last month — he returned on Saturday — Baker has a history of showing little interest in the idea of preventive measures throughout his career.
In 2003, Baker’s Cubs tied for the lead in the sport with 25 games of 120-plus pitches. The Cubs led the majors with an average pitch total of 103.5 per game for starters that season. And we know how the story ended for Mark Prior and Kerry Wood.
Teams don’t seem to have a great understanding of how to prevent injuries. There might not be any firmly established best practices, though perhaps cutting-edge places like Driveline Baseball or new technologies will lead pitchers to a better place. Maybe the stress and velocity in today’s game is simply too much to overcome for pitchers’ elbows. But more teams believe in monitoring fatigue and preventative care. More teams seem to prefer being safe to being sorry. The Nationals are different. Even with a 14-game lead and 100% postseason odds, they are an outlier.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
What do you know, 15 years later and Dusty Baker is still a dumbass.
Its 2 words = dumb + ass. Other wise folks might think your saying Dusty is a stupid fish
Wonder if he likes fish sticks?
I like fish sticks!
What are you, a gay fish?
(It doesn’t work in written form)
And for all the ridiculous comments in this thread about how we don’t know that throwing more pitches in a game is an indicator of injury risk: It is THE leading indicator of injury risk and we have known this for almost 20 years. Below you will find a series of links to Baseball Prospectus articles on Pitcher Abuse Points, which they debuted in 1998 and refined in 2001 and which were probably the seminal research that lead to pitch counts being instituted at all levels of organized baseball.
The main research was done by Keith Woolner, now long of the Indians front office. This was probably THE original contribution of sabermetricians outside baseball front offices to better baseball analysis.
The greatest predictor of arm injury is pitch count due to degrading mechanics as muscle fatigue sets in, and this is especially true for younger pitchers.
A summary:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=2633
The relevant portion of Keith Woolner’s original research, which includes links to the rest:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=1480
The first of a two-part FAQ about the improvement to PAP that resulted from Woolner’s research (and which made it an expotential equation, so it really takes off above 115-120 pitch outings, where risk is the highest).
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=1499
Travis doesn’t relitigate this issue because it doesn’t require relitigation and has been an accepted reality for literally over a decade (the last time pitch counts were controversial, it was the Joba Rules .. Joba is now retired, I had a brief Joba sighting last week here in his hometown of Lincoln, NE).
If you think this is controversial, you’re just as stupid as Dusty Baker was then, and Dusty Baker still is now. Risking a fragile and extremely important part of your team (Gio Gonzales) when you have a 10-15 game fucking lead is the definition of stupid.
I’m a Dodger fan, so I really don’t care if the Nationals show up for the NLCS without half their pitching staff, but probably the rest of you should.
Hahahaha you’re citing research from 2001. Every pitcher can take the exact same workload. Throwing 70 pitches in three innings is the same as throwing 70 pitches in six innings. Exactly 100 pitches is where fatigue sets in which is just one of those miracles of life like the golden ratio I guess.
PAP only penalizes outings of fairly substantial pitch counts. That it starts tracking at 100 is fairly irrelevant; like one of those very pieces notes, someone with an average of 10 points per start is more likely to get injured in his or her bathroom.
What is generally of concern are starts in excess of 115, 125-135-150 pitches, which have been literally completely eliminated from baseball, and which were not eliminated when that was written. Last year in all MLB there was one start of more than 130 pitches.
People didn’t stop tracking PAP because they found it was inaccurate. It stopped getting used because pitchers stopped accumulating, well, any.
You get more for a single 140 pitch start than any starter in MLB accumulated last year.
Its certainly true that all the things you mention increase the risk at lower pitch counts than they might be assumed to be. There isn’t any research, well, anywhere, that suggests that those long-lost, very-high pitch counts are anything but bad.
The reason no one went back to this well is that the main thrust of the battle was won and generally accepted everywhere.
Its also worth discussing that while we have tons of pitcher injuries, we have different kinds of pitcher injuries than we did 20 or 10 years ago.
Elbow injuries are a lot more common, whereas we’ve seen a decline in rotator cuff surgeries, which used to be very common. As those started to evaporate, we saw a rise in labrum injuries and now those are also not as common as they were then.
The elbow remains, probably in large part due to the fact that the easiest way to damage the elbow is a traumatic injury: if a pitcher has a forearm muscle strain (pronator in particular), they can ruin their UCL in as few as 1-5 pitches, before they even notice through the adrenaline that they’re experiencing pain.
There are also long-term overuse UCL injuries, of course.
You don’t see nearly as many shoulder-related problems as as proportion of pitcher injuries as you did in the days before pitch counts.
Its just not that simple. 119 is OK but 120 is suddenly too much? To be honest the worst pitcher abuse I saw in recent years was Ausmus letting Daniel Norris throw 54 pitches in 1 inning (OK it was first inning, but by about #40 he was already done). If it was simply a pitch count issue then I guess no relievers should ever have arm problems? MAYBE pitch count is the highest risk factor but its a lot more complicated than that. Whoever can figure this out will have a big competitive advantage. Maybe the Chisox have a clue.
Correct, it’s not a whole answer but to ignore it is moving backwards.
There are surely many other steps in mechanical analysis and such that will contribute.
pretty sure THE highest risk factor for pitcher injury is a previous injury. One might wonder why it is that in the age of strict pitch counts, pitchers are getting so many elbow injuries. “But we live in an age marked by an unprecedented number of pitching injuries, an age in which teams and players are more often turning to science to better understand performance and injury prevention.” If the science is right why do we have an unprecedented number of injuries? I am not at all suggesting that pitch counts should be ignored or Dusty knows something that has eluded the rest of baseball, just noting that pitch counts quite clearly are not the be all and end all of pitching injuries.
Dusty thought this article was so awesome, he let Roark throw 115 pitches last night in Houston…following an off day….with a fully rested bullpen.
Somewhere, Mark Prior and Kerry Wood are wincing
I think it’s important to note that Prior was injured by a line-drive to the elbow.
It’s also important to note:
Dusty Baker was the Cubs manager from 2003-2006
Mark Prior threw 120+ pitches in 15/87 GS (for Dusty) with a high of 135 (2003). In 2003 alone he threw 120+ in 9/30 GS.
Kerry Wood threw 120+ in 16/68 GS (for Dusty) with a high of 141 (2003). In 2003 alone he threw 120+ in 13/32 GS.
Interesting side note: Jim Riggleman has taken blame for Wood’s injuries.
http://www.espn.com/blog/chicago/cubs/post/_/id/361/riggleman-takes-blame-for-overuse-of-wood
I think his treatment of Livan Hernandez on the Giants is some of his worst.
I wash away thoughts of the lost seasons he gave the Cubs, by thinking about clogging the basepaths.
Counterpoints:
* The Nats first-half bullpen was a five-alarm dumpster fire
* Gio’s start came right after a Johnny Wholestaff game where Scherzer tweaked his neck right beforehand
* Given that we have never seen Dusty Baker and Steve Bartman in the same room since, it’s reasonable to conclude that they are in fact the same person, and that the events of the 2003 NLCS Game 6 were caused by a temporary overlapping of multiverse timelines.
The first point is significant. That bullpen was so, so, so bad. No one involved wanted to go there if the game was close. Dusty didn’t want to lose the game by betting on the relievers. The starter didn’t want to have their previous 100 good pitches go to waste. Hitters were walking up to reporters in the locker room and asking (off the record) if there had been any progress on trading for an arm. Hell, even most of the relievers had such shattered confidence that you could see when they stepped on the mound that they thought they were going to blow it. Here’s the list of RP that anyone was confident in before the trades: LHP Enny Romero, RHP Matt Albers. That’s it. A guy the Rays gave up on because he couldn’t find the plate and a guy with TWO major league saves across 474 career relief appearances. Oh, and Dusty was riding them hard too, but he couldn’t just pitch them every single day.
So yeah. Pitch counts 🙂
How come the white manager that’s working his pitchers even harder doesn’t get his own article?
Because Fangraphs is obviously run by members of the KKK.
It’s not because Dusty Baker has a history of over-using starters.
Are you happy now?
You’re right just for some reason this guy got so blindingly mad at Dusty Baker he couldn’t even read the charts in his own article. Maybe he’s just really really fucking stupid
No because it’s general practice to ride your good starters hard if you’re in a division race, not if you’re 14 games up. Can you answer honestly and tell me if you were race-baiting or if you actually made a logical leap to racism that you believed to be credible?
Exactly, they probably just posted today’s positive article on Buxton to cover their tracks.
I’m guessing: Maybe the emphasis was on the four 120+ starts. The next manager has allowed only 2. When you can recite a stat as “twice as much”, it seems extreme and is probably easier to remember.
It’s interesting to revisit a topic that has been discussed before. You can come away thinking “Dusty is at it again”.
Ignore the racial aspect and it’s a good question. Obviously, Dusty Baker has a reputation on this. But, all throughout the article, I was wondering why we weren’t addressing the Red Sox.
As far as the 120-pitch thing, 2 games vs 4 games doesn’t seem particularly significant to me. The Red Sox lead the league in both of the other two measurements presented. And John Farrell has less of an excuse for pushing his starters, considering the difference in bullpen quality between the Sox and Nationals.
Because the Soxs are actually in a division race while the Nationals haven’t been remotely troubled since mid-May
That is Dusty Baker for you. Die-hard Cubs fans still bemoan him running Prior and Wood into the ground.
Worst manager of our generation. Horrifyingly stupid move by the Nats to hire him when there’s literally dozens of better candidates out there. Baker is as good at managing as Trump is at being President. RIP Gio, Max, Stephen, Sean etc’s careers.
Without saying anything positive about Dusty Baker, 100 pitches has always seemed like an arbitrary number that’s used just because it’s nice and round. What’s the real difference between 100 and 120, and why 100 instead of 80, for example? Does the number of rest days change anything, and if so, what exactly does it change? Does the number of pitches thrown the last start matter at all?
I have no doubt that pitch counts are meaningful, but I’m not sure we actually know anything about determining where the right number is.
A few years ago the Redsox said their goal was to not have three consecutive starts with a total of more than 330 pitches; and that they didn’t worry about single game pitch limits. So at least some actual baseball people thought it was number of pitches over 11 or so days that matters not a single game limit (and their cumulative limit was still an average of 110 pitches).
In any case, this year the Nationals have a wretched bullpen, and the Sox have a very good bullpen, and the Sox are still using their starting pitchers harder than the Nationals….
I’m no Dusty Baker fan, but I don’t see this as a real problem yet.
This is exactly right. It is a perfect example of the groupthink that goes on within fangraphs on a regular basis. Contact in baseball? “How dare you! Athletes should not be allowed to contact another human being at home plate or 2nd base because it’s dangerous, but allowing pitchers to throw a hard ball 100 MPH is ok and should not be changed.”
~ “…100 pitches has always seemed like an arbitrary number that’s used just because it’s nice and round.” ~
I seem to recall an interview Bill James did (no idea where, and I’m scouring bookmarks to find it) where he was upset that the 100 pitch limit was being used as a somewhat hard and fast line of delineation. Essentially, in that interview, he said that he and another researcher were presenting results on pitcher abuse to some team brass around 1980 or so, and they were having difficulty understanding the rates and decimals. James re-couched their presentation in terms of ‘per 100 pitches’, and that’s where he believes the 100 pitch threshold came from.
I’m sure I’m horribly misremembering and terribly paraphrasing that article.
Closest I could find on this computer….
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2009/06/15/james-pitchcounts
As mentioned in the article, nobody knows how to reduce pitcher injuries. I have no love for Dusty Baker, but the issue raised in this article seems to me like much ado about nothing. 120 pitches is not pitcher abuse. This is nowhere near what he did to Prior and Wood.
this seems like a function of staff more than anything. the nats (and the red sox, who have higher average number of pitches) have starting staffs of mostly veterans who have a history of throwing many innings. they also have staffs made mostly of pitchers who have above average command, making their innings less stress than, say, a wild young pitcher throwing 100 pitches in 4 innings. while all pitchers certainly could use rest, i don’t think there’s sufficient evidence that frequently going ~100 pitches over 6-7 innings is a precursor to injury (especially with guys like Scherzer and Gio who have done that for most of their career without frequent injury)
from 2012-2016, the white sox were in the top 3 in average pitches per start every year. over that time, they saw among the fewest injuries to SPs in all of baseball. in that time they saw among the fewest starting pitching injuries in all of baseball, and guys like Sale and Quintana remain among the most durable starters in baseball.
this isn’t to say lots of pitches isn’t damaging, but more so that it’s not a death knell.
what dusty did to young cubs pitchers in the early 2000s was certainly overwork. what he’s doing now? I think the jury is very much still out
I won’t defend Baker and in fact think he’s a terrible manager, for multiple reasons.
However, given that we have to go back to 2003 to point at any concrete damage he’s done, I’m not ready to say that his use of pitchers has really been that impactful since. Happy to hear counterpoints. But while I like to err on the side of caution too (and with a runaway lead in the division, I would), I believe that some teams are yanking starters far too early, and I didn’t support the Strasburg innings limit in 2012.
Aaron Harang would beg to differ
http://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy/what-happened-to-harang/
How much power do players have in situations like this? Presumably you can put into contracts stuff like max pitch counts etc, but if you are still under team control can you ever ‘take yourself out’ without just faking an injury every overly long start?
Have you ever actually SEEN Max Scherzer on the mound. Several times, this season he has talked Dusty Baker into letting him stay in the game just by looking scary.
The Nationals starters have also been very good. They lead MLB in quality starts (with 79) and are 2nd in Starter ERA, so it makes sense that they would be near the top of MLB in 100+ pitch outings.
The 120 pitch thing is also arbitrary. If the threshold was 121 pitches instead of 120, they’d only have 3 such games.
“The 120 pitch thing is also arbitrary. If the threshold was 121 pitches instead of 120, they’d only have 3 such games.”
With 120+, the Nationals have 25% of all of the outings in the Majors this year [and 33% for the NL].
At 121+, with only three such starts,they fall all of the way to 27% and 38% respectively. No wait, those numbers are higher.
Don’t forget- when you take away Scherzer’s 120 game outing, you also have to take away those from Jeff Samardzija, Corey Kluber, Matt Moore and Jon Lester…
24% of the NL 119+ pitch outings
25% for 118+ pitches
23% for 117+
28% for 116+
26% for 115+
24% for 114+
25% for 113+
24% for 112+
23% for 111+
21% for 110+
20% for 109+
So, at this point, they are down to only 20%, but that is still nearly 3x the average other NL team [7.1%]
This is interesting, thanks.
Players seem to like him, which I would imagine is a non-zero factor in grading a manager. I also think this entire “overuse” thing is blown out of proportion by what happened with Wood and Prior. Lots of young pitchers before and after got hurt. There have been medical advancements since then, so whose to say what would of happened if those players were to have came up today? In Japan they think more throwing is better. Whose to know what the magic number is?
Great point Carter. Dusty, to a fault sometimes, is a player’s manager. For all this talk about how horrible he supposedly is, Dusty is currently 14th all time in wins at 1,841 wins. He’s likely going to clear 2000+ wins. Only 10 managers in baseball history have 2000+ wins. Ten. If Dusty wins a World Series title in Washington and clears 2,000 wins he’s going to walk right into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Let it not be forgotten that Dusty Baker also broke Aaron Harang, by using him for over 60 pitches in relief on *two days rest* in 2008.
Hey can we hear about what’s going on with the Red Sox? They’ve had higher pitch counts and more 100 pitch games, only with fewer 120 pitch games. Seems like they’re even worse offenders.
Chicago Fan here. Exactly what the article said, Dusty over used Prior and Wood. Let him ruin Scherzer, Strausberg and Gonzalez. The guy doesn’t know how to handle a pitching staff. Kind of like the NYM physicians don’t know how to handle injuries
I wouldn’t hire Dusty Baker to manage a convenience store. He famously batted Adam Dunn 6th in Cincinnati because he “didn’t want him clogging up the bases.” No shortage of likable managers should possibly justify hiring someone who demonstrates Baker’s sort of negligence when so much is at stake.
In Dusty’s defense, and this will be a meager defense, he does have a better starting staff than most other teams. The Nats also have two of the best strikeout pitchers in baseball in Scherzer and Strasburg, so both are more likely to get to higher pitch counts. This is only in defense of having more outings where starters exceeded 101 pitches. Letting Scherzer, Gio or Strasburg go over 105 at this point in the season is lunacy. Of course, it’s not like he batted a guy hitting .240 leadoff, while batting an MVP candidate 6th for half the season….
So, he could also burn out the bullpen.
You look at the graphs and you guess the post should be about John Farrell, but Dusty Baker is a legendary workhorse of the sabermetric community, do you want to increase the page hits and comments? write a post about Baker and pitch counts, it’s just like a red flag and the bull.
Pitch count is total BS regarding UCL injuries, otherwise relievers should be safe from it, reality proves they are affected by it just like SP’s. The only proven reason for pitch count relevance is the number of times a SP goes through the order and I guess that is the real reason why teams nowadays use pitch count, it’s not for the sake of the elbow, it’s for getting a better performance.
That makes no sense. They could check the number of times through the order by noticing how many times the leadoff hitter comes up.
As a follow-up to my comment, Prior was hurt by a batted-ball striking him. Kerry Wood in high school state championship threw both games of a doubleheader, which famously created the Kerry Wood rule. Kerry Wood had some serious arm issues, but whose to say what caused them? If pitch counts were the concern throwing 250 pitches (counting warm up) and 120 pitches two days prior in high school sounds a lot worse than 130 off 4 days rest.
Personally if we are going to talk about Dusty’s (mis)management I’d give more credence to his horrible batting lineup construction. Rendon 6th? Goodwin or De Aza leading off w Difo second? El oh El. It’s hard to go wrong with any construction of their lineup unless they decide to do something crazy like bat Goodwin and Difo 1 and 2…
How much does build/frame and repertoire come into play?
I’ve bee watching baseball since I was a kid, and I have never seen a manager even close to being as bad as Dusty Baker.
I also don’t think the criticism about him is in any way race-based. If he was a crotchety old white guy who made imbecilic statements and destroyed pitchers then the media would have run him out of baseball a long time ago.
Dusty is just a bad manager. His race is irrelevant.
So, usually FG articles that lean on small samples point that out. And this article cites Scherzer’s 580 PA the fourth time through the order as a small sample size (though I’m a bit surprised by that, seems lazy at 580). And then the outcome of the final pitches in fewer games than I can count on one hand are cited as showing the pitcher was wrung out. I realize its tempting, but it’s not typical FG.
As a Nats fangraphs reader, I can’t like Baker because our ways of thinking, our intelligence, is different. But the team, with similar players, is day and night more cohesive than under Williams, and the team is outperforming its projection. The bullpen and injuries (especially eaton) would have been good excuses for underperforming, but weren’t needed. My intuition is that Baker is dragging the team down, but no one on this thread has posted data or analysis supporting that intuition at a strategic level, especially using recent data. Tactically, lots of suboptimal decisions but strategically, outcomes have been good.
Baker even goes out of his way to rest players. Murphy, who hasn’t been injured, has 471 at bats, compared to someone of similar age and value but a more fragile recent past, like Robinson Cano at 509. That’s weak sauce evidence, but every Nats position on the field has below average at bats.
I don’t think anyone has produced evidence that Baker is in the bottom half of managers in total performance.
Where’s the accountability for John Farrell for his obviously gross mismanagement of David Price, letting him have 9 consecutive 100+ pitch starts before he cracked? Boston have a good bullpen, an elite closer in Craig Kimbrel, and have more 100+ pitch starts than a Nats team with one of the league’s worst pens.
Sack Farrell now before Chris Sale becomes his next victim!
OK, let’s be transparent here. There have been some parallels drawn between pitches and injuries, but not every pitch is the same. If it was, teams would be tracking throw overs, warm ups, balls fielded and whipped to second for the all exciting 1-6-3 DP to crush a rally.
Using a metric as simple as pitch count gives GMs and owners a simple “out” to point to when insuring their investments. The use inning counts as well, elevating players through the system and back from injury. Marquee players and high draft picks still have catastrophic injuries. Many never make it back. Teams become increasingly reliant upon relievers and specialists, making the workhorse now the exception instead of the rule.
There are so, so many factors that go into managing a pitcher, it is just flat ignorant to say that this is Dusty being Dusty. What happened to Wood and Prior was irresponsible and sad, because they did have great potential (earning and performance) that was never realized. But from the managerial perspective, what the hell are you supposed to do? Sit your better pitchers in favor of some expendable AAAA arms to work through the 5th-8th innings of a pennant race? Tell that to a rapid fanbase and media of a team that hadn’t won shit. I suppose its more difficult to get hurt if you don’t pitch.
Trust me…. running off 8 smooth 15-pitch innings is not going to tax your arm as much as tool-and-nailing a couple of long innings to leave after 5 at 100 pitches. More context is required.
F. P. Santangelo, the Nats color man (I hesitate to call him an analyst), has suggested multiple times that Baker is leaving the pitcher who has thrown a lot of innings in longer to give him “a chance to win the game”, when the pitcher is ahead but short of five innings or with a tie score.
I have no idea whether this is true or just a figment of Santangelo’s imagination, but it strikes me that this would be spectacularly stupid, since it would be subverting the team’s chance to win the game to the pitcher’s personal stats.
I like the notion that teams don’t really know best practices for reducing pitcher injuries, but they do know that pitching is bad for you and you should do less of it.