The Verducci Issue

Tom Verducci has made a tremendous career for himself, writing for Sports Illustrated, appearing on the MLB Network, and penning Joe Torre’s book to name a few components of his resume. He garnered plenty of fame over the last several years for what has since been termed “The Verducci Effect,” a theory that pitchers under the age of 25 are significant injury risks the year after they exceed their previous year’s innings pitched total by 30 or more frames. If Pitcher A was 22 years old, threw 100 innings in 2006 and 175 innings in 2007, he would be considered to be a risky asset.

The theory makes intuitive sense and studies have been attempted to both confirm and deny its validity. Still, because of the logic involved, it has become our nature to suspect that pitchers meeting the aforementioned criteria are in fact injury risks.

Last February, Verducci predicted that Ian Kennedy, Yovani Gallardo, Chad Gaudin, Fausto Carmona, Tom Gorzelanny, Ubaldo Jimenez, and Dustin McGowan would fall prey to his self-named effect. As he pointed out in an SI article yesterday, all but Jimenez suffered injuries in one form or another last season. Verducci acknowledged in his article that not all of the injuries were arm-related, but the idea that he was a successful prognosticator and that said predictions were correct is a bit questionable, especially given the acknowledgement that not all of the injuries were arm-related, and because I see no proof of how the injuries not related to the arm were caused by the taxation of pitching.

How would pitching 30+ innings cause Yovani Gallardo to tear his ACL? Or how it hurt Fausto Carmona’s hip while covering first base on a routine play? Or, perhaps how it caused Chad Gaudin to slip off of a curb and smack his back on a dumpster… and yes, you read that correctly. I am in no way criticizing the theory itself but rather the idea that these guys were correctly predicted simply because they happened to get injured at one point or another throughout the season.

We need to get more specific and look for pitchers to have arm issues, like McGowan and Gorzelanny did. The pitchers with injuries not related to the arm should not be touted, unless they are somehow proven to have been related to the act of pitching. This doesn’t rule out all all injuries not related to the arm but it does merit much further investigation on such injuries. Kudos to him for identifying the likes of Kennedy, Gorzelanny, and McGowan, but Gallardo, Gaudin and Carmona fell victim to other forms of injury, not the conditioning problems suggested by the 30+ innings idea. They may have fallen prey with more innings if not injured previously, but that is not the point here. These guys do not need to be touted if they are not proven victims of the theory.