What Bartolo Colon and Chris Sale Have in Common

You probably couldn’t find two more different-looking pitchers than Chris Sale and Bartolo Colon. The former resembles a slingshot made of chopsticks and a rubber band, while the latter is what might happen if a 19th-century howitzer were to assume human properties. Each pitcher throws a bunch of sinkers, sure; otherwise, though, their arsenals are a study in contrast, as well. Colon’s all fastballs, three-quarters release, right side. Sale has bendy stuff coming from a low, left-handed sidearm slot.

There’s one thing, though: they’ve both lasted longer than people thought they might. And there’s a quality they possess in common, something about their approaches, that might be helping in that regard.

Early in 2016, everyone noticed that Chris Sale wasn’t hitting the same big numbers on the radar gun. For a player who supposedly had mechanics that were going to lead to injury, it was worrisome. No worries, the pitcher told us, this was on purpose.

He talked to Scott Merkin about it and gave a few reasons for the change.

“That’s probably the biggest part of my change, is not throwing every single pitch as hard as I can every inning, every out. I waste a lot of pitches doing that,” Sale told MLB.com prior to his Saturday start against the Twins.
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“There are still times to overpower guys,” Sale said. “But when you are going through a game, there’s no reason to throw a 0-0 pitch as hard as you can just because you gave up a hit before that. Now you are 1-0 and now you are more mad than you were before, so you rear back and try to throw one harder.”
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“Innings for a starting pitcher, and starts, are the most important things because if you are getting the innings and out there every time, good things will happen. Everything else will fall into place.”

There’s a whiff of “pitching to contact” in his response — and, maybe with stuff as bendy as Sale’s, contact isn’t so scary, even as most of the league moves to maximizing whiffs. But look closer and you’ll also see that he mentions innings and wasted pitches — he’s talking about longevity, too.

That makes a lot of sense. After seeing preliminary evidence that pitchers are pitching closer to their maximums in the postseason, I reached out to the American Sports Medicine Institute’s Glenn Fleisig to explain his research. Fleisig has demonstrated that pitching closer to personal max causes more stress on the arm.

“The data showed that there is a strong correlation within a person, that the faster you throw, the more torque you produce on your elbow,” Fleisig said as a way to sum up the to-be-published findings. “But there is not a strong association between the two among people, meaning that there are other factors that the radar gun doesn’t show — what their mechanics are and how big and strong you are. Looking at one person, the faster you throw, the more torque you put arm.”

We previously studied this by using the difference between average velocity and maximum velocity, but because there are still errors in velocity recording and because one errant high-velocity pitch may not describe maximum velocity well, I’ve used the difference between average velocity and 90th-percentile velocity here.

Thanks to Jeff Zimmerman and Sean Dolinar, who helped greatly with the data, we can see which players have the largest discrepancy between their average fastball velocity and their 90th-percentile velocity. You probably can guess who appears at the top.

The causes of pitching injury are numerous. As such, we don’t find a collection safe-and-sound starters at one end of this list and just a landscape of shattered bones and shredded ligaments at the other. It is interesting to see hard-throwing Carlos Martinez and his inconsistent mechanics alongside Sale here, though. And three pitchers who shared the same pitching coach recently, in Don Cooper of the White Sox.

Oh fine, let’s take a look at the other side.

While these guys are stressing their arms to get the most velo out of it, Colon and Sale are throwing free and easy, trying to rack up the innings, stay healthy, and leave gas in the tank. Maybe Sale can throw until he’s 44. Wouldn’t that be something nobody predicted?