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Stable Of One?
by Dave
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
I received an e-mail from a regular reader which suggested I put a little something into the blog regarding the overuse of pitchers. I have to note that in the past, I have tended to fall on the side of the argument which believed pitchers could throw as long as they liked and as long as they were not generally worn out. But my views on this are undergoing some changes and I'm about to put forth arguments which differ from what I have said in the past. This subject is somewhat controversial. I know I will hear from the other side in short order.
When I was first involved with this sport, somewhere along the way I read about how underhanded pitching was a much more natural motion than overhand. That is a somewhat obvious observation although not, in my view, a very careful analysis of the realities of windmill pitching. The notion was proffered that softball pitchers could throw virtually endlessly. They would wear out their legs and brains long before their arms or shoulders showed signs of strain. That is why, I read, you see so many of the top pitchers throwing so many innings, especially in the championship setting.
For years, medical professionals have warned us in the softball community that while the overhand and underhand motions do effect the joints differently, we would be mistaken to conclude that windmillers could go on forever, without ever suffering serious consequences to their joints, tendons and ligaments. We know that very often pitchers do suffer injuries. Yet we have seen so many very good teams on which the ace of the squad pitches 14 or more innings on a single day, sometimes on back to back days. We also recognize that there are not enough good pitchers to go around. We take these observations and conclude that if a girl is going to be a top caliber pitcher, she had better get used to pitching more than a single game on any day and be prepared to drive herself to physical exhaustion in championship brackets. Coaches put together teams knowing that they only have one true A level pitcher but reason that if they can get a kid here and there to just eat up one of their three games, the ace will take care of the other 14 innings.
Softball is just different. It certainly is not baseball. I saw the pitcher from (insert top 25 NCAA Div I team) throw 16 innings to keep her team alive on the WCWS. Obviously, good windmill pitchers can go the distance more than their baseball counterparts.
Let's take a look at just a little history. Long ago in baseball, pitchers threw a lot more than they do today. Some baseball pitchers threw full double headers. Some pitched back to back days, some back to back to back. A few baseball pitchers threw one game with their right arm and another with their left. Pitchers often played other positions when not pitching. Remember, Babe Ruth was a pitcher in the major leagues before he began to focus exclusively on hitting home runs.
When sports grow older, they often go through transformations. In the early days of football, not only did they wear very little padding and their helmets were laughably inadequate, but also players often played both ways, offensive and defensive teams. As the sport progressed, teams recognized that they got better results with 11 guys dedicated to offense and a different 11 to defense. nbsp; They had themselves specialists for functions like punting and field goal kicking but that was about it. Later on, they discovered certain position players were more well suited to certain types of plays. Certain blockers were better at pass blocking, run blocking or pulling and other types of plays. The same held true for other players like running backs and tight ends. And the same held true on the defensive side of the ball. Players were shuttles in and out based on expectations regarding the type of play likely. Defenses and offenses got more and more sophisticated to the point that coaches established whole "packages" of players for defensive situations. Now almost half the defensive team comes off the field to be replaced by another "package" of players depending on what is going on with the down and distance. Football has become almost as sophisticated as baseball!
(If you find that you are a purest who believes football teams are wrong to run players in and out on every play, you should consider that offensive teams do not generally agree with you. That is why the whole no-huddle offense was created - to take away time for coaches to make up their minds which package to send in and to sometimes prevent them from making any changes at all.)
Baseball, at least in terms of pitching, has become perhaps the most complicated sport on Earth. Like I said, in the day, pitchers threw often. They also often pitched complete games. Later, pitchers got into a rotation in which they threw every 4, then 5 days. Then, as time wore on, there came an era of the "fireman" who was a relief pitcher that was as dominant as a good starter. The fireman would come in when the pitcher seemed to be out of gas, generally in the 7th or 8th inning, sometimes earlier, sometimes in the 9th. The fireman typically pitched innings, not batters.
Teams noticed when their competition stopped trying to stretch out their pitchers to a full 9. They took notice when a fresh guy came in after the starter walked the leadoff hitter in the 7th and the fresh guy shut their teams down. Before long, the fireman was something they had to have. And the number of complete games dwindled. In the current era, we see things much more complicated than that. There are middle relievers, 7th inning guys, 8th innings guys, and closers.
Not very long ago, the only guys anybody worried about were the starters and the closer. Then it began to be recognized that teams without a true 8th inning guy were losing games when maybe they shouldn't. All of a sudden, the 8th inning guy became more important. Then the same became true of the 7th inning guy. Today it is fairly normal for a starter to go no more than 6, possibly 7 innings, another specialist or two to come in and throw just one inning in the 7th or 8th, and then either the 8th inning guy or the closer comes in to try to seal up the victory.
Even more extreme, many baseball teams carry a guy just to get out a single lefty, perhaps two, late in the game. These guys are probably the oddest breed of them all. Can you imagine a point in your pitching career where your warm-up pitches are 3 or 4 times more numerous than your game ones? These guys sometimes warm for 15 minutes and then come in to throw a single pitch! And I have heard team general managers complain that they are dissatisfied with the guy who is their "lefty specialist" and the market for such players is too thin!!!
There seems to be some dissatisfaction amongst purests regarding this kid-glove treatment of pitchers. They seem to think that teams are babying pitchers and this is leading to a weakened state of the game. Notable amongst the purests who want to extend pitchers in terms of innings and pitches is Nolan Ryan, whose pitching record stands in stark contrast to the way pitchers are treated today. He threw complete games. He was not beholden to any sort of pitch or inning count. He just gutted it out when he got tired. And he is going to try to get things back to the way they were with the team he runs.
Only time will tell if baseball will move back to a more rigorous pitching schedule. But one thing is for certain, the results, not anyone's philosophy, will push the action. If stretching pitchers out results in wins, particularly world series wins, then everyone in baseball will eventually follow suit. If it does not, it will not continue. And, even if we see more complete games in the future, we will not see the role of good relievers diminished very much, if at all.
Some of the reasons that baseball pitchers do not go as long today as they once did have to do with the ball and game conditions. Some of them have to do with the batters. Some of them have to do with medical reasons. And some are just plain common sense.
When baseball decided it wanted more balance between offense and defense because folks were not happy paying big money to go watch a pitchers' duel in which one team had 3 base hits and the other 1, they began taking steps to "level the playing field" between offense and defense. In the old days, outfield fences stood out near the horizon. Those were brought back in by large percentages. The pitchers mound was lowered. The ball was juiced. In the olden days, a pitcher threw what was practically a bean bag at a batter way down there who needed to hit the thing 450 feet just to hit the fence. Today, the baseball pitcher throws a super-ball straight at a batter who, if he check swings too hard and makes decent contact, has a very real chance of going yard.
Batters have much more sophisticated training today than they had in Ty Cobb or Ruth's generation. They have more video analysis than NASA once did. They have machines which train their eyes to hit all manner of pitches at all speeds, even those not humanly possible. There are numerous folks with doctorates in medical fields analyzing the most efficient swings. Coaching has become more and more sophisticated because, as anyone with a sports page this time of year can tell you, there is gold to be earned in them there hills. If hitters are not better trained today than they were 20, 50, 100 years ago, I'd be shocked speechless. These guys take batting practices in which there are video screens set up with tapes of the guy they are going to face tomorrow throwing. The hitters of today are more well prepared, if perhaps not better athletes than those of yesteryear.
They also undergo more strength and athletic training which is geared to hitting homeruns or just plain hitting. Pitchers have sophisticated prep too. But that does not diminish the prep batters have before they face them. Batters also get customized laser vision correction which sometimes gives them incredible vision comaprable to the games greats when their genetics would have failed them. The worlds of video analysis coupled with medical and sports training professionals has tailored training regimens to make them more effective. The entire world of technology seems destined to make baseball pitchers' lives more difficult.
And on top of these developments, batters have become more well schooled as the game has progressed. They make adjustments to pitchers, pitches, and to situations. All the knowledge of the previous generations has been passed down in the game. The hitters of today truly stand on the shoulders of those who went before them. The result is pitchers get run out of games earlier and earlier. Few pitchers have nearly as much success the second time through the lineup as they had with the first. Very few survive their third time through. &nbvsp; Only the absolute best can do more than that.
To go further, medical professionals have had many more years of examining the results of over-pitching in baseball. Each and every year, better and better understanding of injuries occurs. Over much time, we have come to understand that the pitching motion is very hard on the body. We have cut down the amount of pitches to the point where things like the "Joba Rules" in which a young pitcher for the New York Yankees had his number of innings and pitches held to a very low number in the name of preserving the longevity of his career, are becoming more commonplace despite the wisdom of the Nolan Ryans of the world.
So that's baseball and, to a lesser extent, football, two games which have a longer history than softball in the sense of person hours spent playing and examining the structures of the game in order to put together more wins. In both, a high degree of specialization has formed. Teams whose success and failure rides on their ability to win games and, hopefully, championships have instituted relatively high degrees of specialization. Nowhere is that more drastic than with baseball pitching.
To contrast baseball with fastpitch softball does not take a genius. I suppose that is why I am able to do it! Fastpitch softball much more resembles the baseball of Ruth and Cobb than it does the game of today. Teams will often use just one pitcher in the semifinal and championship games. Girls are called upon to throw 10 innings on Saturday and 14 or more on Sunday. Pitchers play the field when not pitching on today's lean travel team rosters. They very often have Ruthian hitting skills. Teams can sometimes jump on the back of one pitcher and ride her to high levels.
The result of seeing these pitchers aligned against us throw back to back games and play when they are not pitching is we come to the conclusion that we should expect this out of our best pitchers. We should search for an ace who can carry the entire team on her back. And the result often is that the team's best pitcher is expected to pitch one heck of a lot of innings, sometimes more than her body can take.
Our game is also becoming far more sophisticated. If you doubt this, consider the that 30 years ago, the SEC and ACC schools didn't even field teams in fastpitch. High schools in most states had either slow pitch or modified fastpitch. Softball did not merely take a back seat to baseball, it was required to ride in the pickup trucks' bay with the feed and livestock. And that was during hail storms.
Today there are fastpitch teams everywhere. More pop up every year. Schools are dropping slowpitch in favor of our game. Position players are going to see position specific private coaches. All players at pre-college higher levels are going to see sport-specific trainers. Batting instructors are far more numerous than they were 5, 10, 20 years ago. Teams travel all around the country to play against better competition. Whereas players from Florida were recruited for just church leagues twenty years ago, today it is becoming somewhat rare for a college team to not have some kid from there. A team from Florida actually won ASA Gold one year. And other states are quickly following suit by developing their programs to compete with the best.
As far as the game itself goes, the pitcher's plate was moved back to 43 feet from 40 with the specific idea of balancing the game's offense and defense. Some few dominant pitchers continued to strike out batters in droves but overall, there are more balls hit into play than there once were. While baseball is still the money sport and the money provides much of the sophisticated training, there is naturally a crumb phenomenon in which the best baseball technology becomes available to softballers. Hitters are better and the deck is stacked somewhat against pitchers.
On top of these developments, we are coming to recognize that pitchers, be they windmill or overhand, all have pretty high incidences of injury. The truth is there is nothing particularly natural about any pitching motion. Underhand may be more natural than overhand but it ain't something that is easy on the body. Pitchers can develop back problems, knee issues, and, of course, shoulder and arm injuries from overuse.
Further, it would be one thing if everybody in windmill pitching threw mostly fastballs with a few changes or a curve mixed in the way baseballers do. But that's not our game. Our game consists of rises, drops, screws, curves, etc. Again, it does not take a genius to recognize that windmillers contort their arms to make the ball dance.
I recall seeing a still photo one time of a pitcher right at ball release. This girl was wearing your typical uniform top so you could see her entire arm and shoulder. She was throwing a drop or a curve in the shot. She was a fairly skinny kid with not particularly much flesh to hide her muscles, tendons and ligaments from view. In the picture, as she released the ball, the muscles on her arms looked like elongated rubber band balls. You could see the actual fibers straining underneath her thin skin. The strain in tendons and ligaments was also apparently visible. The overall picture was one of almost her skin being transparent. Strain was plainly visible.
I would hazard a guess that this kid threw as many as 50% of her pitches using that particular pitch. Girls in our game do come to rely on one or two pitches as their bread and butter while using other types of pitches for set up or to throw the batter off their mainstays. And that "out pitch" or pitches is generally something that requires considerable strain, well beyond the mere fastball. It is common for an ace to be a dropballer, riseballer, or some such. The result is an incredible amount of strain on muscles, joints, tendons and ligaments, more than is evident in the statement that underhand throwing is more natural and less stressful on the body than overhand.
We do see college squads using more than just the ace in most istuations beyond the conference or NCAA championships. Typically, many colleges have three or four pitchers who see a fair amount of action. Typically, the same kid will not appear in both games of a routine, middle of the season, double header. When she does, it is usually for just a part of each game or most of one and little of the other. And many times, when she is used in more than one game, it is due to an injury to one or more of the other pitchers.
High school squads usually do not have the depth to use more than one pitcher most of the time. They may have a kid who fills out innings when they are playing weaker teams. But against the mediocre and good teams, a single kid is used unless they find themselves in one of those rare games in which they luck into a big lead. Sometimes, when scheduling puts demands on a team, the same kid might throw 7 innings in the morning and 7 in the evening. Very often, the same kid is pitching complete games on multiple consecutive days. It can be quite a grind.
Travel rosters, typically consisting of no more than 12 kids, sometimes 11, rarely find they have tremendous depth in pitching. Certainly a few fortunate teams have a wealth of pitching. But, as anyone in travel can tell you, if you have too much pitching today, you won't for very long because the pitchers who see too little action will quickly leave. Travel teams often have one ace plus a couple other pitchers who vary in terms of abilities. I have been involved with or known teams that have one good pitcher and several mediocre or below. I have been fortunate to involved with teams that have a good amount (3 or 4) of pitchers who can each throw 4-7 innings successfully almost any day. That's a real luxury.
By far the most common circumstance I have seen occurs in which a travel team has one kid who is head and shoulders above the other pitchers. Maybe she is an absolute flamethrower or perhaps she has a great mix of speeds. Maybe she is one of the few who can truly master the rise or maybe she is really a refined girl destined to play D-1 softball and be good at it. In any event, these teams often overuse these aces.
They start out Saturday with a plan of giving each kid a game and alternating their relief pitchers. Then they get to their first game and the number 3 struggles so they bring in number 1 who is still scheduled to start game three. She works four innings and then goes back to CF for game 2. Then in game 2, number 2 pitcher does very well until maybe the 4th or 5th when she loads up the bases. The team would like her to finish but they lost the first game, need to win this one, and are currently leading by a couple runs. So, in comes the ace to throw a couple more innings. There is a one game break and then game 3 starts. Of course, the ace is scheduled and will pitch it like usual. She's gone 13 or 14 on the day and tomorrow she will be expected to pitch 14 or more depending on how deep into the tournament the team goes.
This tremendous workload for the ace pitcher is done all the time in the travel world. There, luckily, the games come just once a week, unless the team scrimmages a lot during the week or has the ace pitch live batting practices a couple times. Still, it places tremendous stress on the pitcher's muscles, tendons, ligaments, and lest we forget, brain.
I was talking to someone on a fairly typical travel team the other day. His daughter was a pitcher at 12U for an ambitious team. They played something like 100-110 games during one year. That is a lot even for top travel clubs, at least in my experience. This team was the typical travel club in that they had 3 pitchers. One struggled that year because she was younger. The number 2 was pretty good but could not get batters out after the second time through the lineup. The ace, this guy's daughter, pitched the lion's share of the innings. In about 100 games, averaging perhaps 6 innings, yielding about 600 innings on work, this guy figured his kid pitched about half to two thirds. That's 300 to 400 innings! You know what? After that season, she got hurt.
There are more injuries to windmill pitchers than anyone likes to talk about. Sometimes these injuries are traced to non-work-level reasons. Sometimes the tracing is done for self-serving reasons. I have often heard folks talk about how their ace pitcher got hurt because she is generally out of shape or because she must do something wrong with one of her pitches. It isn't the pitching that caused the stress, it was the kid's fault. Many times, the injury is pegged to a reason that isn't the kid's fault but is just one of those things. I think she slept on her shoulder wrong. Her parents have bad shoulders (knees or whatever) and she inherited them. S0ometimes it is game related but not in any way related to pitching. She hurt her foot running the bases and was over-compensating for that when she pulled a muscle in her arm while pitching.
Excuses are like ..., everybody has one. Everybody has more reasons to explain something than they have excuses!
We examine data in order to trace and locate cause and effect. Pitchers, by the numbers, get hurt. It does not so much matter that we can use anecdote to blame something other than overuse. Co-incidence does not necessarily indicate causality but one has to wonder about the relationship between pitching too much and other factors. On top of this, we have the whispers of medical professionals in our ears. They are warning those of us who believe firmly that windmill pitching doesn't cause strain that perhaps they are wrong. They are telling us that the strains of the windmiller are similar enough to those on baseball pitchers to take a closer look. They are telling us that we need to have more pitching and to use it.
I hope I am at least causing travel and other coaches to think about how much they use pitchers. I hope I am getting you to at least think about it. The game is quickly maturing though it will never mature as much as baseball or football - there just is not that kind of money around. As it matures, there will be more and more need for more pitchers. I think we are starting to see this development in the college game. Eventually that may make its way down to high school though depth will still be a problem. We need to at least consider it for the travel game. Parents of ace pitchers should watch the amount of time (innings and pitches) their daughters work. m Pitchers should not allow themselves to be used when they are overtired. A stable of one is just not enough.Labels: coaching, pitching, youth tournament teams
Permanent Link: Stable Of One?
 
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