Strength in Numbers #91
Our company has dedicated roughly 20 hours to discussing pitch counts this past week. And interestingly, our discussion revolves around the beginning of the MLB season when the training wheels come off, and players get to ride.
But even among the pros, should you let the dogs loose without a leash? Does the 100-pitch limit for starters make sense at this time?
Let the Pitch count chaos ensue…
Ten years ago, as a doctoral student, I and a few Canadians smarter than me, Dr. Tom Karakolis, who works in the Canadian Defense Sector, and Shivam Bhan, an executive with Nike, set out to understand if pitch counts and innings really matter to anything at all.
It’s been ten years, and for some reason, people still don’t understand the critical findings.
The way we are using pitch counts, at least at the MLB level, have ABSOLUTELY NO INJURY PROTECTIVE VALUE. I can spare you the pain of reading these articles, but if you want to, here are a couple of links:
An Inferential and Descriptive Statistical Examination of the Relationship Between Cumulative Work Metrics and Injury in Major League Baseball Pitchers.
In professional baseball, every team has a different build-up process at the MIL level, where the pressure to win is not so great. Generally, on the most conservative end, pitchers throw 60 pitches or 4 innings, 75 or 5 innings, and 90 or 6 innings over the year.
But again, there is no data to support these pitch count ladders work.
In my first year in pro ball, I worked with the St. Louis Cardinals and some of the best players in the game. One athlete we had was Lance Lynn.
The Cardinals would use two starters and a reliever in an interesting model called the “Piggyback” system at the short-season level to prepare the arms for full-season teams.
This system groomed more pitchers to throw more innings and allowed you to interconvert starters to reliever roles and visa-versa. So, for example, you may have a pitcher open and throw 4, a second starter throw 4, and a reliever throw 1 inning.
This workload scaling method was supposed to reduce fatigue, which I studied and found was accurate. In combination with our strength programming, pitchers saw a 4 mph average increase over the season using the Piggyback system, which was way before the explosion of information and programming using weighted balls.
Now, here’s the kicker. Jordan Oseguera, our pitching performance mind at ArmCare, worked with me as a Pitching Analyst in our Performance Integration Department.
He did an extensive dive into the impacts of pitch counts in the minor leagues and found that:
- The healthiest teams were the ones that threw the most before the full season.
- They could give their pitchers higher pitch counts at each progressive level.
These things ultimately prepared arms for the rigors of MLB while more injury-prone teams were still building up pitchers in the big leagues.
Be A Part Of The Elite
Now, if you want to help us shape our workload models, and get in on other conversations behind closed doors, join our ArmCare Elite (ACE) community.
You will become a part of the Elite by becoming dually certified as an ArmCare Specialist and ArmCare Biomechanist.
We are growing by the day, and when we reach 50, we will start having deep discussions on important topics in baseball, beginning with individualized pitch count approaches that we are building based on strength qualities and fatigue resistance.
We could use some fresh eyes to get a feel for real-world scenarios across tournament play, states and countries, age levels, and competitive ranks from various experts who are part of ACE.
If you want in, we are making a soft launch here for a new course bundle, and if you have taken the Certified ArmCare Specialist Course or Certified Pitching Biomechanist Course and you want to take the next course, go to our course page and take advantage of our new pricing below.
