Yes, there’s a gray area here. There’s an art to when a pitcher should be pulled that takes into account his history of injury, how smoothly he has progressed through a game, how well he rebounds from tough games. I just worry that in too many cases the art is being tossed by the wayside. Hard numbers hold too much sway.
Larry Bowa agrees. The Dodgers’ third base coach, famously tough, sneered when asked about pitch counts. “I don’t like ‘em,” he said, noting that he’d make some exceptions for young players and whippet-thin ones. “This stuff is hurting the game. These guys get to 100 pitches and they start looking for help. They don’t know how to pitch out of a jam or bring home the win.”
Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt hardly hid his thoughts either. He called this a problem deeply woven into modern baseball, one that’s awfully hard to stop at the major league level. “You get guys like Chad Billingsley and Clayton Kershaw and they’ve been on a pitch count since the minors,” he said. “They’re 24 and 25 and it’s hard to get them off it.”
Things won’t ever go back to the way they used to be, nor should they. But Honeycutt said baseball can move in a more balanced direction if jolted by a successful team that goes against the grain. Down in Texas, in his second year as president of the Rangers, Ryan is trying to do just that. His mantra, from the minors on up: toss the pitch counts to the side—let the pitchers show their stuff.
Said Honeycutt: “You’ve got to have a guy like a Nolan Ryan saying ‘enough of this stuff, there’s no reason in the world these guys can’t go 120 pitches. No reason at all.’ A guy like Ryan, maybe he can shock the world.”
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1. Walt Davis Posted: June 20, 2009 at 11:59 PM (#3226518)Baseball people made the decision to limit pitches. They enforce it at every level of their organization. They could change it tomorrow but they don't.
Yet we outsiders are supposed to believe them when they complain about them?
Anybody know how the Rangers' experiment is going?
Because, as every baseball fan knows, no starting pitcher ever has to pitch out of a jam prior to throwing that one hundredth pitch.
DB
In that sense, Torre was paying attention more to the pitch count than to Billingsley's command that night.
now nolan ryan is trying to turn every pitcher into a freak like himself
shrug
whatever, it's not my team
but i sure notice that they are not leaving the pitchers out there to try to pitch out of jams and finish the game after throwing 180-200 pitches like ryan did every single start his entire 22 years AND HE LIKED IT!!!!
the media is getting tiresome with this every guy gotta go out there and pitch complete games and throw 300 innings a year like every single other pitcher did up until TLR come to town and dennis eckersly Ruined Baseball
When did he get so tough? Was he considered tough as a 150 lb shortstop? Does reaching your second half-century and growling a lot make you tough?
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