https://bleacherreport.com/articles/144276-why-cant-pitchers-throw-as-many-innings-as-they-used-to THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2009 By the way; the mound was reduced in 69... Sure the Strike Zone was a bit bigger; but it was and met the standard of and to the bylaws of MLB; as noted below. Imo; it's not about the heighth of the mound and it sure isn't about the size of the K-Zone; then or now; if you read the link noted below. This is all about Pitching; and why the fewer innings pitched. We've got better conditioned athletes today; yet we have much much more injury; with TJ surgery being the norm these days; so why the fewere innings??? Read on- then pass judgement if you will.... https://www.businessinsider.com/mlb-strike-zone-2014-9 According to rule 2.00 of the Major League Baseball rule book, a strike zone is defined as "that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap" and is determined by "the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball." Perry Arnold March 24, 2009 A couple of weeks ago I saw an interview of Tom Seaver on MLB network. He was asked if he ever had a pitch count when he was with the Mets. His answer was astonishing. He said "Yes, that his pitch count was probably about 135." That made me wonder why pitching has changed so much and why there is no an automatic pitch count of 100 on virtually every pitcher in the major leagues and there are innings limits on pitchers. Seaver made the comment that every pitcher now has a limit of 100 pitches per game and at that point they begin to look for the right time to take him out. Seaver pitched 20 years in the big leagues. I went back and looked at his records, won/loss, innings pitched and complete games. A representative sample for his career shows that from 1967 through 1979 the fewest innings he ever pitched was in 1979 when he threw 215 innings. He threw as many as 290 innings twice during that period. And he finished games. He averaged 15 complete games per season during that period. I decided to look at other pitchers of that era. Bert Blyleven pitched in the bigs for 22 seasons. Looking at a nine year period from 1971 through 1979 Bert averaged 273 innings per year. Read that again, please. Over nine years he averaged 273 innings per year. He threw as many as 325 innings in a season and he averaged 16 complete games those nine years. Luis Tiant pitched for 19 years. During his hey-day from 1968-1976 he averaged 271 innings per year and 18 complete games per year. The Baltimore Orioles of the late '60s and 1970s had three dominant pitchers in Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar and Dave McNally. They also had incredible numbers of innings pitched and complete games. Palmer pitched 19 years in the bigs. In the span from 1969 through 1978 he averaged 19.2 wins per season. He also averaged 18 complete games per year and 272 innings per year. Palmer had four seasons in which he was over 300 innings per season and two other years when he had 296 innings per year. Cuellar had a six-year period from 1969 through 1974 when he was almost as dominant. During that six years he averaged over 20 wins per year, 277 innings per season and 19 complete games per season. Dave McNally averaged 19 wins per year from 1968 through 1974. He also pitched an average of 261 innings per season and fourteen complete games per season. Looking at one more dominant pitcher of that era, Bob Gibson pitched for 17 seasons. From 1963 through 1974 he averaged 18.5 complete games, 263 innings and 19.45 wins per season. Of course, I have chosen to look at the statistics of seven very dominant pitchers of that era of the '60s and '70s. But one could look at almost any pitcher of that time and the number of games they started, the number of innings they threw, the number of games they completed would be far, far higher than the average pitcher in today's game. Many teams used a four man rotation in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Starting pitchers were expected to pitch late into games. Even the role of closer was different. Recent Hall of Fame inductee, Goose Gossage has talked a lot about the fact that when he came into a game it was going to be in the seventh or eighth inning and he was expected to pitch until the game was over. The idea of a "closer" getting three or four outs was unheard of through the 1970s. And going back to what Seaver said in the interview. His pitch count was probably 135 per game. He mentioned Nolan Ryan and other pitchers and everyone of them had pitch counts that were much higher than 100. Now pitchers are babied. From the lowest minor leagues they are not conditioned to pitch long into games. They are restricted severely on the number of pitches they can pitch in games. They are also limited in how many innings they can pitch. Even this year, expectations are that Joba Chamberlain will not exceed about 160 innings for the New York Yankees. There has even been a great deal of discussion about CC Sabathia being limited in the number of innings he will throw and that he has pitched so much in the past couple of years that he cannot be expected to have anything left in the playoffs. Someone, or some group of strategists has changed baseball. Without question workout regimens, training programs, weight lifting and nutrition are all better now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. So why can pitchers not throw as much as they used to be able to throw? Why does anyone think that a young pitcher such as CC Sabathia should be held to under 220 innings? Should player development experts, pitching coaches and managers not instead be looking at the way things used to be done? Should not someone be talking to Tom Seaver and Jim Palmer and Luis Tiant and Bob Gibson and try to figure out what they did that allowed them to pitch so much for so long and to be so good? The only theory that has been advanced that makes any sense to this writer is the idea that so much is invested in the pitchers now, both in time and money, and pitching talent is generally so thin that no one wants to take a chance on ruining a good arm. That may be the thought but if you look at the picture historically, young men should be able to throw a baseball much more than is expected today.
One of the ways baseball, from the MLB level down, has tried to combat this problem is through pitch counts, and when it comes to those, there is one magic number across the sport: 100. How did we come to decide that 100 pitches were too many? Well, it seems that the number was arbitrary. James Andrews, the renowned orthopedic surgeon, suggested 100 — a ballpark figure — in a 1999 study titled "Elbow Injuries in Young Baseball Players" with James Whiteside. Even 17 years later, this study is still frequently cited. The 100-pitch limit suggestion took hold, and it seems over time, the suggestion lost its ambiguity. There’s no data to suggest that 100 is the magic number of fatigue, after which injuries increase at an alarming rate. There’s no information that’s been collected that labels the 100th pitch as a saturation point of effectiveness either. It’s an arbitrary number — a ballpark figure. One must presume it was well-estimated, but it was an estimation nonetheless. But over time, the estimation became the law. https://www.foxsports.com/mlb/story...ch-limit-rookie-100-pitches-reason-why-040916
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-bullpens-took-over-modern-baseball/ the broader trend that goes back half a century is clear. In 1964 (four years after the save rule first came to baseball), teams used an average of 2.58 pitchers per game, including the starter; today, they’re using 3.92 pitchers per game. In ’64, relievers tossed an average of 2.64 innings per game; today, they’re throwing an eyelash more than three innings per game. Starters are getting yanked much earlier now than they did during Willie Mays’s heyday, and relievers are shouldering a greater percentage of the pitching load. But what’s most striking is how much bigger the jump is in the number of pitchers used per game as compared to number of relief innings thrown per game. Bullpens weren’t always like this. In 1960, sportswriter Jerome Holtzman introduced the save statistic to baseball. Holtzman wanted a way to better recognize the impressive contributions of pitchers like Joe Page and Hoyt Wilhelm, relief aces who came out of the bullpen to replace tiring starters, often throwing multiple innings at a time. Over the ensuing 25 to 30 years, bullpens slowly evolved, to the point where managers started to ease back on the role of multi-inning stoppers. The person often credited with the next wave of changes is Tony La Russa. The former White Sox, A’s and Cardinals manager figured he could squeeze more value out of his bullpen by placing a greater emphasis on putting specific relievers in a spot where they’d have the best chance to succeed. If you want to know why a contemporary manager may use three different relievers in a single inning in the name of getting the lefty-on-lefty and righty-on-righty matchups he wants, you can give a lot of the credit (or blame, if you’re not a huge fan of three and a half-hour games) to La Russa. this data gives us a good idea of the “what.” Figuring out why relievers are getting so much faster and so much better is trickier, because it’s more subjective. It’s possible that teams are doing a better job of recognizing which pitchers should be converted into relievers and which ones should remain starters. In the same way the Yankees figured out that Betances was much better suited to relief work, the Cincinnati Reds resisted the temptation to make Aroldis Chapman a starter and let him unleash his electrifying fastball in the closer role instead. Chapman alone might be skewing our data set somewhat, given the frequency with which he launches blinding fastballs, and the incredible results he produces. According to the excellent site Baseball Savant, Chapman has thrown a staggering 257 fastballs that have topped 100 mph this year; every other pitcher in the majors has combined to throw 103 of them. Earlier this year, in an an article about the recent increase in Tommy John surgeries, I discussed why we might be seeing more pitchers assaulting radar guns than ever before. One frequently cited theory holds that kids are specializing in one sport at an earlier age, so once they lock in on baseball they’re building arm strength and pitch velocity more quickly, but also making themselves more susceptible to future injury. That so many can throw so fast, and so many hit the disabled list, makes relievers fungible (with a few exceptions like Betances and Chapman). As a result, managers choose a few relievers from a phalanx of fireballers, then go get a few more if some of them break down. In other words, the pitchers might be on the mound for fewer and fewer. Call it what you will: I call it the pussification of Starting Pitching in MLB....This has nothing to do with the strike zone; or the mound heighth.... Umps are worse than ever in this era imho...Regardless of the K-Zone!!!
Teams are using data much more nowadays. Pitchers get less and less effective each time through the order, so teams are trying to milk the most effective innings and lose the others. Unless you're a Verlander type who stays strong through 9, you're going to get pulled before you ever reach your most ineffective innings. Look at the use of openers. Teams are trying to have their starter (really follower) avoid the top of the order once to keep them away from damage. They'd rather use a reliever going full-tilt for an inning or two to shut down the top bats and then let the starter come in. Relievers have the lower OPS averages against them because they don't have to pace themselves, and they only go through the order one time. I think it's like all the extreme fielding shifts, they're ugly and don't look like real baseball to me, but there's no arguing they work.
....^^^^ Just stretching out. Wait 'till I start warming up. I'm gonna give everyone a tipoff, when it's time to "play ball"; I won't be throwing any curves, breaking balls or off speed junk. It's gonna be nothing but BB's (not bases on balls, lol). No chin music; even if someone pisses me off. It's gonna be nothing but flames. The only thing that will be breaking will be the speed of sound. Signed: - Senor Smoke aka- Fuego Rojo
I will give you one reason and this is coming from a very reliable source...myself... My nephew is a college pitcher...he was pitching since little league...he was on travel teams...he was going to pitching instructors aince jr high. He was throwing curve balls and sliders in middle school...his junior year of high school..guess what...tj surgery... The summer before that season..he had scouts feom the diamnonbacks lookong at him... Injury and he had to go to community college for 1 year then onto a 4 year school. He was pitching way too many innings while his arm was still growing. Im sure the premier pitchers of yesteryear were not throwing all the differnet types of pitches they use today nor throwing in as many games at such a young age. Baseball is 12 months a year, even here on long island...multiple travel teams where coaches dont or choose not to communicate with each other and kids end up throwing way too much.
One other thing that comes to mind as we are watching sox yanks...batters are have a totally different though process on todays game..taking more and more pitches. more swinging for the fences which drives pitch counts up.
Would not be surprised that today’s pitchers have less of a chance to enter the HOF. With pitch counts getting lower & lower, 5 inning stints get you zilch, injuries cut down pitcher duration, emphasis on relief and not the starters ........HOF selection is almost nil.
