Do Today’s Pitchers Break Too Easily?

As a New York area baseball fan, I find it particularly frustrating how young pitchers are babied by organizations in an often futile attempt to preserve their arms. Such things as pitch counts, innings counts, late-season shut-downs and the like. I’m thinking of the so-called “Joba” rules, when the Yankees were nurturing Joba Chamberlain when he was lighting things up as a young gun five years ago. 

The minute you get to like a young pitcher like a Joba or a Harvey or a Wheeler on the Mets, and a Strasburg, on the Washington Nationals, the teams shut them down to “save” their arms and avoid a potential flame-out. Yet Joba and Harvey and Strasburg still ended up with major arm surgery, despite the delicate handling. So why the innings limitations? Doesn’t seem to work, in my opinion.

But then my judgment is skewed by flawed images of the past, when pitchers like Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Satchel Paige, Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan, Don Drysdale and many others pitched 250+ innings year after year. In four-man rotations, not five. Makes one consider if the more you work a pitcher, the better they get. But then I found this article that seems to have solved the mystery for me.

It seems that it has always been thus. Even in the old-timey days, pitchers flamed out constantly—with an attrition rate probably worse than it is today. For every iron man like Walter Johnson or Cy Young, there were dozens of Dizzy Deans and Herb Scores and Brandon Webbs, who were done in their late 20s.

But I still think the obsession with pitch counts has less to do with a pitcher’s longevity than good genes and flawless mechanics. The one saving grace is that today’s training and surgical solutions help rescue many more careers than in years past. But, gee, can’t we have a bit more than 150 innings out of Zack Wheeler or Noah Syndergaard this year? Please?