Reply to "Pitching Injuries"

       
       


When it comes to common sense, I think you and I have both discovered that that is unfortunately lacking in many of these situations.
As far as the pitch counts go, I'm of the understanding that they are only tallying the pitches thrown in a competitive setting, ie. to a live batter. I think warm ups, throws to first etc. are factored in as given so only the competitive pitches are counted. I think they assume a certain number of these throws are part of the preparation and not as stressful on the arm. That can be debatable.
I'll share a related story on this exactly common sense, pitch count. During the 5th round of the playoffs my son's freshman year, he pitched a Saturday game 3 and was pulled after the 5th inning. Pitch count his freshman year was never an issue because the coach taught psychology and was certain a 14 year old freshman couldn't handle the mental stress of varsity. Now his talent had him there but the coach always had a quick hook at the first sign of adversity. That probably saved the inevitable discussion of pitch counts for his mom and me. Back to the game.... we were leading 5-0 after 5 and he had thrown 72 pitches. Probably a good point to pull him but it wasn't due to pitch count, I think that's as far as he'd trust the freshman and chose to bring in senior. Besides his post game arm care, his usual protocol was to throw lightly the next day, do band work and get a running program in. Plus 2 days was a long toss day and so on. So Sunday he did his usual and Monday he was to long toss. I told him if he didn't get to during practice, call me and I'd come up after practice to long toss with him. Inevitable I get the call he didn't during practice, his head coach has a terrible protocol for his pitchers, so I met him at the high school to throw with him.  I forgot the ball bucket so we had to ask the coach if we could borrow a ball bucket. He asked my son what we were doing and when son informed him he was going to long toss, he said "aren't you sore, you should be sore." Now whether it's his post pitching routine or luck , my son rarely if ever gets sore. When he informed the coach of this, the coach said, "if I'd had known that, I would have had you throw in the intrasquad today." At this point I knew he didn't understand the difference in stress of long toss, a bullpen or throwing to live batters. Lesson learned for both. When the high school pitching coach heard this, he put his head down and walked away.