College Baseball

quote:

Originally posted by CADad:
Typical of college baseball it seems. I wanted to post this before seeing the results.

UCI brought back it's Saturday starter who threw 6 innings on Saturday to pitch the 9th today. Hard to believe but typical of college baseball. Risk a career to win a game.

That is not typical of most top college programs and unfortunetly a third games hurts unless you have endless depth. This move, IMO cost them a trip to Omaha.

The reason I wanted to get that posted before seeing the results was that I didn't think the results were relevant to the point I was making. I maintain that it is typical of college baseball when it comes to the "big prize".

Now it should be obvious that the stiffest day after a heavy workout, i.e. pitching quite a few innings, is not the next day but the day after that. It was a bad move in more ways than one.

CADad,
The best )or worst) illustration of your point, that I ever saw, occurred in 2004 at the DIII level.
Unfortunately, the pitcher involved was a potential top draft pick, not your better DIII pitcher.
In the West Regional, he threw 9 innings(120 or so pitches) on Thursday. Came back and pitched 1 1/3 in relief on Saturday.
Started against our son's team in the Championship game and went 7 1/3 on Sunday(130 or so pitches).
They win the West Regional and are off to the DIII CWS.
Comes back on Thursday in Appleton and goes 9.
Back on Saturday or Sunday(cannot remember which) and pitches 1-2 inning.
Back on Monday for the Championship and pitches another nearly complete game. He throws roughly 36 innings in 12 days.
His best pitch was a very tough slider at 87 or so.
Two weeks later he is a 6th-7th round pick.
In August he is shut down during short season, has surgery and never pitches again.
More than a few players with whom I have interacted about this have posted that getting that "ring" makes everything after worth it.
The coach of that Championship team received a promotion to a top Pac 10 program.

Getting "that ring" is worth it because they were told that by college coaches who maintain or enhance their careers by getting that ring. I don't think the ring was worth it to the player in the case you mention and many times they don't get the ring anyways.

Scary how young men can be abused for the sake of a coaching career.

Which is why we need to constantly reinforce in our kids that they have to take responsibility for their bodies regardless what the coach wants. It is a fine line that they walk, wanting to contribute and help their teammates but having the maturity to say “coach I can’t go today”.

quote:

Originally posted by CADad:
Getting "that ring" is worth it because they were told that by college coaches who maintain or enhance their careers by getting that ring. I don't think the ring was worth it to the player in the case you mention and many times they don't get the ring anyways.

Scary how young men can be abused for the sake of a coaching career.

Are you talking about any coach specifically, because I don't remember son's coaches ever telling him that his career would be enhanced by getting a championship ring?

And how do we know that the player didn't ask to be placed in that situation?

My guess is that the player in question asked to be put in that situation. That's the mentality that is often encouraged in HS ball and in college ball. So what? That doesn't absolve the coach.

The ring thing was a response to infielddad who said that the coach in that case moved up to a better job after getting the ring while helping to ruin the player. It happens. I don't know what percentage of college coaches would or wouldn't do it but it happens.

I think infielddad's post is a pretty good case in point that it does happen.

quote:

Stands for Pitcher Abuse Points. Only reason I know is because my son is listed.

It's over my head , but here is the explanation I found.

The basic formula for PAP is a counting stat where, for each appearance, the pitcher is credited with the number of pitches over 100 cubed --
PAP = (NP - 100) ^ 3, where NP is the maximum of the number of pitches or 100. In the essay in the book, they go on to successfully correlate this measure with two different outcomes -- pitchers with higher PAP counts are likely to be less effective later in the season (something which should get every coach's attention), and they are more likely to lose significant time to injury at some point later in their career. The plot of reduced effectiveness with the cubic formation of PAP3 is especially striking.

______________
"If you can read this, thank a teacher, and since it's in English, thank a soldier !!"

This came from FrankF.

From what I can tell the highest PAP scores tended to come from smaller schools lacking depth in their staffs. The top schools didn't tend to abuse their pitchers and had no need to ride one or two pitchers.

Of course with the format of the CWS it all changes and one is more likely to see one or two pitchers ridden hard even for the bigger schools with deep, capable staffs.

I am not disagreeing with what you said about the player that started on sat and then was put in to close yesterday. As I said that totally worked against them, IMO.
PA (D1) is way down from years ago, I am not sure how far one can go back, but it has changed significantly.
The one thing that it doesn't show, is the above scenerio, a pitcher can pitch 125 and then come back 3 days later for an inning. That is abuse, but not sure that happens often except as teams advance to their championship.