quote:
Not only that, consider that nowadays kids are throwing way too much, way too early, way too hard, way too many off speed add that with the frequent use of radar guns clocking very YOUNG pitchers.
For the people reading this, do not confuse throwing with pitching. Today's kids throw too little and pitch too much. Throwing builds arm strength. Pitching too much tears arms down.
Spahn played in an era, as someone else mentioned, when we threw all day, every day, all summer. Not pitched, threw. We all had arm strength. Those good enough to play MLB ball had incredible arm strength. Spahn once went 16 innings and 163 pitches. I believe Juan Marichal also went the distance that game with a similar count.
Today, due to lack of sandlot ball building arm strength, combined with the investment pro ball puts into today's players, the pitcher's arms are pampered. Rookie A pitchers rarely throw more than four innings in a game. They're being conditioned to not be able to go more than one hundred pitches.
Article on former pitchers and pitch counts:
Staying Power ... Not so long ago, complete games were common and starters hated to come out. Those days are gone
By Chris Dufresne, Times Staff Writer
Thirty years ago tomorrow night, in the cavernous confines of near-empty Anaheim Stadium, Denny Doyle doubled home Mickey Rivers in the bottom of the 15th inning to lift the California Angels to a 4-3 victory over the Boston Red Sox.
Barry Raziano pitched two innings of relief to earn what was his only major league victory.
Raziano, who runs a construction company in Louisiana, said recently he has no recollection of the game, which puts him in the overwhelming majority.
You could argue, however, that someone will eclipse Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak before another game is played like the one on June 14, 1974.
Standing at his clubhouse cubicle before a recent game, Angel pitcher Jarrod Washburn eyeballed a copy of the disco-era game log and shook his head.
"No," Washburn said, "it won't happen again."
What happened was this:
Boston starting pitcher Luis Tiant pitched 14 1/3 innings and took the loss.
Nolan Ryan of the Angels lasted 13 innings, struck out 19 batters, walked 10 and, hold onto your helmets, threw 235 pitches.
When contacted for this story, Ryan asked that the box score from that game be faxed to his office in Texas.
After reviewing it, Ryan said two memories stood out: striking out Cecil Cooper six times and "not wanting to come out" after heaving his final pitch, which yielded a ground out to second by Carl Yastrzemski.
By today's standards, Tiant and Ryan each pitched more than two "quality starts" — six innings, three earned runs or fewer allowed — on the same night.
"Quality start?" Ryan chuckled over the phone. "In those days, if I had pitched only six innings and gave up three runs I had a bad outing and I was hacked off.
"And I can tell you what: my manager and general manager weren't happy either."
What makes the 1974 game seem remarkable now is how unremarkable it seemed then.
The Times' game account acknowledged "Tiant and Ryan dueled tenaciously," yet there was no mention of Ryan's pitch count in the game story or the following-day notes. Ryan knows he threw 235 only because Tom Morgan, the Angel pitching coach, kept track on a hand-held clicker.
"I think he did it out of, I don't know if it was curiosity or what," Ryan said.
No pitch totals were readily available on Tiant, but how could he have not thrown at least 180?
Get this: There were no grievances filed to the players' union, no complaints by either pitcher about inhumane treatment, no newspaper scribe's rebuke of the managers who allowed it and, in the case of Ryan, no rest for the weary.
"It obviously ruined his arm because he had to retire 19 years later," said Bill James, a renowned chronicler of baseball facts and figures.
Ryan took his regularly-scheduled start four days later and won, pitched again five days later and won again, started five days after that and tossed a one-hit shutout against Texas.
"Guys like Nolan Ryan, they only come around once every 100 years or so," the Angels' Washburn said.
Ryan may have been blessed with a bionic arm, but he did not corner the market on durability.
He finished with 26 complete games in 1973 and 1974 and did not lead the league either year.
Ryan, who won 324 games and pitched until age 46, led the league in innings pitched only once, in 1974, with 332 2/3.
Since then, baseball has gone from seat-of-the-pants, gut-check performances to Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky.
Whether baseball is better now is open to debate.
Modern-day pitchers rarely are allowed to throw more than 110 pitches, after which chess-master managers consult their flow charts and start a parade of percentage maneuvers involving multitudes of relief pitchers.
"You know, in those days," Ryan mused, "I was my own closer."
There was outrage recently when San Francisco Manager Felipe Alou allowed Jason Schmidt to complete a game in which he threw 144 pitches.
Ryan says, in 1974, he averaged between 160 and 180 pitches per outing.
For 100 years or so, baseball was played a certain way, and that way was good enough to earn it status as our "National Pastime."
Once, starting pitchers were warriors and relief pitchers were, Ryan said, guys who never got to pitch "unless your starter was just horrible and got knocked out early."
At some point in the 1970s, baseball was transformed, irrevocably, right in the middle of Ryan's career.
"I can remember the first couple of starters that I knew that didn't go out with the intent of finishing the ballgame," the Hall of Fame pitcher said. "I couldn't fathom that.
"I came from the mind-set that it was your game, you were the starter and you had every intention of finishing it.... You weren't remotely interested in turning it over to somebody. That's just the way it was. You thought nothing of it."
Fred Claire, the former Dodger general manager, tried to imagine Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale getting yanked from the mound after topping the 100-pitch count.
"Those guys would have looked at [manager] Walter Alston like he was somebody that had come down from Mars," Claire said.
In 1933, Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants pitched 18 shutout innings in a 1-0 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals and, no, his arm didn't fall off.
In the seventh game of the 1962 World Series, New York Yankee manager Ralph Houk allowed starter Ralph Terry, a right-hander, to face San Francisco Giant left-handed slugger Willie McCovey in the bottom of the ninth inning of a 1-0 game with runners at second and third.
"Think about that," said Bob Costas, a noted baseball historian.
McCovey lined out to second baseman Bobby Richardson in a classic World Series ending.
On July 2, 1963, Juan Marichal of the Giants and the Milwaukee Braves' Warren Spahn matched pitches in a game the Giants won, 1-0, on Willie Mays' solo home run in the bottom of the 16th inning.
Anyone think this is the same sport?
In 1974, there were 1,089 complete games thrown in the major leagues.
Last year, there were 209.
In 1974, the Boston Red Sox pitching staff combined for 71 complete games.
In 2003, the Houston Astros' staff combined to pitch one.
In 1968, Detroit's Denny McLain led the majors with 30 complete games.
Last year, three players led the majors with nine.
Some say baseball isn't better or worse now, it's just back-loaded.
Whereas Koufax, Drysdale and Don Sutton were the heroes when dinosaur Dodgers ruled the earth, Claire noted, "the most exciting player the Dodgers have today is Eric Gagne," a closer.
Costas understands there is no going back from the strategic turn baseball took while acknowledging the game has somewhat suffered.
"There's tremendous drama in a guy walking off the mound after completing a tough, complete-game victory, or trying to make his way through it," Costas said. "You don't have those moments anymore."
Changes
Why did baseball change and, more important, why did it have to?
"Why does anything evolve?" the Angels' Darwinist manager, Mike Scioscia, wondered.
Even statistician James, the man who turned baseball thinking inside out, can't quite put his finger on the answer.
"Without anyone deciding we were going to dramatically change the game, it wandered very, very quickly in a certain direction," James said.
Baseball experts cite several factors that coalesced in the 1970s that led to radical departures in baseball thinking:
FREE AGENCY
It did to the complete game what MTV did to the radio star. When players were finally granted free agency in the 1970s, and salaries started to escalate, owners became more interested in protecting their investments.
"When we were on one-year contracts and you went down, I can remember they tried to cut people 20%, or they wouldn't sign you," Ryan, whose career spanned from 1966 through 1993, said. "All they did was lose a starting pitcher, they didn't lose a starting pitcher and still have to pay him eight to 10 million over a three- or four-year period."
Ryan said front office men seeking to protect the bottom line began to think that pitchers would last longer if they pitched fewer innings per start.
This put more emphasis on the role of relief pitchers, whose increasing roles led to rising salaries that also needed to be justified.
Ryan says this begat the modern-day "set-up man" and "closer."
"Now, if you sign a guy for an exorbitant amount of money and you guarantee his contract, you have locked yourself into that person," Ryan said. "You have committed to that person that he is going to play."
Eventually, the "pitch count" worked its way into the manager's decision-making process and is now as much a part of the baseball box score as at-bats.
Ryan's opinion of the pitch count: "absurd."
James says the pitch count redefined the way the game was managed and reported.
"It was unfair, inaccurate and it shouldn't have happened," James said. "But pitch counts became a weapon with which to attack any manager who let a starter throw 130 pitches."
SPORTS MEDICINE
In 1974, Dodger orthopedic surgeon Frank Jobe performed a historic ligament transplant surgery on pitcher Tommy John, extending a career that otherwise would have been finished.
In the years since, the surgery has prolonged the careers of hundreds of pitchers.
Claire said Jobe and other sports doctors made huge strides in understanding the mechanics of the pitching motion and, more important, how unnatural an act it is.
As pitchers rehabilitated from injuries, it was understandable their arms were treated with more care.
Whereas, Claire said, "When guys in the 1950s hurt their arms they were done."
INSIDE BASEBALL
James, who once worked at a pork-and-beans plant in Lawrence, Kan., published his first "Baseball Abstract" in 1977 ("Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information that You Just Can't Find Anywhere Else").
James was different. For example, he once wrote, "The way that managers have tested the limits of starting pitchers for the last century is quite a bit like the way they used to test for witches, by pond dunking."
James' quirky insights were initially shunned by the baseball establishment, but they slowly took root.
James explained, as only he can, that "the introduction of new information into a fixed way of thinking about the game changed."
James brought a new vocabulary to the game — sabermetrics. His observations made writers and baseball executives look at baseball in a more scientific light.
Then, in the 1980s, Oakland Athletic Manager Tony La Russa took the game to another cerebral level.
His preparation strategies were glorified in George Will's seminal baseball book, "Men at Work."
Noting the disappearance of the complete game in baseball, Will penned, "Like any human contrivance, sport is an organic institution, evolving with changes in the forces that play upon it."
James fostered a new, intellectual wave of thinkers that spawned general managers such as Oakland's Billy Beane.
And what became of James?
Two years ago, the Red Sox hired him as a senior advisor.
EXPANSION
Scioscia says the complete game went on life support because there are more teams — 30 now, compared to 24 in 1974.
Said Scioscia: "I think the pitching has become so diluted to where when you have a good one, I think you want to make sure he's handled in a matter that's going to keep him good for a long time."
End Game
Over time, the nine-inning pitcher became a museum piece.
Little did we know Fernando Valenzuela, the seemingly tireless workhorse Dodger, was a relic when he recorded 20 complete games in 1986.
In one brilliant, supernova 1988 season, Orel Hershiser had 15 complete games and eight shutouts. Fittingly, his nickname was "Bulldog."
It's not that kids today don't have the competitive desire.
While pitching for Lincoln Memorial College in Tennessee, Angel reliever Scot Shields said he once threw 261 pitches in a 16-inning loss.
"There was no way I was coming out of that game," Shields said.
Of course, in college, no owner was on the hook for Shields' long-term contract.
Pro baseball simply will not tolerate such tendon torture.
Washburn says the modern starter is not physically conditioned to go nine innings — think of the difference between a starter in 1970 and a starter now as the difference between a thoroughbred and a quarter horse.
It is an accepted anomaly that, in an era when athletes are getting bigger, faster and stronger, the role of workhorse starting pitcher has diminished.
Yankee Stadium may still be the House That Ruth Built, but baseball in general today is moored to "specialization" and "economics."
No more gladiator Bob Gibsons, no more Nolan Ryans, no more 200-pitch outings.
"I don't think so," Claire said. "The course has been set. This is what we have."
Major League Baseball's new motto: it is what it is.
"I don't like the game as much," Ryan confessed. "I'm more of a purist. If a guy is throwing a shutout, or a guy pitched a really good game, and he's still dominating, you don't take him out and bring a guy in.... It's hard to accept the new changes when, in your mind, it's not for the better."
Thirty years ago tomorrow night, it was Tiant and Ryan and a whole lot of tryin'.
It really was, looking back, one for the books.
Said Ryan: "I don't think the rest of my life I'll ever open a paper and see a box score like that."
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