How Many innings

doubt the recruiter cares. son pitched app 60 inn sr yr 40 inn summer b4 college and was a non conf starter and weekend(conf) reliever on weekends, on his college team as a freshman.the coaches will make their decisions based on what they see when they get a hold of him.

Recommendation that I have seen is to throw no more than 2500 pitches in a competitive setting in a calendar year.

Here is a research paper that I helped write in college regarding pitch counts in high school baseball...

http://mnhopper1s.files.wordpr...-school-baseball.pdf

Nice paper Bulldog. Of course there are some things I would have liked to have seen done a bit differently, but the trouble with research in this area, is its so difficult to get valid data. Many coaches don’t have it, and many that do won’t give it in unadulterated form.

There’s another “issue” as well, and perhaps is the one that causes most of the problems. While in the last 20 years the education of everyone having anything to do with youth baseball has improved, there are still a lot of folks who believe more of anything is better, and a lot of folks who just don’t believe that throwing something as small as a baseball could possibly cause any serious problems. Plus, there will always be those who feel their player or their kid is somehow bulletproof and impervious to any ill effects.

What’s always been plain to me is that the main thing holding back much more research, is the dearth of data. Until the last couple of years with the advent of scoring apps that automatically generate lots of stats, there just weren’t a high percentage of coaches/teams/leagues/organizations who kept any data they had, for more than the current season.

The main reason for that is pretty simple. There’s no requirement to do it, and until there’s some entity willing to provide the capacity to both store and retrieve the data, it would be silly to require it. So, the loop remains uncompleted. If when you did that paper you’d have had access to a database that had valid pitch counts and dates for just 25% of all youth pitchers, youth being defined as less than college level, do you think it might have changed things a bit, and if so, how.

After many years of looking at what numbers I could get my hands on, I really don’t think the problem of arm injuries due to overuse/abuse is as widespread as many believe, or that it ever was. The thing I see limiting it, is the chance a particular pitcher will give the team the best chance to win. That generally means most pitchers will never be put in much jeopardy, at least from being overused/abused. But, if you limit the group looked at to the pitchers considered in the top 25%, its almost a slam dunk they’ll be put in harm’s way over and over again.

My son was never asked once by a college recruiter how many innings he pitched. Not that they did not care, it is not a question they concern themselves with.

He typically threw 40-60 HS innings and 40 or so elsewhere, so he was throwing around 80-100 innings per year and about 1,500 pitches max. We more or less followed ASMI. I would say quality is more important than quantity. Get to the right events and throw 3-5 quality innings. More than this and you are just burning out your arm.

http://www.asmi.org/asmiweb/position_statement.htm

Stats, there's a lot of things I would change if I could. But it was a simple research project/paper for a class project No money involved. If I could I would love to do it again, but I would need to try to be more specific.

I would love to track athletes over multiple seasons and detail every time he throws, pitches, etc. That would provide the best details.

quote:

Originally posted by Stats4Gnats:
The thing I see limiting it, is the chance a particular pitcher will give the team the best chance to win. That generally means most pitchers will never be put in much jeopardy, at least from being overused/abused. But, if you limit the group looked at to the pitchers considered in the top 25%, its almost a slam dunk they’ll be put in harm’s way over and over again.

I believe the above to be correct, I think that is why so many often say that the harder the pitcher throws the more likely he will have an injury.
My opinion is that those that throew harder when young were over used, because they often over power their peers.

However, when my son was younger I witnessed many parents offer up their young for the game, hard tossers or not, there were always some who threw more than others and often times it was the coaches sons who got the lions share of work.

This is, IMO, about common sense. Too much of any one thing never leads to anything good.

I will further this by saying in the last 2 years I have had 2 pitchers go D1 and was never asked how many pitches they threw or innings they logged over the course of the year.

quote:

I believe the above to be correct, I think that is why so many often say that the harder the pitcher throws the more likely he will have an injury.

I would agree. I believe our research found that throwing harder than 85 MPH was considered a risk factor for injury.

quote:

Originally posted by Bulldog 19:
Stats, there's a lot of things I would change if I could. But it was a simple research project/paper for a class project No money involved. If I could I would love to do it again, but I would need to try to be more specific.

That’s the trouble with hindsight. Not only does one see things more clearly, one sees many more things as well. But that 1st step always has to be taken, otherwise there’s no way to know if it was taken in the right direction.

quote:

I would love to track athletes over multiple seasons and detail every time he throws, pitches, etc. That would provide the best details.

Well maybe sooner or later one of the scoring/stat apps will automatically dump the data into a common database, and we’ll at least have access to raw numbers if not the ability to attach them to a specific player.