Trouble in Texas

Circling the Bases is a great new blog on NBC with an allstar cast of writers that I would read on my own, let alone together in one. Anyways, they recently pointed me towards the news story that Nolan Ryan has abandoned pitch counts in Texas:

Ryan has banished the use of the pitch count in determining how long a pitcher stays in the game through out the organization.

One could confidently say that Nolan Ryan knows a bit more than I do about pitchers, but in terms of pitching and injuries maybe I know more about what it's like to be human. They say the best players don't make the best coaches, because they expect greatness to come at a relative ease like it does for them. Maybe Ryan expects injuries to have the same effect on his pitchers as it did for him, meaning they're nonexistent? Not many pitchers pitch through their mid 30's let alone mid 40's without any injuries.

"The ceiling is off," said Maddux. "This is a mental thing we have to overcome. We have to change the attitude of the starters to want to go deep and believe they can."

The plan is to build a foundation with a fitness program heavy on stamina, and to get pitchers over that "mental" aspect. Pitching in baseball is on par with golf (pun intended) in terms of the mental aspect, but injuries are physical. Sure being strong mentally can help me go from 120 pitches to 140 pitches during a game when I don't think I can do it, but in 2 months when the workload has caught up and my shoulder is busted and I can't lift a can of soda, the issue is no longer mental.

Strict pitch counts aren't the greatest thing, but all in all you are probably better off safe than sorry. However, each pitcher has their own unique pitch count, to use a blanket approach on pitchers is probably stupid, so Ryan has a point there, but to assume in general pitch counts are stupid is, well, just stupid. Pedro Martinez had his threshold when he became ineffective (we all know Grady screwed that one up badly) and I'm sure even Roy Halladay has is. The point is being every pitcher reaches a ceiling where they should no longer be in the game, by lifting that ceiling you are likely hurting your teams performance.

I have this theory on drugs in rock and roll and I think it can be applied here. Some rockers' bodies were able to digest copious amounts of drugs and they survived, the one's that couldn't died. I don't think Keith Richards is alive because he worked on building a foundation aimed for stamina to take more drugs, and I don't think Janice Joplin died because she didn't do that. Similarly, some pitcher's are just able to throw more pitches, if you force every pitcher to throw more pitches some are going to come out of it fine while others will overdose, I mean get hurt.