Sabermetric Tuesday - July 29, 2008

PITCH COUNTS

You won't see any regression analysis in this week's edition of Sabermetric Tuesday.  Heck, you won't even see a scatter plot this time around.  I'm keeping it simple and straight forward today.  After all, these are the dog-days of summer... do we really want a statistics lesson?  Well, if it helps my fantasy team win I'm up for just about anything.  But for today's 'First Pitch,' I decided to look at the simple stat called The Pitch Count.

You've seen the pitching coaches in the dugout keeping count of the number of pitches thrown with that fancy counter device.  Most stadiums today even have pitch count trackers on scoreboards.  And if you watch a game on telelvision, you'll hear about a player's pitch count when he pitches late into a game.  But do we ever stop to think about the cumulative effect of pitch counts?  If its so important in a single game, should the number of pitches thrown over the course of a season (or better yet, throughout a career) be a cause for concern to fantasy owners?

The obvious answer is "yes," but we rarely look at the aggregate and mostly focus on innings pitched as a measure of pitcher's potential fatigue.  But we all know that certain pitchers average higher pitches per inning simply due to their plan of attack.  As a rule of thumb, strikeout pitches tend to throw more because they work deeper counts and aim at striking a guy out (compared to the other little league/Chien Ming Wang theory of "let him hit it"). 

So what I decided to do is take a look at total pitch counts for starting pitchers.  I downloaded the information that was available to me (pitch counts dating back to the beginning of the 2007 season) and summed the total pitches thrown since that date.  The full list can be found by following this LINK.  Here's a quick summary of what I found:

Of the top-10 pitcheRs with the highest pitch counts, there are some clear disappointments for the 2008 season.  Perhaps this is an indication of a tired arm that has already set in and for some of these pitchers, it may be an indication of what is to come.  The most notable names in the top-10 that have underperformed include Gil Meche, Daniel Cabrera, Javier Vazquez, and most famously, Aaron Harang.  Other disappointing names that crack the top-20 include Johan Santana (he's still good, but not as good as we expected), Bronson Arroyo, Barry Zito, and Jon Garland.  Here's a brief summary chart of the top-20 and their total pitches thrown:

In the master data, I also include games started, appearances, and basic pitching metrics for your reference.  Some of the names on this list are work-horses (Livan Hernandez) who can pitch forever and not get tired.  And it makes complete sense that historical success leads to high pitch totals, because these pitchers tend to throw later into games.  But that doesn't necessarily mean fatigue won't set-in if over-worked for an extended period of time (like what we may be seeing with Harang). 

In any event, I hope the data gets you to think a little more about pitch counts and less on innings pitched.  Have a great Tuesday.  -- Joe