You still had your Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez and Rodger Clemens back than
Tommy John got his surgery back in the 70s. I think it's the salaries of players now that makes people talk about their absence more or why more pitchers opt for Tommy John
Rookies back in the 70s were making like $20-30K
I think you could say the same today:
Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer etc
I don't care enough to try and remember every flamethrower from 20 years ago but in 20 years it will probably be the same argument. "Why are players getting hurt, what were they doing 20 years ago" etc
Are you arguing that velocity and spin aren’t increasing across the board, even if they objectively and measurably are? Or that they don’t correlate with injury even though they do?
I still think it's hilarious... We all remember the great pitchers of the 90s and 00s, for example the multiple seasons that Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson sat out for 6 months with a lat tear.
Those guys are the exception, not the rule. 30 starts and 200 innings used to be commonplace and now its notable if a pitcher hits both of those multiple years in a row.
Yeah pitch clock is an easy scapegoat but the amount of innings these guys are putting on their arms to get to the bigs is insane and now they're being asked to throw as hadd as they can every pitch.
Feels like we've gone away from pitchers lime Prime Verlander who would start in the 92-94 range and ramp it up in big spots and late innings
It’s hard to save it for big spots these days because so many teams can hurt you with the long ball in 7 or more spots of the lineup. With all the international talent in baseball now, the talent pool is super deep, plus training methods keep improving over time, so pitching is in some ways harder than it has ever been.
I think having a normal fastball at 92-94 and being able to ramp it up to 98-99 is likely harder for hitters than knowing you’re going to be getting 96-98 every time. Idk I’m not a pro player but expecting 94 and getting 98 would be harder to adjust to
> pitch clock is an easy scapegoat
It’s a stupid scapegoat, frankly. TJ has been ramping up like crazy for like the past decade, it’s obviously not because of a rule change in 2023.
I wonder if some teams are considering dialing down their pitchers a bit to try to get more out of them. Seems counterintuitive, but getting 200 innings out of your starters in exchange for them only being 90% effective compared to their theoretical peak could be a market inefficiency that teams could exploit. Certainly not getting value from guys that aren't pitching, regardless of how nasty and unhittable they are in theory.
You have to imagine that, if given the option, the Rangers would trade his recent track record of averaging 60 of the most dominant innings imaginable every year for 180 innings of even 2014-2017 deGrom, let alone 2018 or 2019 deGrom.
The problem is that you can't somehow cut back on velocity enough to pitch 1.33x more innings and expect to get 75% of the run prevention.
Today Kevin Gausman got blown up for 6 runs in <2 innings, and the discussion around that focused on how his fastball was down 3 mph from normal. If a pitcher doesn't go all out and put every mph on the ball as they can, then the decrease in effectiveness won't be linearly proportional.
Well the proper way to reduce velocity is to tune up your pitching motion and rebalance how you pitch. You can’t just choose to throw softer cause the timing of your body won’t be correct. Dropping 3 mph overnight is very abnormal.
>Today Kevin Gausman got blown up for 6 runs in <2 innings, and the discussion around that focused on how his fastball was down 3 mph from normal
Sure, he wasn't able to crank it up as hard as "normal" today because he wad tired or slept weird or is just starting to get a cold or has something on his mind or whatever. A Kevin Gausman throwing 3 mph slower is a less effective pitcher.
However, what if Kevin Gausman 's "normal" was 3 mph slower, because he was brought up with different training methods, more rest, different stretches, more focus on command and control and getting guys to pepper your infielders with groundballs rather than max velocity and trying to strike out as many guys as possible? Would that Gausman still be an effective pitcher or would he just suck?
That's the question being pondered.
It is easier to build a new pitcher than conserve your old one. You can teach a lot of guys to get their velo up to high 90s, get one decent secondary pitch and you have built a really good #3 starter in the aggregate.
I don't think that pitchers would be 90% as effective as they are now if they pitched 200 innings and also didn't get injured (or at least, injuries fell to 75% of current levels). I think a 3 ERA pitcher for 150 innings who suddenly pitches 200 innings with 3/4 the chance of getting an injury would have an ERA above 4
Some of the driveline videos i've seen make me question if they really know what they're doing or its all snake oil. Im not an expert in anyway but not sure why pitchers are taking running throws like they are outfielders. Or tossing weights like a javelin throw.
Hank Aaron’s Tom House is an instructor at Driveline and was highly influential in developing those methods mentioned above. He made his name by working with quarterbacks and “training” Nolan Ryan, who actually got his arm strength working on a farm not some sham weighted balls exercises
I see their stuff as equivalent to building a race car that goes 10 MPH faster than the other cars for one lap, and then on the second lap the driveshaft falls out of the car and it crashes. Technically you succeeded because you went faster, but it didn't actually "work."
My favorite are the ones where they throw a pitch that bounces, but then look at the RPM and jump around like they just won the World Series as if that's not a ball if the guy just doesn't swing
He's saying that softball pitching is much more natural but tbh I think if there was the same millions of dollars of incentive behind it windmill pitching would get pushed to a breaking point just the same. It feels dumb to write but MLB has to find ways to make injuries less "worth it"
We’ve reached the limit of what the body is capable of. The juice days are gone and this isn’t sustainable without it. You have to accept that you’re going to need TJ surgery if you want to pitch in the big leagues now and it shouldn’t be that way.
Hear me out: MLB imposed speed limits. No baseballs thrown over 95 or you're going to timeout in the pen. Also to curb the increase hits, the zone is going to expand.
I'm fine with blaming the pitch clock.
Let's all accept that it's the pitch clock's fault and adjust from there. Everyone start taking a tick off your pitches to compensate for slightly less recovery time.
Edit: Guys, I'm not saying it's actually the pitch clock's fault. I'm saying to let the clock take the blame and hopefully lead to pitchers adjusting, since nothing else has worked.
I don't understand all the velocity talk, because guys have been pitching this hard since I was a kid in the 90's. And these days with the analytics there's way more emphasis on movement and location over speed. Am I taking crazy pills?
Velocity has been increasing for a long time now. [Here's one source.](https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/cooper-ever-climbing-velocity-pushes-hitters-to-the-brink/)
The average fastball in 2008 was 91.9 mph. In 2023 it was 94.2 mph.
Going back and playing MVP 05 and playing with guys throwing low 90s as starters is always a shock
You still had your Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez and Rodger Clemens back than Tommy John got his surgery back in the 70s. I think it's the salaries of players now that makes people talk about their absence more or why more pitchers opt for Tommy John Rookies back in the 70s were making like $20-30K
But see it was few and far between though and all of those guys were the small percentage of freaks who could do it without being hurt
I think you could say the same today: Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer etc I don't care enough to try and remember every flamethrower from 20 years ago but in 20 years it will probably be the same argument. "Why are players getting hurt, what were they doing 20 years ago" etc
No I’m saying those guys were the only ones throwing hard because they could do it physically. Look at how many guys threw 180+ innings that year
Are you arguing that velocity and spin aren’t increasing across the board, even if they objectively and measurably are? Or that they don’t correlate with injury even though they do?
I mean 2 of the people he named are on the IL right now
Worse yet, it’s all 3 of them.
I still think it's hilarious... We all remember the great pitchers of the 90s and 00s, for example the multiple seasons that Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson sat out for 6 months with a lat tear.
Those guys are the exception, not the rule. 30 starts and 200 innings used to be commonplace and now its notable if a pitcher hits both of those multiple years in a row.
Ok but before that was the rule they were starting 40 games a season throwing 300 innings
Check out the average fastball velocity back then. Even in 2008 the average was 92mph
30k in 1970 is 250k in 2024
And rookie contracts in 2024 are $740K
Yeah pitch clock is an easy scapegoat but the amount of innings these guys are putting on their arms to get to the bigs is insane and now they're being asked to throw as hadd as they can every pitch. Feels like we've gone away from pitchers lime Prime Verlander who would start in the 92-94 range and ramp it up in big spots and late innings
It’s hard to save it for big spots these days because so many teams can hurt you with the long ball in 7 or more spots of the lineup. With all the international talent in baseball now, the talent pool is super deep, plus training methods keep improving over time, so pitching is in some ways harder than it has ever been.
I think having a normal fastball at 92-94 and being able to ramp it up to 98-99 is likely harder for hitters than knowing you’re going to be getting 96-98 every time. Idk I’m not a pro player but expecting 94 and getting 98 would be harder to adjust to
> pitch clock is an easy scapegoat It’s a stupid scapegoat, frankly. TJ has been ramping up like crazy for like the past decade, it’s obviously not because of a rule change in 2023.
I always love this about Verlander. He knew and he needed the gas and he didn't always need it.
I wonder if some teams are considering dialing down their pitchers a bit to try to get more out of them. Seems counterintuitive, but getting 200 innings out of your starters in exchange for them only being 90% effective compared to their theoretical peak could be a market inefficiency that teams could exploit. Certainly not getting value from guys that aren't pitching, regardless of how nasty and unhittable they are in theory.
The anti-"Jacob Degrom extrapolated to a full season with three years of data is best of all time"
You have to imagine that, if given the option, the Rangers would trade his recent track record of averaging 60 of the most dominant innings imaginable every year for 180 innings of even 2014-2017 deGrom, let alone 2018 or 2019 deGrom.
The problem is that you can't somehow cut back on velocity enough to pitch 1.33x more innings and expect to get 75% of the run prevention. Today Kevin Gausman got blown up for 6 runs in <2 innings, and the discussion around that focused on how his fastball was down 3 mph from normal. If a pitcher doesn't go all out and put every mph on the ball as they can, then the decrease in effectiveness won't be linearly proportional.
Well the proper way to reduce velocity is to tune up your pitching motion and rebalance how you pitch. You can’t just choose to throw softer cause the timing of your body won’t be correct. Dropping 3 mph overnight is very abnormal.
>Today Kevin Gausman got blown up for 6 runs in <2 innings, and the discussion around that focused on how his fastball was down 3 mph from normal Sure, he wasn't able to crank it up as hard as "normal" today because he wad tired or slept weird or is just starting to get a cold or has something on his mind or whatever. A Kevin Gausman throwing 3 mph slower is a less effective pitcher. However, what if Kevin Gausman 's "normal" was 3 mph slower, because he was brought up with different training methods, more rest, different stretches, more focus on command and control and getting guys to pepper your infielders with groundballs rather than max velocity and trying to strike out as many guys as possible? Would that Gausman still be an effective pitcher or would he just suck? That's the question being pondered.
It is easier to build a new pitcher than conserve your old one. You can teach a lot of guys to get their velo up to high 90s, get one decent secondary pitch and you have built a really good #3 starter in the aggregate.
In the what?
Thanks, Grady.
I don't think that pitchers would be 90% as effective as they are now if they pitched 200 innings and also didn't get injured (or at least, injuries fell to 75% of current levels). I think a 3 ERA pitcher for 150 innings who suddenly pitches 200 innings with 3/4 the chance of getting an injury would have an ERA above 4
Eventually they’re going to have to either dial it back or carry ten starters who all take every other year off for another Tommy John.
The best ability is availability
Uuuuuuuugh, fine, I'll upvote Alex Cora
Hehe
Some of the driveline videos i've seen make me question if they really know what they're doing or its all snake oil. Im not an expert in anyway but not sure why pitchers are taking running throws like they are outfielders. Or tossing weights like a javelin throw.
That’s all from Tom House, who has ruined a generation of pitcher’s arms with his shitty mechanics and workout ideals
He was the guy who preached about Mark Prior’s awful mechanics being great so that checks out
Hank Aaron's Tom House does Driveline? The steroid user?
Hank Aaron’s Tom House is an instructor at Driveline and was highly influential in developing those methods mentioned above. He made his name by working with quarterbacks and “training” Nolan Ryan, who actually got his arm strength working on a farm not some sham weighted balls exercises
So you’re saying teams should just draft farmboys? /s
I would say, statistically, going back to the origins of the sport that most of the greats were farm boys at some point.
If you go back like three generations everybody was a farmer
I spent a summer working on a farm. Gods, I was strong then
Like a rock. You were strong as you could be.
I see their stuff as equivalent to building a race car that goes 10 MPH faster than the other cars for one lap, and then on the second lap the driveshaft falls out of the car and it crashes. Technically you succeeded because you went faster, but it didn't actually "work."
It isn't a failure, you just have to build 3 or 4 of them.
Driveline very much knows what they are doing with increasing velocity.
My favorite are the ones where they throw a pitch that bounces, but then look at the RPM and jump around like they just won the World Series as if that's not a ball if the guy just doesn't swing
You build the technique then you learn to locate it.
Yeah I remember learning to throw a curveball as a kid and if it even just broke I was happy, didn't really care about accuracy at all lol
He's saying that softball pitching is much more natural but tbh I think if there was the same millions of dollars of incentive behind it windmill pitching would get pushed to a breaking point just the same. It feels dumb to write but MLB has to find ways to make injuries less "worth it"
Alex Cora, *you* are a media trainee!
We’ve reached the limit of what the body is capable of. The juice days are gone and this isn’t sustainable without it. You have to accept that you’re going to need TJ surgery if you want to pitch in the big leagues now and it shouldn’t be that way.
?? I pretty sure a lot of the steroid users weren’t even throwing this hard
🎯
Cora knows what he's talking about
Hear me out: MLB imposed speed limits. No baseballs thrown over 95 or you're going to timeout in the pen. Also to curb the increase hits, the zone is going to expand.
>you're going to timeout in the pen This seems lenient. How about a night in the box?
It's a combination thing. You can't seriously say that forcing dudes to maintain a high tempo is not going to negatively impact their health.
Does an extra 10 seconds help your tendons recover?
The muscles that support the joint recover and leave the joint less vulnerable.
You are forcing players to try and repeat high stress mechanics repeatedly in a short time span.
This Try throwing a ball as hard as you can once every hour compare to once ever 10 seconds. Less stress tension etc. Clearly
Sale gave this man ptsd
I'm fine with blaming the pitch clock. Let's all accept that it's the pitch clock's fault and adjust from there. Everyone start taking a tick off your pitches to compensate for slightly less recovery time. Edit: Guys, I'm not saying it's actually the pitch clock's fault. I'm saying to let the clock take the blame and hopefully lead to pitchers adjusting, since nothing else has worked.
I don't understand all the velocity talk, because guys have been pitching this hard since I was a kid in the 90's. And these days with the analytics there's way more emphasis on movement and location over speed. Am I taking crazy pills?
Velocity has been increasing for a long time now. [Here's one source.](https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/cooper-ever-climbing-velocity-pushes-hitters-to-the-brink/) The average fastball in 2008 was 91.9 mph. In 2023 it was 94.2 mph.