Bochy has very rarely pushed any starter over 120 pitches during his time here, nor when he was with the Padres. Bill James stats on his usage of pitchers showed that Bochy was routinely at the bottom of the list among managers for much of the 2000's.

This year, however, they switched to recognizing managers with over 110 pitches and he's now among the highest.

There are not any studies that definitively says that going over 110 pitches is bad that I'm aware of. I don't recall BP putting out anything on that thus far, but I don't subscribe to them either. Can anybody enlighten me if they did?

Else, I stand my ground that all this worry is babying our pitchers.

You should continue to repeat these same words, over and over, when anyone mentions PAP. It's fun to re-read a hundred times.

Horse. Beaten.

Lefty,

I'm not vigilant, per say, but I do try to look at things from a cost/benefit ratio.

What's the benefit of letting Lincecum throw 119 pitches after coming off an injury? What's the benefit of letting Cain go into the 120's in a meaningless game against the Marlins in August?

I just can't see any positives aside from some "He's got to learn how to pitch late into games" baseball nonsense.

Pitch counts are a proxy, not a complete tool and I just get tired of anytime I mention PAP or anyone else, OGC has to state that Bill James didn't care for PAP, like he's some sort of baseball Jesus. "Oh, Bill didn't' like it? I guess that ends that debate!"

And then throwing in the straw-man of "BP liked Prior, so what do they know!" is neither here nor there and it's definitely sneaky and not conducive to the argument.

I'm not mocking OGC, I enjoy his posts, but he has the tendency to go on like a broken record and repeat the same things over-and-over-and-over and the PAP thing is one I've seen a jillion times. So, I was a little snarky. I apologize! I'll play nice, promise.

To clarify, it is not Bill James but Baseball Prospectus, in their rebuttal to Bill James teardown of PAP, who appears to make 127 pitches to be a good top pitch limit. Else why note them as examples?

There is nothing magical about the game pitch count being in the 110-130 range that I can find so far that makes it any more than "the sky is falling, the sky is falling.

Bill James, far as I can tell today, hasn't really promoted a magic number. I had thought that he thought 120 pitches was the threshold, and posted that before, since he reported on managers who had their starters go over that number, but it appears he is only reporting it so that people can compare managers: he originally started with 130 pitches, then few managers did it, then 120, and now 110.

Sure, Bill James is not always correct, but that's not why I use him as an example, of course he's not always right.

However, he's the only one I've seen willing to push back against the Baseball Prospectus hegemony that all those with sabermetric-bent seem to bow down to: BP isn't always correct either, even though I respect their work enough to buy their book every year. I mentioned the Prior quote, I'll admit, as a snark, but also to show that they do not always know what they are talking about either, though the way they write, you would think that they walk on water.

About young arms, in James' book, when "young" is mentioned, it is 20-22 year old pitchers. I'll quote some of his passages here as they represent what I feel, and I'll leave this topic for a while now, Chris and I have been like that Star Trek episode with Frank Gorshwin as one of the planet's last inhabitants.

"I think that there is a natural balancing of risk, in almost any physical activity, and that this balancing of risks, with respect to the use of pitchers, has gotten out of whack.

... Most injuries to pitchers are not the result of chronic overuse; some are, particularly to young pitchers, but most are not. They're catastrophic events, just like a heart attack or a torn muscle. They happen suddenly, and they happen when a pitcher goes outside the envelope of his previous conditioning.

Backing away from the pitcher's limits too far doesn't make a pitcher less vulnerable, it makes him more vulnerable. And pushing the envelope, while it may lead to a catastrophic event, is more likely to enhance the pitcher's durability than to destroy it.

What I believe has happened is that this "balancing of risks" has just gone completely haywire. ...

There is a natural balancing of risks, between avoiding a catastrophic event, and developing a tolerance for more work. In order to develop a real understanding of this issue, we are going to have to take acount of both ends of the injury spectrum."

What I'm more worried about, which I guess gets lost both in my head and my posts across the internet, is about Cain's total pitch count.

If every pitcher threw only 1 pitch per game, then if Cain threw 2 pitches per game, he would be leading the league by a wide margin. Extreme, but hopefully it makes my point that nobody has a definitive point at which total pitch count damages a pitcher.

Now, what I found, anectodotally, by reading through the Graphical Player book, was that when pitchers went past the 3,500 pitch count, it seemed like that pitcher would suffer a decline in that book's proprietary measure of his value by season. So it's not scientific nor statistical, but my observation flipping through the book.

Once I noticed that, I went through the whole book, pitcher by pitcher, and except for The Rocket and The Big Unit, it seemed to be true (roughly, PC was on a graph and I had to estimate where 3,500 was).

So that's my magic number and Cain is headed towards that number like a freight train. He has 27 starts and if it's a 5 man rotation, he's getting 7 more starts, 6 man 6 more starts, put him at 33-34 starts and roughly at 3500 threshold.

Why baby pitchers late in the season? Sure, it might not mean anything in the seasonal view, but they have egos too and want to stay out there and compete. You, as manager, has to balance the two, particularly when we all are reaching in the dark on what is right to do.

I like that the Giants take a nuanced approach to when to take out a pitcher. They try to monitor whether they think the pitcher is laboring, whether at 80 pitches or 120 pitches. There are some nights that is muggy and hot that pushing him past 80 would be bad, while on other cooler nights, 120 is a breeze.

That is the human approach, as I don't think that every 120 pitch outing the is the same as the next, some days you got it, some days you don't. Sure, that's touchy feely, and I'm not saying that numbers is bad, it should be monitored, I'm just suggesting that the pendulum has swung too far to the conservative side of the coin, particularly when there is no hard proof that such usage is harmful.

The underlying question behind all our posts is this: what is an excess of pitches and why is that an excess? And what makes your excess point more valid than any others?

Yes, BP did note that he responded to their older model, but do you really think that Bill James would let BP get the final word on that in his own book?

Like ELM with his math problem, I didn't have the patience to go through all his disection of PAP, but have to think that whatever he pointed out as problems probably still exists in his mind, old model or new.

He's not going to let himself look stupid in print like that, I would think, unless he felt that his work refutes BP, whether old model or new model.

OK, I've read through Bill James breakdown of BP's PAP system since you brought it up. I'm obsessive in that way. :^)

Sure, he may have looked at the older system but the newer system is based on the older system and here is what Bill said about that, as he did acknowledge in his text (probably post BP rebuttal) that the system he analyzed was updated, but...:

"But again, I don't think that fixing this 'age' adjustment is going to make this method work. I think that the problems are more fundamental than that. I think, in essence, that we have driven a long way here down a blind alley, and that we're not going to fix it by backing up a few feet and trying again.

The problem is not with our method; the problem is with our thinking. The method is fine; it's our thinking about the whole issue of pitch counts that is messed up. Throwing 120, 130 pitches a game, for a healthy, mature pitcher, simply isn't dangerous. It's probably good for them.

This research is built on assumptions. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no sabermetric research anywhere that backs up those assumptions."

So, yeah, Bill James didn't respond to their new system but he felt that the problems fundamentally inherent with the system was so serious that no matter how they fix it up, the sow's ear won't look like a silk purse.

Thanks, very interesting articles, I'm certainly open to other views where some data is concerned.

I'm no expert on regression, you know, all the math, but I have a problem with his regression analysis.

He lumps good pitchers with bad pitchers all together. With a 500 IP threshold, all you need to do is have one good year before you are 26, that will get you a second year where you are exposed but get over the 500 IP threshold, and you are gone by the 3rd or 4th year, resulting in less IP after 26 as before.

Obviously, whether you are a good or bad pitcher will have a great effect on whether you get to pitch a lot of innings after you are 26.

And he compared the high walk pitchers 12,045 pitches against the low walk 11,358 pitches when there are some problems with that.

First, high walk pitchers who get to pitch under age 26 also are high strikeout pitchers too, else they don't get to pitch under age 26, so that adds to the pitch count relative to low walk pitchers, who I just realized are probably better pitchers, as a population, when you think about it, because it takes extraordinary control to keep your walk rate low, young or old. That could explain the lower pitch count, they are better in general as a population.

And that appears to be true, using his stats, the high walk has a K/BB of 1.88 vs. the low walk's K/BB of 2.40. A K/BB of 2.0 is what you want out of a starter, good starters can keep this ratio higher than 2.0, and the elite are able to keep it above 2.4. So if you are comparing the two population, you are comparing apples with oranges, Greg Maddux with Jason Marquis.

I guess that was my second point too, I was going to note that a walk rate of 2.57 is damn good.

And you can see that with the stats after age 26, the low-BB is roughly the same stats, whereas the high-BB improved because all the truly bad high-BB pitchers got demoted, leaving only the better pitchers: K/BB ratio of 2.0 after age 26.

Lastly, how many pitches difference is that? If the average pitcher threw 3,000 pitches in a season, that's roughly 4 seasons worth of pitches for the high-BB, meaning that the difference works out to a difference of 172 pitches per season. Over 32 starts, that is roughly 5 pitches difference per start, roughly 1 extra pitch per inning pitched. Is he saying that 1 extra pitch per inning is having that great an effect?

Plus, he also noted that regression is a roughly tool, plus he didn't note the usual disclaimer about regression, which is that his findings does not find a causal relationship between the variables and the metric he is estimating, only that this particular dataset happened, even if there are any variables that have a low P-value.

Yes! Thank you, totally agreed. Someone tell OGC that this is what I was trying to say in my earlier comments, but I guess it wasn't coming across well enough. Argh. (tears hair out)

If you argue why take the chance, then why not just shut them down totally now? Why take that chance? That's part of what I don't get given your stance, the logical thing is to just shut him down.

And at what point do you decide this? The Giants have been out of contention basically since the first week. Should we have been limiting him to 100 pitches since then? Or shut them down then? I know I'm being ridiculous, but hopefully you see my point that he needs to continue to throw to build up and condition his throwing arm for next season and seasons to come.

It's kind of like when it comes to a 26-mile marathon, if you don't build up to it, you won't be able to reach that level of achievement, you can't do that all at once, your body can't handle it but if you do it steadily enough and continually enough, you can reach that level of achievement.

If we continually limit our starters based on some fear that maybe it will harm him, at some point you will be holding back his development.

I think we are reaching or have reached that point, when starters have a hard time finishing games. I have no proof I readily admit, but somehow pitchers were able to have careers that spanned decades without much problem for the first 100 years of MLB. At some point we have to stretch out their capabilities and get them ready to throw more pitches.

Take Lincecum for example. Given all the reports of how much and how often he throws, by this theory, his arm should have fallen off already, because he not only throws during the game, but he long-tosses the next day as well. It is easy to brush him off and call him a freak of nature, but this routine is similar to what Leo Mazzone taught all the Braves pitchers, from the lessons he learned from an experienced MLB pitcher himself (can't recall his name). He had them tossing a lot in between starts to build up their arm strength.

Here is what Bill James quotes from Tommy John, "It's hard for people to buy into the fact taht throwing will strengthen your arm. A lot of them think that rest will strengthen it. It won't. It might make it feel better but it won't strengthen it."