Friday, March 03, 2006

A new angle on WBC pitch counts

Everyone (the three Americans following the World Baseball Classic) is talking about how unfortunate it is that the enforced low pitch counts might deprive viewers of the best possible pitching matchups in this tournament. But what if we think about this another way. Don't pitchers generally get worse later in starts? Could it be advantageous for Venezuela to have Johan Santana pitch 5 innings, Freddy Garcia 3 innings, and Francisco Rodriguez 1 inning? I don't know, but I've thought about this a lot (mostly when I am playing an exhibition in a baseball video game). It seems like an advantage to me...

2 comments:

  1. What is enforced low pitch count?

    ReplyDelete
  2. this simply means that pitchers are not allowed to throw more than 65 pitches in an early round game, or more than 80 in later round games. the idea is that the pitchers are not in optimum game shape, so the organizers do not want to risk too many injuries. for your information, a standard starting pitcher throws approximately 100 pitches per regular season start.

    ReplyDelete