Posted by
Bill Crawford on Thursday, February 26, 2009 11:41:14 PM
...As evidenced by the re-emergence of the oh-so casual calendar of early spring training baseball, where every batter is trying to get his timing down and every pitcher goes no more than three innings.
Relatives of mine bought me a device for my birthday that tracks any team, like a weather monitor. I have it plugged into my NY Mets, and it faithfully projects the latest box score and the upcoming schedule. Now I check it every time I pass by the kitchen window.
The Mets and Yankees start life in April in new stadiums. The Steinbrenner family did a better job of bribing city officials for funding, so they didn't need any corporate sponsors. If they tried to put anybody else's name before "Yankee Stadium", there might have been hell to pay from the purists. The Mets are still going through the shakeout from Citibank and their Obama money. Maybe "Bailout Field" will become a moniker that will last a lifetime, especially if they fold like a house of cards in the NL East again.
One of the first things people notice in my major league collection of books at home is that, among all the non-fiction tomes that nobody else wants to read, there is a decent collection of baseball history. It has been my game since I learned how to throw and hit in the eighth grade, and probably will be until I die. I could go on for a while about how I think it is a great game that is being mismanaged to death, but I would get very boring.
One of the peeves of mine that I've dug into lately is the use of pitching in the game. In the late '60's, the Orioles and the Mets rewrote the book by going to a five man pitching rotation, bringing the front line pitchers down from 330 innings a year to about 275. This seemed to make sense, and the results they brought made it a staple of the game.
Twenty years later, a new paradigm entered this world- the pitch count. Now everybody runs a five man rotation, with a hundred pitch limit per game, limiting front line pitchers to only 230 innings. The research I have seen shows that the pitch count makes perfect sense, but if you follow it up with the proper ice down and rehab, there is no reason why you can't pitch in three days instead of four.
This means that you can take your four best pitchers and run them for 300 innings a year, as long as they don't get their arms abused with high pitch counts on their pitching day. This also means that every team is essentially taking 250-300 innings a year and sending out minor league pitching to "save" their best pitchers. That amounts to how many games a year?
The first coach that hooks on to this, if they have even three good pitchers, will rewrite the manual on pitching and become the next Rube Walker or Leo Mazzone. Will it ever happen? I don't know. Habits die hard in this game, and pitchers are the most prized cattle in the slaughterhouse. The last great changes in the playbook in this game has been in the approach of hitters, and it shows.
It is spring, and hope rises eternal. Baseball is all about the spring and summer, and new life. Occasionally, new ideas break through, usually from teams that have nothing to lose.