Your 2015 Giants: Bummer Dude!

I commented on Bumgarner's situation and wanted to share it here.  Plus, it did not survive moderation, for some reason, the website is now moderating, and yet a clearly spammy comment was allowed to be posted publicly, as well as a variety of stupid types of comment.  If there is a size limit, then they should just do that.  And there is nothing below that is about any other comment, it is my own thoughts.

ogc thoughts

I understand the worry about Bumgarner. And what else can he say other than everything is fine, he's raring to go. The proof will come once he's on the field and we see how he performs.

But I'm not that worried about Bumgarner, other than that he is a pitcher and pitchers eventually have injuries. When Madison came up, he marveled at how little MLB pitchers threw between starts. He said then that he would cut back on his throwing in order to save strength for the actual games, but from what I've seen of him in public, I would bet that he still throws a lot more pitches than any other MLB pitcher around.

So if there is any pitcher who can throw nearly 300 IP today (remember, there were many pitchers in the past who threw 300 IP regularly, in the regular season only, and never had any issues, because their arms were prepared for it), it's Bumgarner.  And while threw over 4,000 pitches, Lincecum threw even more pitches in 2010 and was OK in 2011 (though, it should be noted, not OK since 2012, though apparently that's because he hasn't been working with his dad since 2009 season).

At least that's the theory that the Braves former pitching coach, Mazzone, learned from an old pitcher, and which he used with his pitchers under his charge. He taught that pitchers need to throw a lot more, in-between starts, to build up the muscles to handle the overall strain of pitching in games and thus suffer less injuries.

And I believe that. Muscles need to be built up to handle the workload. A slovenly guy like me can't just join an MLB team and throw a full season's worth of pitches, I would need to build up to that (that and somehow having the ability to throw 90+ MPH). That was Bill James very public rebuttal in his book on pitching to the PAP nonsense that BP was pushing, about 10 years ago.

The CYA pitchcount culture has done a lot of damage to our game by encouraging pitchers to not build up their muscles throwing. They treat every throw as the same thing. But I just read an article that showed that it was MLB pitches that affect player's injury history, not minor league pitches, Will Carroll found no connection, there is something about pitching in the majors that start to wear on arms. But the pitchcount mantra makes it seem like if you force your kid to throw more often, it would be abuse.

But there is no way to really prove things either way, and it makes some sense that throwing less saves your arm, so the pitchcount hegemony will undoubtedly take over all of baseball. So the scare tactics of PAP and pitchcounts will continue even though there is no evidence that there was any linkage between the two. Hopefully our game will be able to survive this.

What would be great would be to hear what Dick Tidrow has to think about pitchcounts, how to build up pitcher's arms properly, and things like that related to pitching. If I hear that he's for pitch counts, then I would reconsider my opinions and stance.