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Banging the Drum

A lot of really good or interesting stuff happened last weekend. There were some great games, including the Georgia-Clemson double header on Sunday and the Texas comeback/Oral Roberts collapse on Saturday. Stanford finally lost, albeit to a team they didn't have any business having to play in a regional. Texas Southern's upset of Rice on Friday is the single biggest upset in the time since 1997 that I have records for, and there's an excellent chance that it's the biggest upset of all time in college baseball. Unfortunately, all of that excitement has been overshadowed.

There are some coaches who are trying to destroy this game in the name of their own careers. College baseball does not have a guaranteed pipeline of players the way that basketball and football do; the best high school players usually have the option to go directly to the minor leagues and develop their skills there. That's a suboptimal strategy for them in the abstract, more so these days for pitchers because of the emphasis on college pitchers in the professional draft now, but coaches like Dave Van Horn are doing their best to drive pitchers into the minors and away from the chance for you and me to watch them play college baseball.

The good news is that not every coach is guilty of this sort of abuse. We lost, at least temporarily, one of the good guys in workload management this week with Steve Renfroe's firing, but there are still coaches who put the future development of their pitchers ahead of short-term gain. It's really too late for this year's senior class, since most of them who are headed to college have already signed commitments, but for the players and parents of this year's junior class, as you make your decision next year, there are two questions you need to answer:

• How likely am I to be consistently overused if I pitch for this coach?
• Is this coach willing to risk sacrificing my entire future for one weekend?

The answer to the first question can usually be found in the numbers on the Pitcher Abuse Points reports over in The Filing Cabinet. For some evidence on the second question, here's the pitch count report for last weekend:

Now, don't let this chart be the only piece of information you get -- some of the coaches involved here, such as Jim Morris at Miami or Kevin Cooney at FAU, usually do better than this. And even I'm willing to grant that a single 125-pitch outing in an important game might be justifiable (note that I said single, which means you can't do it three weeks running). There are a couple of cases here, though, that, like the infamous Kenny Baugh 171-pitch start against Nebraska in 2001, are pretty clear signs that you don't want to trust your arm to the coach involved.

Will Carroll, one of the authors of Baseball Prospectus and the author of Saving the Pitcher, recently posted a call to war in his daily injury report on BP. It's in the subscriber section, but I'm betting he won't mind a short quote:

[After a discussion of college pitch counts] Think that looks pretty ugly? Guess what, it's worse. If something like this chart happened in the majors, we'd be screaming and calling for the pitching coach's head. But these data aren't from the majors. This chart uses pitch counts that Boyd Nation has collected from collegiate pitchers. I attached the names of the youngest starters in the majors because their ages are equivalent to the young men being sacrificed on collegiate mounds. It's bad there, it's as bad in high school, and bordering on child abuse in youth leagues around the country. I've asked each of you to help with Velocity Loss study and you've come through. Now, I'm asking you to get shrill. Let's find pitcher abuse throughout the country and point it out. Asking nicely isn't working.

This isn't new territory for me here, and I realize the dangers of quoting someone who's quoting you, but Will's right. It's time to start on the war path. Coaches don't listen to the media, whether professional or semi-amateur like me (OK, they do, but they shouldn't). They listen to fans, and they really listen to recruits and their parents. Don't play for a coach who lets his pitchers throw more than you're comfortable with (it's possible to argue about where to draw the line, but almost no one sane draws it so that there's not someone past it in the list above), and tell him why you're not going to play for him.

The ISR-based probabilities for the rest of the tournament (team followed by probability of a super win and of winning it all):

Texas, 70/23
Miami, 60/10
Long Beach State, 60/10
Cal State Fullerton, 70/9
South Carolina, 54/7
Louisiana State, 54/7
East Carolina, 46/5
Arkansas, 52/4
Texas A&M, 46/4
Florida, 40/4
Arizona, 40/4
Vanderbilt, 30/4
Georgia Tech, 51/3
Georgia, 49/3
Florida State, 48/3
Tulane, 30/1

Long Beach State has gone from left for dead a week ago to a serious threat to win it all. This does not include a home field adjustment, since there's no proof that that works in the postseason; feel free to bump the home teams up a few percent if you want.

I won't repeat the whole list down here, but there are a couple of corrections I need to get in from the week before:

Brannon's line is one of the more amazing you'll ever see, and is backed up by evidence from the play-by-play. Given Van Horn's apparent plan for the postseason, he's lucky that Tennessee jumped at so many first pitches. Lacy's line is amazingly similar.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Banging the Drum

About the author, Boyd Nation