The Wall Street Journal's Jared Diamond on the issue of pitch counts and college pitchers:
In an era where MLB teams treat their pitchers like porcelain dolls, college pitchers are bucking the trend.
www.wsj.com
...Skenes, a 6-foot-6 right-hander for Louisiana State, has taken on a workload in recent weeks that would be unfathomable at any other level of baseball, despite the life-altering money coming his way. He threw 120 pitches in a dramatic win over Wake Forest on Thursday night on four days of rest, his quickest turnaround of the season. It was his third time throwing at least 120 pitches in a game this month. No major-league pitcher has thrown 120 pitches in a game once all year.
...Skenes isn’t alone. College baseball’s postseason tournament is an annual showcase for the nation’s top talent. It is also the last corner in the baseball universe where the concept of a “pitch count” seemingly doesn’t exist—a place where title-hunting managers let their best hurlers throw many more pitches than any professional organization ever would.
Tanner Hall of Southern Mississippi fired 123 pitches in a start earlier this month, then started again three days later. Stanford’s Quinn Mathews threw a whopping 156 pitches in an NCAA Super Regional game, sparking ferocious debate about how college programs handle their pitchers, especially those on the cusp of a significant payday.
“This is a risky business from a sports medicine point of view, for sure,” said Glenn Fleisig, the director of biomechanics research for the American Sports Medicine Institute.
In the majors, a starter throwing 120 pitches is rare. Throwing much beyond that is unheard of. The average MLB start in 2023 lasts about 87 pitches. The last pitcher to throw more than 135 pitches in a game was Tim Lincecum in 2013. Nobody has reached Mathews’s supersized 156-pitch effort since knuckleballer Tim Wakefield in 1997.
The research explaining why that’s the case is evident. Fleisig said that a sharp spike in workload and frequency of pitching is “maybe the strongest indicator of injury risk.” Throwing a lot of pitches at maximum effort at high velocities is also linked to injury. Skenes threw 46 of his 123 pitches against Tennessee on Saturday at 100 mph or harder...
Those in college baseball argue that their game is different and can accommodate a more aggressive approach than MLB. Starters typically pitch once a week, rather than every five days. College pitchers rarely throw much more than 100 innings in a season, whereas top MLB pitchers are expected to exceed 200. Perhaps most importantly, college coaches have far more authority than many MLB managers, who have to answer to increasingly powerful front offices armed with mountains of data.
“The biggest difference is we are the managers of our own clubs,” said Scott Berry, who just retired as the coach of Southern Miss. “A lot of times it seems like in the big leagues they’re not the managers in the fact that there are a lot of those decisions that are coming down from up top that they just have to do.”
It was Berry’s decision to let Hall throw 123 pitches against Samford on June 2 and then pitch two more innings against Pennsylvania with only two days of rest in between...
Stanford coach David Esquer used similar reasoning in letting Mathews throw 156 pitches on June 11. He noted that Mathews threw a lot of change-ups and relatively few sliders. He said the athletic trainers and strength coaches signed off on it. But there was another factor as well: Mathews was adamant that he was able to keep going.
“He wanted in so bad,” Esquer said. “With his safety in mind, it seemed like the right thing to do for him.”
Berry said that in these situations, college coaches “have to be the parent calling the shots.” But from a competitive standpoint, it makes sense that they would be inclined to let their pitchers pitch.
Coaches’ legacies are built by how much they win. Their rosters don’t have the deep bullpens that MLB teams enjoy. Mathews with 120 pitches on his arm was probably a better option for Stanford than any reliever Esquer could’ve brought in.
Mathews dismissed the idea that he put himself in danger, saying, “To the critics out there, I’m just appreciative of them, honestly, that they’re willing to put the time and energy to write stuff about me and talk about me and do all that.”
On Monday, eight-days after his 156-pitch start, Mathews returned to the mound for the Cardinal. He allowed four runs in 4 ⅔ innings in a loss to Tennessee. It ended Stanford’s season.
