Archive for Workload

I have never been supportive of pitch clocks. In fact, the first ever thing I wrote about baseball (formally), was an article in the Journal of Sports Sciences, illustrating how pitch clocks could elevate muscle fatigue in pitchers, possible contributing to increased injury risk. I also came up with a workload metric which factors in the time between pitches when calculating the number of Fatigue Units a pitcher can accumulate. I was pleased to read Travis Sawchik’s article on pace of play solutions, focusing on how it may be more on the batters than the pitchers when it comes to speeding up the games. Well, I was pleased until the last paragraph, where he proposed the ol’ 15 second pitch clock – but we’ll get there.

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Fatigue units attempt to physiologically represent the workloads pitchers face. This includes velocity, days of rest, pitches per inning, and even the pace they pitch. Pitchers with extreme workloads were 2.7x more likely to have Tommy John surgery when compared to pitchers with moderate workloads. Who has worked the hardest in 2017?

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At the midway point of the season, it’s always interesting to see how teams are utilizing their pitching staffs. I’ve been examining workloads through the metric I created, called Fatigue Units. This metric accounts for days between appearances, stress during pitching, and time between pitches – you can read more about it here. TLDR; Fatigue Units appear to be a more accurate indicator of “overworked” pitchers than pitches, or innings pitched.

To start off – what does the midway point indicate about a pitcher’s workload? It doesn’t necessarily indicate what the workload will be by season’s end, but it does say that the pitcher has worked hard in the first half. It definitely says that the team has trusted that pitcher, and, that pitcher is very good. Here’s what the halfway point workloads looked like in 2016.

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Tom Verducci once wrote about how a 30% increase in innings pitched could lead to injury in young pitchers. Since he wrote that, many people have objectively determined that this is not the case (Carleton, 2013). Not all innings are created equally, and not all pitches put the same amount of stress on the human body.

As we have learned in many different ways that are not a lot of fun , both relief pitchers and starting pitchers can succumb to the effects of pitching (also read as, getting injured). This makes the Pitcher Abuse Point scale not appropriate for relief pitchers (see this article on Baseball Prospectus – (Jazayerli, 1998)). Other research has pointed to measures like innings pitched as being a poor determinant of workload in pitchers (Karakolis et al., 2016). Pitching on consecutive days, high velocities, and total pitches have been identified as risk factors for injury (Whiteside et al., 2016). Read the rest of this entry »