Pitch counts in college baseball become source of debate, discussion
Back when Jimmy Buffi was conducting research at Northwestern, he had one concept in mind: injury risk.
His PhD was focused on how much stress a pitcher’s elbow takes on while throwing a baseball. Buffi wanted to better understand the distribution of that stress, and he envisioned a long career of advising teams on how to keep their pitchers healthy. But when he was hired by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2015, Buffi, then a senior analyst with a doctorate in biomechanical engineering, had a lot to learn about competing motivations.
“When you sit behind a computer to write a paper about injury risk, injury risk is your number one priority,” said Buffi, who left the Dodgers in 2019 to start Reboot Motion, a sports science company that consults for teams around Major League Baseball. “But when I joined the Dodgers, it was like, ‘Oh, crap; winning is the number one priority.’ And I think about that often: There’s always a risk-reward trade-off when the ultimate goal is winning.”
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Buffi told this story while breaking down recent starter usage in college baseball. First, Paul Skenes, a top draft prospect, threw a 124-pitch complete game in LSU’s lopsided win over Tulane on June 2. Then Quinn Mathews, a senior at Stanford, threw a 156-pitch complete game against Texas on June 11 to help his team advance to the College World Series, which began last week in Omaha.
Mathews threw 89 pitches in Stanford’s season-ending loss to Tennessee on Monday. Skenes tossed 123 in a win over Tennessee on Saturday, and LSU remains alive. And so, too, is the conversation about whether Skenes and Mathews should have reached such high counts — or if any pitchers should moving forward. Ask 10 people in the sport, and you might get 10 different answers. There are obvious injury risks. There is usually more context than considered by moralist arguments. There are also futures to think about; college baseball is not the end of the line for Skenes and Mathews, who are expected to be professionals soon.
Most mock drafts predict Skenes, a 6-foot-6, fireballing righty, to go first or second in July. Mathews, drafted in the 19th round by the Tampa Bay Rays last summer, is MLB.com’s 119th-ranked prospect, slotting him as a potential fourth- or fifth-rounder. Pushing them in June is a sharp contrast to the draft-bound college football players who sit out bowl games. Or to Brandon Barriera, a lefty who shut down his high school season last spring, then was drafted 23rd by the Toronto Blue Jays.
The many factors only seem to multiply the opinions. Here is what four people in the game had to say:
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Ben Brewster, pitcher and founder of Tread Athletics, a high-end pitching facility in North Carolina: “Is a guy 100 times more likely to get injured from that sort of workload? I don’t know, but there is no doubt a heightened injury risk. But they also know that keeping him in the game is likely going to maximize the chance to win that game. So it’s a tough scenario when the player isn’t going to take himself out, he’s a competitor. And the college coach, his whole incentive is to win, and the perspective is very much a short-term view — we need to win this year. It is somewhat that way in the pros, but they have invested millions of dollars in guys and are looking at it over a multiyear horizon.”
Josiah Gray, starter for the Washington Nationals and former Division II pitcher: “When you’re in college, you kind of think you’re invincible, right? So it’s not an uncommon thing to have a guy say he can still pitch. But I think you also have to have a coach or someone to look after you to say, ‘Hey, you know, here’s what could potentially happen.’ ”
Dan Latham, Stetson University pitching coach: “All pitches aren’t really created equal. [Throwing] 75 high-pressure pitches where you have a 30-pitch inning, traffic on the bases, every pitch is kind of a do-or-die, is different than throwing 100 grooving pitches, everything is easy, up-down, fast half-innings, on and off. I just find the fatigue is different for those things, and the breaking point and where they hit that level of fatigue that turns into injury is just going to differ game to game.”
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And Buffi: “I tend to push back a bit on people who freak out about pitch counts. I think it’s all context-dependent. Throwing 120, 130, 140 is of course more stressful on the body and arm than fewer pitches. Micro damage does accumulate over time. But the arm does recover. If there isn’t a sprain or blowout during the high-stress outing, the arm has a chance to reset if given the chance to. That’s a huge part of this.”
Buffi made sure to say he doesn’t believe in pitching and pitching and pitching with no limits. But like Brewster and Latham, he pointed to factors such as recovery, the situation, the specific pitcher and differences between pro and college baseball.
At the major league level, Rich Hill, a 43-year-old left-hander, has thrown the most pitches in a game this season at 119. There were only three 120-pitch outings in 2022. More than anything, MLB pitchers are hooked before reaching high counts because it’s not statistically sound to have them face a lineup for a third or fourth time. In the evolution of the sport, greater concerns about arm injuries have coincided with a data revolution that has flipped the conventional thought on starter usage.
Remember when Kevin Cash pulled Blake Snell after 73 dominant pitches in Game 6 of the 2020 World Series? It wasn’t to protect Snell’s elbow ahead of the offseason.
“MLB teams have decided it’s not smart to push and push pitchers for a lot of reasons,” Brewster said. “Is part of that to mitigate injury risk? I’d imagine so, yeah. But no one at that level is shy about not wanting their pitchers to see hitters three or four times in a game. Popular strategy can almost appear like risk-averse medical practice.”
There is not an agreed-upon upper limit for pitchers, according to Buffi, though Pitch Smart guidelines consider 120 the absolute max for a pitcher between the ages of 19 and 22. With a pitcher’s ulnar collateral ligament — the elbow ligament repaired by Tommy John surgery — injury risk rises with pitch counts because the UCL starts to bear even more stress than it should. Brewster explained that, at the beginning of an outing, the muscles around the UCL are fresh and able to offload the stress created by torquing the arm and elbow over and over. But as those muscles tire, the UCL absorbs more of the strain, heightening the possibility of immediate injury or cumulative damage.
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This makes recovery and preparation that much more important. Mathews had thrown at least 100 pitches in 15 of his 16 starts entering that Texas game, building him up for a big workload (though not for 156 pitches, some might argue, or 336 in a 10-day span from June 2 to June 11, during which he struck out 16 in those nine innings against the Longhorns). Entering the NCAA postseason, Skenes had topped 100 pitches in nine of 15 starts and thrown at least 110 in four. And college pitchers typically have six days between starts, two more days than the average recovery time for major league pitchers. After he defeated Tulane, Skenes had seven days before he logged 101 pitches over 7⅔ scoreless innings against Kentucky. He then had six days before he threw 123 against Tennessee over the weekend.
“Stress can be good if it’s in the range that your body can tolerate. If you do more than your body is prepared for, that’s when you start exposing yourself to heightened risk,” said Brewster, the founder of Tread, who added that there’s a “very strong correlation” between pitching through fatigue and future injury. “If you’ve been built up to run a mile and then all of a sudden you run 10 miles the next day, you just exposed yourself to a much higher risk than if you gradually build up one mile, two miles, three miles, four miles, five miles and so on.”
“Pitch counts sort of become self-fulfilling prophecies,” Buffi explained. “If you always take a pitcher out at 100 pitches because 100 pitches is a round number, then the pitcher’s body is going to adapt to throwing 100 pitches, and you should take that pitcher out at 100 because you’ve trained the pitcher that that’s their limit.”
To that end, high pitch counts were a self-fulfilling prophecy for Skenes and Mathews, who pitched so well that their coaches felt the game should stay in their hands. More and more, that’s a situation reserved for college baseball. Meet you here next year for the same discussion.
Andrew Golden in Houston contributed to this report.
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