Pitching Is Cruel and Unusual

Fuck, my arm. That has to be what every pitcher thinks, or says to their mom or wife, after a start. Think about it: Throwing a red-hot molten rock 95 miles an hour, doing that weird thing with your leg, repeating the delivery about 105 times a game if you’re a starter, making your elbow basically whip out in front of your body: It’s taxing work. Shit, it’s dangerous work.

Human arms and human bodies are by and large not designed to throw baseballs at 95 miles an hour, and if some are, they’re certainly not designed to do that without incident for longer than a couple years. Injuries and pitching go together like KISS and gold records. KISS, America’s No. 1 gold record award-winning group, makes, with few exceptions, gold records, and pitchers, with few exceptions, get injured. Young or old, every pitcher in baseball—ever—has gotten hurt, been injured or has spent time on the disabled list. Indeed, injuries are so prevalent that there’s even a theory about it. The TINSTAAP theory, which stands for There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect and is actually one of the shortest acronyms Sabermaticians use, states that prospects ain’t, in the long run, shit. Most of that is because they whip molten rocks at exactly 95 MPH exactly 105 times every five days and their tiny arms will indubitably become injured. Because so many good pitchers get injured, most of the pitchers left over are bad, and these bad pitchers are mostly good at not getting injured.

Still, baseball depends—nay, fucking seriously super-creepily depends—on pitchers, and pitchers staying healthy. Take Moneyball: a hugely popular book and then a movie that received one of only 25 nominations for a Best Picture Oscar last year, which chronicled the ’02 Oakland A’s unlikely success on a shoestring budget. People who bought into author Michael Lewis’s theory laid the success at the feet of General Manager Billy Beane, who brilliantly signed undervalued players, specifically, fat guys who took pitches; critics owed it to the three young aces who struck everybody out and won the majority of Oakland’s games. In reality, it was both and a little luck, but everyone in baseball agrees that if you have three young elite pitchers don’t get injured, you’ll win some games.

Since the success of Moneyball, every team has either hired a full-time stat nerd to run spreadsheets and crank KISS and gauge which shitty player isn’t in fact shitty, or they’ve hired a consultant to do that from their laptop while following KISS on the road. The stat nerds, all of whom could probably beat me up, have given their teams more info than seems safe, building databases comprising every baseball player in history’s every tendency, including also whether this one guy from South Texas can get along with this other guy from North Texas (he can’t).

Now everyone knows that fat guys who take pitches are awesome, but no one in baseball has figured out how to reliably reproduce the A’s amazing young pitching. A good rotation is hard to maintain: Health can get in the way, as with Toronto’s young core, decimated by injuries this season, as can plain old lack of development.

Maybe you can’t prevent injuries and they just happen. Or maybe you just need to give ball throwers a break. Shelby Miller, St. Louis’ unreal pitching prospect, was in the “fuck, my arm” category for most of this season, playing worse than he should have been in June, throwing much slower and reportedly pushing a cat around by its hind legs like a lawnmower. The Cardinals noticed and made him skip his start, and when he returned last week he looked awesome across the board, throwing faster and with more command, and apparently, looking pretty snappy in his Affliction shirt at the nightclub afterwards, according to a janitor friend of mine.

Resting pitchers is not an entirely new idea (no shit): People who watch baseball might know that the All-Star Game is next week, that’s the time when All-Star pitchers usually develop bullshit injuries so they can take a siesta and sit a couple of weeks instead of like two months down the line. Tom Verducci, the KISS of America’s baseball reporters, suggested the same thing in a column in April. Maybe these guys just need some time off?

Doesn’t sound so stupid to me. Then again, I’ve been listening to KISS all day.

@samreiss_