That certainly was an interesting article. I was unaware of Mathewson's dominance in the 1905 World Series. To do it on such short rest is even more amazing. I know it was the deadball era and that pitchers back then threw more innings with less rest, but if it was so easy, you'd see far more deadball era pitchers on the list.
Baseball pitching continues to evolve and the trend is certainly towards fewer innings for both starters and relievers. I find this rather counter-intuitive, as the trend is towards bigger, stronger, better conditioned athletes, yet they pitch fewer innings? One would think that the opposite would be true, meaning more innings, not less.
I went to a baseball dinner about 4 years ago where Tommy John was the keynote speaker. He spoke about the evolution in pitching from the '60s and '70s, where every team had a 4 man rotation and most teams had a starter who pitched 260+ innings and where it wasn't unusual to have a pitcher throw more than 300 innings. No major league pitcher has thrown 260+ innings in 11 years, when Roy Halladay pitched 266 innings in 2003 and no major league pitcher has thrown 300 innings in 34 years, when Steve Carlton Pitched 304 innings for the Phillies.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leade ... gues.shtmlNote that the number of innings pitched for league leaders remained fairly steady from 1920, the start of the live ball era, through 1980, even with the DH in the American League, where pitchers could stay in the game longer without being removed for a pinch hitter.
Anyway, Tommy John, obviously from the old school of pitching, said that more innings pitched actually helps make arms stronger. He said that pitch counts are a much bigger factor today than they were when he came to the big leagues in the '60s, where a starting pitcher was left in the game as long as he was effective and told the manager he wasn't tired. Nowadays, more often than not, a pitcher is removed from the game around 100 pitches, regardless of how he feels. It would be interesting to know how 100 pitches was chosen as the magic number, if there was some objective test that showed pitchers started to lose effectiveness at that pitch count or if it was just arbitrarily chosen because it was a nice round number to use. Tommy John blamed the agents for reducing innings pitched, saying that the thought was that it would extend careers, meaning more money for a pitcher in his lifetime.
I doubt that there are any studies that show that a pitcher is more effective with reduced innings over the course of a season or career. or that pitching careers are longer now. Again, the opposite seems to be true. Of course, it's hard to compare across eras with such factors as lowering of the mound in 1969 and the use of PEDs for 20 years beginning in the late 1980s.
Anyway, while Bumgarner's feat is impressive, in my lifetime, I have to agree with mrharryc, the most impressive performance by a pitcher in a World Series was when Mickey Lolich started and won 3 games for the Tigers against the Cardinals in the '68 World Series, including pitching on two days rest and beating the nearly unhittable Bob Gibson in game 7. To this day, Lolich is the last pitcher to get 3 complete game wins in the World Series. What makes the feat all the more impressive is that 2 of the wins came after the Tigers had fallen behind in the Series, 3 games to 1. In addition, in his first win of the Series, Lolich hit his only career home run! Talk about clutch, rising to the occasion and performing under pressure! I don't think that we'll ever see another World Series performance like Lolich's again.
Mon Oct 27, 2014 10:29 pm