WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, BAMBI?

A thing of the past: Why teams have gone away from a four-man rotation (John Shea, August 17, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

The Big Four. The Fab Four. The Ain't They A Swell Four. Call them what you want, but don't call them The Only Four.

The A's have the best young pitching rotation in the majors with Tim Hudson,

Barry Zito and Mark Mulder. Add newcomer Rich Harden, whose bite is as good as his hype so far, to the mix, and it's a high-quality quartet. [...]

So why don't the A's go with their strength on a daily basis? Why don't they use the old-fashioned, when-men-were-men four-man rotation? [...]

The last team with a quintessential four-man rotation was the last team with four 20-game winners, the 1971 Orioles. By then, four-man rotations were evolving into five-man rotations, though Baltimore manager Earl Weaver stayed loyal through much of the '70s. [...]

The game has changed, and so have pitchers, who aren't physically or mentally prepared to work as often as pitchers in past generations. Teams are afraid to risk injury to draftees who make millions in signing bonuses, so they apply strict pitch counts throughout the minor leagues, babying their prospects along the way.

By the time a starting pitcher reaches the majors, he's programmed to throw every five days, at the most, and is not always accustomed to reaching 100 pitches.

[Pitching coach Rick] Peterson is overly protective of his co-aces for a reason -- they're the strength of the organization -- and isn't silly enough to use them as a guinea pig for an experiment. He did extensive research last September, with help from Dr. James Andrews of the American Sports Medicine Institute, before using them on three days' for the playoffs. [...]

With a true four-man rotation, each pitcher would throw 40 or 41 times over 162 games.

"That's only five more starts," Zito said. "I think it could work, but that's one starting job times 30. That's a lot of lost jobs. I'd like to go back to when they used four-man rotations to look at their pitch counts and see what kind of off-speed stuff they were throwing and how often they were throwing it."

This is one of the least well understood issues in baseball, with the direst implications, despite ample explanation from George Bamberger (pitching coach for those Orioles) and statistical work by Bill James. Bamberger had his pitches throw a lot, even if just long-tossing the ball to each other in the outfield on days off. He argued that the key, contrary to popular opinion, is not to limit how often you throw but how much you throw when you pitch. Bill James has run the numbers to back this up and shown that the most direct correlation to injuries in young pitchers comes not from the numbers of times they pitch but how many pitches they're allowed to throw in those outings. Limit starters to 100 pitches and they'd be unlikely to have greater injury risk even if they were in a four-man rotation. Moreover, the pitch limit creates a greater incentive to throw strikes, which in turn makes it imperative for them to throw more fastballs, which also cuts injury risk, as well as speeding up games. And getting rid of the generally rancid fifth starters in the majors would likewise tend to cut average game times by avoiding the slug fests that are routine when they start. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 18, 2003 4:29 PM