The last question concerning why sliders are more prevalent than curveballs was a real eye-opener. When I was learning to throw, I always heard that a curveball puts more stress on your arm and shouldn’t be taught to kids until nearly full grown, which for some isn’t until long after 15 years old. So, the whole thing about making sure a kid has a good curveball before 19 or so is really surprising. The quick fix slider solution was equally surprising.

I’m wondering if the Rangers have moved away from the slider and toward a change-up as a quick fix. It seems many of the reports on pitchers out of instructs cite an effort to learn a change-up. Part of that, I would guess, is that any pitcher needs three pitches to be ML starter. This is anecdotal, but, I can only think of two guys who trumpet the slider: C-Wun and Julio Santana. It seems more is posted about change-ups (Holland, Feliz, for example) and ground-ball inducing fastballs (KG, Boscan). Might it be a couple of changes in the organizational philosophy since the days when Dr. Boganzi talked to a Rangers coach in Port Charlotte?

Lots of interesting stuff already

A couple things I found interesting:

1) Stop throwing – skip pitching batting practice (I always felt this caused problems by creating an unrealistic form of throwing).

This concerns me with Nolan Ryan mentioning having the pitchers throw more batting practice.

I found his comments about pitch counts interesting. I think it has gotten to the point, especially in snarky fan forums like the commenters at Baseball Think Factory and others, where it is just a reflex that if a pitcher has a high pitch count the manager is an idiot and an arm killer. Obviously, managers should err on the side of safety. And having Sabathia pitch the 9th with a 6 or 7 run lead like happened a couple weeks ago is just stupid. But a manager has to be trusted to use his own judgement and if a pitcher is throwing well, with good velocity and control, there’s no need to cut him off at 100 or 110, or even 120 pitches.

We didn’t use pitch counts; maybe we should have, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of arm problems, so some of this is mental.

The key word there is SEEM. I believe there were at least as many injuries then as now, they just get talked about much more now. I think the slider may be a cause for more injuries, and differences in the type and frequency of pitches thrown might have more to do with health than pitch counts and innings totals.

Looking forward to part II.

Some really eye-opening stuff.