The Drubbing

I want you, not the guy next to you, you. Stop acting like one of the Night at the Roxbury guys and get out here

Near the end of my last column on the pitchers I have been tracking since before the season, I wrote the following about Ramon Troncoso:

“In the article before the season, I said that Ramon’s worst enemy was Joe Torre. I worried that he might blow out his arm. Currently, he has pitched 53 innings in 82 Dodger games. That’s on pace for more than 100 innings. Here is my prediction: Either Troncoso gets injured in August or he gives up a devastating hit in the Division Series because his arm is shot. Write it down, its a lock.”

After writing that, I got to thinking about whether or not Joe Torre was bad on relief pitchers. Everyone seems to say that he is, and as you know all to well now, once I start thinking about something I have to know if it is true. So, once again, lets start with an explanation, show you a chart, and then talk about what it might mean.

I decided to look at relief pitchers under Joe Torre since 1990 when he started managing with the Cardinals. More specifically, I looked at the relief pitchers with the top two innings totals in each year that Joe managed. I also looked at how many innings those pitchers threw the following year as well as whether or not they ever pitched that many innings again in their career. Here is what it looks like:

Now, some explanation of what we see. There are 37 pitching seasons on the list and 14 of those 37 seasons saw the pitcher throw 40% or less innings in the following year. I did some searching on the internet and of those 14 pitchers, 12 of them missed time the following season due to arm injuries (Ken Dayley suddenly developed serious vertigo after the 1990 season and eventually retired and Ron Villone had lower back issues in  2007). That means that 32% of pitchers in this analysis had arm injuries the year following being one of the top two pitchers utilized by Torre.

Before drawing any conclusions, lets delve a little deeper. Of those 37 cases, only 7 of them ever pitched that many innings again. Of those seven, 3 cases were Mariano Rivera. The entire list of pitchers who ever threw that many innings again is Rich Rodriguez, Mike Stanton, Jason Grimsley, Mariano Rivera, and Omar Olivares (who became a starter). Only three times did a pitcher ever throw more innings in the following year, and two of those cases were Rivera (and before you think that Rivera is throwing off the numbers, eliminating him from the analysis only increases the injury rate to 34%)

So what are we to think? Well, with the usual caveat that this is not perfectly scientific, I think these numbers are somewhat compelling. A 32% injury rate is quite high when you factor in what a pitcher throwing 70-90 innings out of the pen means to a team. You don’t get that many innings if you are not effective. If nearly one out of every three highly used pitchers are going to break down, there is certainly an issue that any diligent team should investigate. If we wanted to be really critical of Joe Torre’s abuse of pitchers, we could also mention that Scott Proctor and Tom Gordon broke down after the second year of abuse.

The numbers tell us that you don’t want to be one of Joe Torre’s favorites. They tell us that you have a nearly 32% chance of getting injured the next year. If the pattern holds that means that Chan Ho Park and Cory Wade are on the clock from last year. I wish them both the best of luck in avoiding the 32% chance. That leaves us with only one question for Mr. Troncoso…are you feeling lucky?