Steve Stone channels Ray Miller

[Frobby]

Several interesting bits about Ray’s pitching philosophy in here.   

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/steve-stone-has-a-lot-of-opinions-on-pitching/

[Il BuonO]

Guys who don’t have big fastballs or hard breaking balls … they call that ‘pitching to contact,’ which is a pseudonym for ‘your stuff is marginal, so you better hit your spots.’ 

Sounds like too many guys I’ve seen pitch for the Orioles.

[El Gordo]

Be great to hear Palmer break down some of our pitchers like that.

[Just Regular]

I agree with his feeling that the 4-man rotation will be back at some point as relievers continue to grow their percentage of the innings.  Especially as starters going third time through continues to diminish, somebody will experiment with redeploying those extinct batters faced 19-27 to see if some regular good starter can get 18 guys (mostly) out 40 times a year instead of 32.

With an opener, Ryan Yarbrough won 16 games last year.  I feel like a perfect storm of a very good teams convincing a very good - maybe even great - starter to accept an opener could result in somebody making a run at a 30-win season.  Rightfully it should be the tapering off phase of somebody like Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw's career.

My memory is Earl resisting the 5-man because he said it was too hard to find four.

To the extent I'll be scrounging for any kind of Oriole entertainment at the major league level the next couple years, I won't be sad if we goof around with this kind of stuff.

[DrungoHazewood]

“You need to learn how to go through the order multiple times. Let’s say you try to shoot free throws in the NBA without ever practicing free throws. If you’re not expected to make free throws, you’re probably not going to be good at it. You have to convince guys that there’s a benefit to going a third time through, and hopefully a fourth time through, the order. If you yank somebody at the first sign of trouble, he can’t possibly become good at it.

In a max effort environment, learning to go through the order multiple times is counter-productive.  It's going to be very rare that you have a starter who is regularly better in his 4th time through the order as a reliever is in his first.  There's no learning how to be as effective at pitch 100 as a good reliever is in pitches 1-10.  There are freaks of nature like Nolan Ryan, but mostly it can't happen.

If you want pitchers to go back to throwing complete games I think the best way to get there is to limit teams to eight pitchers on the roster.  Then they'll have to back it off from max effort.  Of course they'd have to deaden the ball to compensate.

On the subject of Yarbrough, I've long thought that a team could designate someone as the "winner".  They only come into gamesfollowing the opener if the team is ahead, tied or down one run.  They pitch 3 innings or so at max effort, put up a reliever-like stat line, but go two or three times a week.  That could be 180 innings or so.  I don't know if that's a good team strategy, but if that's done enough someone will eventually be credited with winning 30 games.  Yarbrough most often pitched 4-7 innings per game, and never more than eight times in a month.

[interloper]

2 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

 

 

In a max effort environment, learning to go through the order multiple times is counter-productive.  It's going to be very rare that you have a starter who is regularly better in his 4th time through the order as a reliever is in his first.  There's no learning how to be as effective at pitch 100 as a good reliever is in pitches 1-10.  There are freaks of nature like Nolan Ryan, but mostly it can't happen.

If you want pitchers to go back to throwing complete games I think the best way to get there is to limit teams to eight pitchers on the roster.  Then they'll have to back it off from max effort.  Of course they'd have to deaden the ball to compensate.

On the subject of Yarbrough, I've long thought that a team could designate someone as the "winner".  They only come into gamesfollowing the opener if the team is ahead, tied or down one run.  They pitch 3 innings or so at max effort, put up a reliever-like stat line, but go two or three times a week.  That could be 180 innings or so.  I don't know if that's a good team strategy, but if that's done enough someone will eventually be credited with winning 30 games.  Yarbrough most often pitched 4-7 innings per game, and never more than eight times in a month.

It's like putting your worst free throw shooters in in the last minutes of the 4th quarter in a close game in order for those guys to get practice at hitting clutch 4th quarter free throws. 

Idiotic.

[esmd]

Interesting read.