The Arm (11 page)

Though scouts nattered away about Molina's bad makeup—the nebulous quality that combines personality, attitude, willingness to accept coaching, and general demeanor—the episode did little to diminish his standing among the showcase class. Under Armour had called asking him back to its All-America Game—this time alongside Riley Pint. Molina heard from USA Baseball, too, and of course Perfect Game expected him to show up at nationals. He might not throw 96 or 97, as the scouts hoped, but he needed to maintain his ranking. “I don't want to see him get any lower because of this,” Nelson said.

He did drop, and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Between June 2012 and October 2014, Molina went to twenty Perfect Game events. That was twenty times throwing to the radar gun, twenty times trying to justify being number one, twenty times being peddled by all of the adults—family, scouts, agents, event coordinators—ostensibly there to protect him. However cosseted arms may be, rest for ones with just-closing growth plates never qualifies as a bad idea.

For the first time, Riley Pint would ramp up his summer schedule with events in between babysitting gigs. He planned to hit five Midwest tournaments and the WWBA with his Mac-N-Seitz team, fly in for a day to pitch at Perfect Game nationals and the Area Code Games, and headline the Under Armour game at Wrigley. After that, Pint expected to shut down for three months and start training for his senior season earlier than before, in November or so. He decided not to play basketball his senior year after a couple of twisted ankles, a concussion, a dislocated finger,
and a shot to the nose the previous season. No sense in risking it, not with the rising clamor.

Early in the 2015 Major League Baseball season, the Milwaukee Brewers spiraled to a 4–16 start. Fans grew resigned to them picking first overall in the draft.
Brew Crew Ball
, a blog devoted to the team, took the opportunity to stump for its choice: “Riley Pint has a name fit for the Brewers.”

“Not to sound cocky or anything,” Pint said, “but I do want to get drafted number one overall. That's my goal. And if that doesn't work out, I can go to LSU and play for an amazing program.”

Because Pint is a history buff, he knew the number of right-handed high schoolers that went with the first overall pick: none. Eight right-handers were chosen second, some successful (Josh Beckett, J. R. Richard), some spectacular busts (Jay Franklin, Tommy Boggs). The latest two were Jameson Taillon, who underwent Tommy John surgery, and Tyler Kolek, whose 100-mph fastball in high school raised suspicions about his long-term viability. The only three left-handed high schoolers taken number one were David Clyde and Brien Taylor, both of whom were out of baseball before their twenty-seventh birthday because of arm problems, and Brady Aiken, whose career didn't even start before he needed Tommy John.

Train and pray. That's all Pint could do. His coaches praised his mechanics and scouts liked his smooth delivery. Not once had his arm hurt. Nonetheless, Neil Pint paced every time his son started a game, the clock still ticking, June 2016 too far away to count days but close enough to dream about.

In early May 2015, Saint Thomas Aquinas traveled to Blue Valley West, a high school in the nouveau riche south Kansas City suburbs. Nobody with a radar gun showed. Those would come in waves next spring, area scouts and cross-checkers and maybe even some general managers. Their absence wasn't necessarily missed. Pint struggled to command his fastball. A couple of ground balls
with legs reached the outfield. He issued a four-pitch walk. His first-baseman missed an easy out with a brain fart. And suddenly he trailed 5–0, a victim of death by paper cut. He left after fifty-one pitches, and Aquinas soon thereafter got mercy-ruled. “Worst I've ever seen him,” Neil said.

Which, he suggested, wasn't a bad thing. The night before the game, Pint spent a few hours with his friends playing basketball. Neil wondered about the wisdom in that, especially with a game early the next day. He didn't belabor the point. He wants Pint to make more of his own decisions and recognize their consequences. You know, a normal adolescence.

Normalcy long ago vanished for kids like Riley Pint. Nothing illustrated this better than the line of questioning after the game, when Pint circled around the dugout and caught the eye of his father.

“Your arm OK?” Neil asked. Pint nodded.

“You good?” asked Schaum, his advisor. Pint nodded again.

His mom was sick the night before, so he walked into the stands to see how she was doing.

“How's your arm?” asked Missy. The words sounded familiar to Pint and boys everywhere inside the baseball machine. It's the exact thing Olivia Molina said to her son almost a year earlier at nationals, the first question, always the first question. They don't want to be like Braedyn Woborny's mom, wondering if they didn't do enough, stuck in the maze of second-guessing, their million-dollar lottery ticket gone like flash paper.

Eventually, the questioning shifted elsewhere. Neil wondered when Pint was going to get a haircut—the edges of his sideburns were starting to curl around his hat—and if he needed any food or Gatorade or something else. Pint politely answered, the frustration of the rare bad game evident. Neil knew better than to keep pushing.

“As long as you're healthy is all,” he told his son. “Right?”

N
OBODY IN BASEBALL KNOWS HOW
to create a firestorm quite like Scott Boras, agent to the stars and seasoned arsonist. What unfolded in September 2015 was no surprise, then, because little stokes Boras's ire like a perceived misuse of the pitching arm, and Matt Harvey's was about to become the biggest story in the game.

In Boras's thirty-five years representing players, only a handful of arms were as glorious as Harvey's. He pitched for the New York Mets, and as they were barreling toward the National League East division title, Harvey's innings count continued to creep up. He was no ordinary twenty-six-year-old right-hander; Harvey was one of the game's best pitchers, and that he was in his first season back from Tommy John surgery made his performance that much more impressive.

Following a seventeen-month layoff, Harvey threw 166⅓
innings through early September. That's when Boras sounded the alarm bells. He said doctors advised Harvey not to exceed his previous high for innings in a season of around 180. The Mets fired back, saying they wanted Harvey to keep pitching, and the New York tabloids weighed in ad nauseam about his dedication, and Harvey published a story online saying the innings limit was malleable, and at the end of ninety-six hours of nonstop Harvey discussions, the arm once again stood front and center, capable of dividing a franchise and its star.

Boras didn't know if staying beneath the 180-inning mark would keep Harvey healthy, and no doctor would dare say so definitively. Trying to protect an arm worth tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions, is folly. You guess. You hope. And, if lucky, your guesses and hopes get you through the year, as Harvey's did. He threw 189⅓ regular-season innings with the Mets, enough to pass the threshold, far fewer than he might've without New York skipping his turn in the rotation twice.

“Any player in this game wants to play this game for a long time and be healthy,” Harvey said. “It brought up a concern. As a human being, besides being an athlete, your career and your health is always a natural thing to worry about.”

Harvey is what Riley Pint and Anthony Molina and every other kid on the showcase circuit strives to be, and it's one reason his arm is so scrutinized. Harvey was one of baseball's most popular players, and his arm bore the brunt. Baseball, as usual, was wading into the unknown with his arm, and whether Harvey sustained his long-term health or not, he was another data point, another chance for baseball to make a legitimate breakthrough.

“Much like space travel, we're just putting a lot of this in orbit for the first time,” Boras said. “Before we get to Apollo, we're going through Project Mercury. Right now, giving pitchers extended rest and saying it's not just innings accumulation but the amount of rest you get. Maybe there's another way to say we can utilize this talent and protect it by using this model.”

The model cared as much about 2016 and '17 and '18 and beyond as it did 2015. Though Harvey's innings limit applied to the current season, his future—the great unknown—didn't just loom over the decision. It reminded baseball how little the sport really knows.

T
HE FIRST SIGNS OF A
shift toward more oversight with young pitchers started in the late 1980s and early 1990s, even as managers wore Bobby Witt and Al Leiter and Ramón Martínez and Cal Eldred and Alex Fernandez with 150-pitch starts. The last three hundred–inning season was now a decade in the rearview mirror, and rising salaries forced teams and players to focus more intently on preserving healthy arms. Better training, weight lifting, and arm-care programs became routine, if still rudimentary. Baseball finally began to realize that turning nineteen-year-old wunderkinder like Gary Nolan and Don Gullett into twenty-five-year-old also-rans was malpractice.

If doing more of something is bad, the thinking now went, doing less must be better. The widespread adoption of the five-man rotation gave starting pitchers an extra day of rest but didn't demonstrably help keep pitchers healthier. When Russell Carleton of
Baseball Prospectus
studied every start from 1950 to 2012 to learn whether an extra day of rest helped a pitcher perform better, the answer surprised him. “There was no indication that pitchers did better or worse based on how many days of rest they got,” he wrote. “What
was
significant was the number of pitches that the pitcher had thrown in his previous start.”

After a game in the range of 140 pitches, a pitcher's next outing suffered mildly. Today, keeping a starter in that long warrants Congressional intervention, thanks to a dermatologist in Chicago whose research ushered in baseball's pitch-austerity plan.

In the mid-1990s, well before he got his medical degree, Rany Jazayerli was a Johns Hopkins undergraduate and an unapologetic Kansas City Royals fan. At a used bookstore's dollar bin, he stum
bled across a copy of
The Diamond Appraised
, written by Craig Wright and Tom House and published in 1989. Wright was one of the first statistical analysts to infiltrate a baseball front office—he wrote most of the book's essays—and House was a former big leaguer turned pitching coach. Jazayerli bought the book because Bill James, the godfather of sabermetrics—the analysis of baseball statistics that today suffuses the sport—wrote its foreword. The authors took aim at everything in the game, all of the fallacies and thoughtless tripe that passed for critical thinking. More than a quarter century after its publication, the wisdom of
The Diamond Appraised
still shines brightly.

Wright didn't just rail against problems; he tried to offer solutions. In lamenting the fortunes of Nolan and Gullett and others, he proposed a change to the system. “In trying to protect the modern pitcher,” Wright wrote, “we can no longer rely on innings pitched as our sole measure of a pitcher's workload. We also have to consider how often he's pushed past his endurance level within his starts.”

He suggested focusing on the number of batters faced, which wasn't entirely novel. In the late 1950s, Paul Richards, the manager and GM of the Baltimore Orioles, had eased rookie pitchers into the major leagues with reduced workloads before pushing them above the two hundred–inning mark. The rest of baseball didn't catch on until after Richards died and Wright's book, gathering dust in the dollar bin, happened to inspire the right person.

During his first year of medical school a few years later, Jazayerli joined four others from the pre–web 2.0 baseball Internet community of geeks, diehards, and know-it-alls to publish a book in 1996 they called
Baseball Prospectus
. However off-brand and amateur its appearance, it was a revolutionary declaration of independence from the wrong thinking of the past.
Baseball Prospectus
was the twisted, snarky progeny of Wright and James.

Two years later, as Jazayerli watched the Florida Marlins tax Liván Hernández with 150-plus-pitch starts and keep rookie Jesús Sánchez in for 147 pitches, he thought back to Wright's idea that
batters faced mattered more than innings pitched. One could approximate pitch count from the number of batters—plate appearances tended to average about 3½ pitches—which allowed Jazayerli to make it even more granular. He wanted to quantify the harm done to an arm by the exact number of pitches thrown.

“The creation of any new baseball statistic is an act of arrogance,” Jazayerli later wrote, and yet there it was, on the
Baseball Prospectus
website June 19, 1998: “Pitcher Abuse Points: A New Way to Measure Pitcher Abuse.” Jazayerli did not see all pitches as equal. There was no way throwing 95 pitches in consecutive starts equaled a 150-pitch start followed by a 40-pitch outing. There had to be a point at which one pitch was more harmful than another. Jazayerli's original theory assigned pitcher abuse points, or PAP, for pitches over 100. One point for every pitch from 101 to 110. Two points for each from 111 to 120. Three for 121 to 130. And so on, all the way up to Nolan Ryan's 235, and the 211 thrown by Brooklyn Dodgers left-hander Joe Hatten on September 11, 1948.

His PAP article ran the summer that twenty-year-old Kerry Wood lit up baseball with 100-mph fastballs for the Chicago Cubs. Wood underwent Tommy John surgery the next spring. Between the Wood surgery and Jazayerli's demonization of high pitch counts, the issue of how much a pitcher throws wove itself into the fabric of every game. TV broadcasts today track pitch counts on a graphic next to the score. Box scores include pitches thrown by starters and relievers. Even if Jazayerli's PAP article wasn't the impetus behind the evolution, it captured the zeitgeist with impeccable timing.

By focusing on pitches, baseball, in the throes of its number-centric revolution, could revisit its history. Pitch counts for the Brooklyn Dodgers existed from 1947 to 1964 because of a man named Allan Roth. His first day of work at Ebbets Field, April 15, 1947, was overshadowed by another debut: Jackie Robinson. Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey had hired Roth as the game's first full-time statistician. On bespoke seventeen-by-fourteen-inch sheets of paper, Roth tracked every pitch thrown,
hopeful that the data would reveal some tiny advantage to exploit. From platoon splits to home-and-road results, it did, and the Dodgers won three World Series and played in five more during Roth's time with the team. He failed to link overuse with arm injuries, even though the Dodgers had plenty of both.

The most egregious pitch counts belonged to Koufax. In a 1961 game against the Cubs, he threw 205 pitches in a thirteen-inning complete game. Another thirteen-inning outing a year earlier required 199 pitches. The Dodgers rode Koufax as they pleased. Over the ten-year period Roth tracked his starts, Koufax exceeded 150 pitches 6.9 percent of the time, 140 pitches 13.8 percent, and 120 almost 40 percent of his appearances.

Roth's data provided insight into not just how the Dodgers operated but all of baseball. In recent years, noted sabermetrician Tom Tango developed a formula to estimate past pitch counts that stands up remarkably well to Roth's actual Dodgers numbers. It uses batters faced, strikeouts, and walks, and it illustrates the ebb and flow of usage by the decade far better than innings pitched. The upper boundary on a modern pitcher is around four thousand pitches in a season. Four-thousand-plus-pitch seasons were prevalent in the 1920s and '30s, dipped in the '40s and '50s, made a comeback in the '60s, and peaked in the '70s. An estimated twenty-two pitchers exceeded four thousand pitches in 1970. It's almost as many as the entirety of the 1990s. There are legends in that group: Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton and Fergie Jenkins, Gaylord Perry and Jim Palmer. And there are those whose arms betrayed them: Gary Nolan and Larry Dierker, Chuck Dobson and Mel Stottlemyre, Dave McNally, and, after his only four thousand–pitch season, Tommy John.

Since 2000, only Randy Johnson (twice) and Liván Hernández (once) have thrown four thousand pitches in a season. Nobody in baseball cracked the 3,500-pitch mark in 2015. Baseball took a well-intentioned idea—limit young pitchers' workloads to prevent them from getting hurt because of overuse—and applied the
doing-less-must-be-better philosophy to every pitcher, as though handed down on Mount Sinai by the baseball gods. “It's gone so far beyond what I was hoping would happen, I'm kind of flabbergasted,” Jazayerli said. “I'm just astounded. It's a credit to the game that it considered it. But maybe it overshot things.”

When a starter reaches one hundred pitches today, the bullpen almost inevitably stirs. I've wondered, as have many in the intervening years, why one hundred happened to stick as that line of demarcation and figured it was our infatuation with round numbers. Jazayerli fell for that spell, too, and gave
Baseball Prospectus
's implicit blessing by assigning PAP after the one-hundredth pitch.

“The one thing I feel guilty about was that one hundred is this magic number,” Jazayerli said. “One hundred was just a starting point. When I made it a baseline for PAP, I was just thinking that pitches one through ninety-nine aren't going to hurt you. So let's start at one hundred and go from there.”

The arbitrariness dissatisfied Bill James and other prominent sabermetricians who criticized PAP. Jazayerli and Keith Woolner, an influential colleague, collaborated on a newer, sounder version in 2001 that doubled down on the concept. Instead of adding one point every ten pitches, they suggested PAP grew cubically with every single pitch over 100. A 110-pitch outing, then, equaled 1,000 pitcher abuse points, while a 120-pitch start meant 10,000. Using this methodology, they found players with above-average PAP were three times likelier to be injured than those who had thrown the same number of pitches but had fewer PAP.

The winnowing of pitch counts already was well under way. By 2002, the number of 120-plus-pitch outings was nearly halved from four years earlier. In 2015, pitchers exceeded 120 pitches just thirty times, a more than 90 percent reduction from the year in which Jazayerli first wrote about PAP. Only four pitchers have thrown 140 pitches in a game in the last decade: two of them came in no-hitters, and the other two were from the rubber-armed Liván Hernández.

Pitch counts have dropped to the point that Jazayerli wrote that
PAP “became obsolete.” And yet here we are, two decades after he read
The Diamond Appraised
, pitchers throwing less and blowing out more. The arm confounds even the smartest people and inspires radical ideas, such as the best pitching prospect in a generation sitting out the playoffs in 2012 because maybe it would keep his arm healthy.

T
HE FRONT DOOR OF THE
Boras Corporation offices in Newport Beach, California, is like something straight out of
The Wizard of Oz
, impossibly tall and swinging open to reveal a hidden world. There is the conference room with more TVs than Best Buy, the outdoor lounge area with a pool table, and the ultimate showpiece: Scott Boras's office, the hub of the sprawling building because what's done inside this one room pays for everything else.