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Armed With Data, One Team Bucks the Conventional Use of Pitchers

June 13, 2004 - By DAVID LEONHARDT - New York Times

At a simple ballpark just beyond Washington's Beltway, the Cincinnati Reds, baseball's oldest franchise, are conducting a little experiment to see how well the past mixes with the present.

The men who run the Cannons, a Class A affiliate of the Reds analyzed years of data and decided that to pay as much heed to how much a pitcher throws in any one outing as to how often he pitches. As a result, Potomac pitchers are limited to such a low number of pitches every game - about 75 - that the team actually has an eight-man rotation, with two pitchers scheduled to throw about half of every game.

In football, Coach Bill Belichick has helped lead the New England Patriots to two championships in three years partly by avoiding common inefficiencies, like trading away draft picks and going for the 2-point conversion too often. In baseball, the Mets' pitching coach, Rick Peterson, sums up the new attitude by saying: "In God we trust. All others must have data."

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In baseball, the numbers suggest that pitchers tend to do the most damage to their arms after they have thrown about 120 pitches in a game. So throwing 130 pitches in one outing and 70 in the next is usually far more taxing than throwing 100 pitches twice in a row.

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