Counting Throws

After his days as a minor-league pitcher were over, my grandfather supplemented his income by playing baseball for semipro teams. He played for two different clubs in the mid-1940s, and traveled around the New York City area to pitch games in these very competitive, business-sponsored leagues. The money was good and the baseball was fun, so my grandfather found himself pitching two games a week. This was a lot, but he pushed it even further at one point and pitched four games in eight days. As you might expect, he felt a tear in his elbow while unleashing a pitch, and that was the end of his golden left arm.

By the time my brother and I grew into young ballplayers, my grandfather instructed us to avoid throwing curveballs as kids. He wanted us to let our arms grow naturally and avoid any extra strain. We took his advice, and paid close attention when he showed us that his injured left arm was 3-4 inches shorter than his right. We learned how violent the baseball pitching motion is, and did all we could to avoid overdoing it.

As a baseball fan, it is aggravating sometimes to hear all the talk about pitch counts, and to see managers limiting the number of times a young man gets to throw a ball toward home plate. It seems that we’re always seeing managers take their young pitchers out of the game early, all for the sake of minimizing the pitch count.

Even my grandfather would get annoyed when pitchers were taken out just because they’d hit a certain number. But he’d also holler at the pitchers when they wasted too many pitches. If you’re up to 100 pitches in the fifth inning, after all, you haven’t been pitching all that well.

In the end, my grandfather understood what those managers were doing. Pitching long into a game is not a sign of who’s a real man and who’s not. Warren Mueller was a great man. He had a ton of heart. But his arm endured violent, career-ending damage from extreme over-use. This happens in fields across America, all the time. Baseball managers know this.