Quote:
Originally Posted by PhillieFever
Given the fact that medicine, especially sports medicine is so far advanced than it was even 25 years ago let alone 100 years ago, and the athletes themselves are in much better physical condition why is it do you think that the pitchers of today seemingly cannot handle the load that the pitchers of the past did? I for one do not buy the argument that old time pitchers "coasted" until key spots in the game and then turned it on, athletes are just not hardwired that way, they are super-competitive and "most" give 100% all of the time. If you think about it, it's one of the lone examples in sports where performance has decreased over time.
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Well, I think that's true depending on how far back you go. Christy Mathewson outright admitted as much in
Pitching In A Pinch. That said, I agree with you that pitchers at least as far back as the 50s did not have the freedom to coast against weaker hitters, at least not from the few games I've seen from then. One difference between then and now is the advent of pitching from the stretch. In the 50s in particular there wasn't a lot of stealing bases so pitchers often didn't just throw from a full windup, they threw from big windmilly windups which often look comically exaggerated compared to the windups of today. IIRC this has not been shown to increase velocity but I'd be very surprised if using your shoulders and legs this much to generate your delivery doesn't reduce the strain on one's arms.
The other issue is that there are a lot of different kinds of pitches thrown now compared to back then. The slider, which may or may not have been similar to the nickel curve thrown by guys going back to the 1920s, was in its heyday in the 1970s and allegedly produces a lot more strain on the arm than most pitches do. The same goes for the splitter, thrown with a grip somewhat similar to a forkball but with the speed of a fastball. In the meantime, you really aren't seeing a lot of pitches that were a strain on the arm going away. I guess the screwball isn't thrown quite as much as it was back in the day (although it always was, I think, a novelty pitch as much as anything else). The knuckler isn't used as one pitch among many much at all anymore, although from what I gather that's about an easy a ball to throw as one exists.
Perhaps the lack of stamina is just an outgrowth of the continuing evolution of the game in other areas. Strikeout rates continue to climb from one generation to the next, as do BABIPs. The level of K/9 a pitcher has to achieve at a minimum to be of major league quality is a lot higher than it was even 30 years ago. Perhaps this requirement forces people to throw more pitches than they used to and also to throw harder on a pitch-to-pitch basis than they used to as well.