[44] Great, will do. I do remember reading somewhere about David Cone throwing 150 pitches on more than one occasion..

the pitchers here in Japan are Seriously “abused”..Matsuzaka’s famous “Koshien National Tournament” championship game was over 175 pitches..and he had pitched two days earlier, and he was 18 years old!

162 games divided by five pitchers is 32.4 starts. Even at eight innings per start that’s only 259 2/3 innings. But 162 games divided by four is 40.5 starts, a pinch more than 7 1/3 innings per start in a four-man rotation would push an ace like Sabathia up to 300 frames.

It’s funny, because the same performance analysis that has lead to strict pitch counts and innings limits for young pitchers (based on evidence of workloads leading to injuries in the past) also argues in favor of four-man rotations for established starters as it would eliminate the often-replacement-level fifth starter and there’s no evidence that pitching every four days is any harder on a mature pitching arm than pitching every five days.

Amazing to look back though and see guys throwing 300 innings..doubtful that will ever happen again.

It’s about conditioning. He’s just not stretched out, and players under 25 are still maturing physically so you have to be careful about extending them significantly past what they’ve been conditioned to do in the past. Pitching is a very unnatural act. Once he’s built up, like CC has been, he should be able to go 230-odd innings annually, but it takes a few years to get to that point and to get him out of what they call “the injury nexus,” which is that less-than-25-years-old period.

Put it this way, just because somebody’s tall, thin, and leanly muscular doesn’t mean they could go out and run a marathon without training for it first. And you can’t go from running a 10K to running a marathon without some intermittent training either. Throwing 200+ innings in a season is like running a marathon, you have to build up to it.

I know this has been covered before, but I still don’t get it..Joba looks like a Mack truck, is his arm that fragile that he can’t even pitch 180 innings at this point?? Perhaps someone can point me to some reading material about pitchers arm strength and development..obviously each individual is different, but it just seems like they are babying him a bit..

We kid about AJ and Sheets, but you know, I don’t want to speculate that they will get injured. Besides, we have a plethora of options at AAA for spot duty. If Cash wasn’t afraid of Sheets’ injury report, he’d be here already…

Ben Sheets is STILL out there, right? Would love to see the Yanks offer the same deal Andy got to Sheets..then the rotation would be:
CC
AJ/Sheets (18-20 starts each with all the injuries)
Wang
Andy P
Joba
Phil

add it up and you get 100 wins…

I wonder who is going to help out at ST this year? Has that information been published yet?

From fangraphs;

Thanks to the new Marcel projections that were just added to the site last night, we can estimate Burnett’s 2009 performance pretty easily. Marcel projects him at 187 innings with a 3.87 FIP for next year, but we’ll round that to 190 innings and a 3.90 FIP just to make the math easier. Once again, we’re going to use a 5.50 FIP as replacement level for a starter and cap his innings at 160, and use a 4.50 FIP as replacement level for a reliever, who will make up the 30 inning difference. So here are the totals that we’re projecting:

3.3 wins * 5.5 million per win = $18.15 million in projected 2009 value. We again factor in a 10% discount rate to make up for the fact that he’s going to get a long term deal, and that gives us an annual average value of $16.4 million. Given Burnett’s history, it’s unlikely he’ll get more than four or five years. That puts his projected contract at 4 years/$66 million or 5 years/$82 million.

A.J. Burnett was signed to a five-year, $82.5M contract.

Not bad how the math works out, eh?

OYF: “$18m for 170 IP of a league-averagish ERA is a bit depressing. ” Why do you think I was so pissed off when they signed him?

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Chase-ed Wright Off The 40-man[/a]

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Chase-d Wright Off The 40-man

I copy and paste whatever text and link into an existing example of a hyperlink code, as this is easy to forget unless you’re an HTML coder (wowzers…)

Let the kids fight it out for the #5 spot and slot Pettitte as the swing man. If the kids are all ineffective or if one of the starters becomes injured, Andy is available to provide lots of league-average-or-better innings. If the Yanks don’t need much of Pettitte in the rotation, they won’t have to pay more than the base salary and roster time. If he ends up contributing as a rotation regular, they’ll pay him like one.