Pitch Counts Over Mechanics? Says Who? Oh, Dibble…

Rob Dibble doesn't like what he's "seeing:"

One thing that has bothered me since I retired after the 1996 season is the way pro baseball pitchers have been handled--or should I say mishandled. --

is a very special young pitcher, just like Tim Lincecum, Tommy Hanson, Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. Some of the hype surrounding those players has been expected, but some of these pitchers, I feel, were pressed into big league action before they were ready. I truly believe that pitch counts are way overrated and great mechanics, not throwing across your body, repeating your delivery and protecting your arm are way too overlooked in today's game. Were Kerry Wood and/or Mark Prior rushed to the bigs? Were they too young, or were they not taught properly? We may never know that answer. My idol growing up, and even when I made it to the pros, was Nolan Ryan - why? - not just because he had a great fastball, but he also had the mechanics to last well into his 40s.

I've never played baseball above the little league level, so I'm not going to pretend like I know more about how the game is played than Ron Dibble.  I don't. Conversely, I'm pretty sure that Dibble hasn't studied the game as much as some of the experts out there in the media, or some of the pitching coaches who are trying to be progressive in the management of pitchers rather than rely on methods developed in the 1920s. When Dibble tries to combine the worlds of former player and current media personality, he fails.  Here, he sounds like every other pitcher from a previous era that hates all the talk about pitch counts and innings caps simply because they were never spoken about when he was a pitcher.  I'm pretty sure the Internet wasn't a hot topic of conversation when Dibble started pitching in 1988 but, for a job, he's made the adjustment. My big beef is the statement, "I truly believe that pitch counts are way overrated and great mechanics, not throwing across your body, repeating your delivery and protecting your arm are way too overlooked in today's game." First, the insinuation is that pitching coaches are ignoring mechanics, not preaching repeating your delivery, and simply sitting back and counting pitches. Can Dibble really think that's the case?  What would the state of major league pitching be if that were the attitude of today's coaches and pitchers? Second, Dibble thinks that "protecting your arm

way too overlooked in today's game," but he is dismissing pitch counts in the same thought.  Why are teams worried about pitch counts then?  Is protecting your arm simply not throwing across your body?  The logic makes no sense. Highlighting Mark Prior and asking whether he was taught properly or not is a misinformed question.  By most accounts, Prior had near flawless mechanics when he was promoted to the big leagues.  Unfortunately for him and the Cubs, he didn't have the durability to be a starting pitcher every fifth day.  That may or may not have had something to do with protecting Prior's arm when, in 2003, he averaged 126 pitches over his last 6 starts of the season while reaching and going beyond what should have been his innings limit.  Maybe, just maybe, Dusty Baker could have "protected his arm" by not riding the 22 year old pitcher like Nolan Ryan. And of course Dibble liked Nolan Ryan.  He was a horse.  Would you have expected him to say Mark Fidrych instead?  He wasn't durable. I don't blame former players for having a perspective based on their playing experience.  If you spend ten or fifteen years working in any industry, you're going to gain some knowledge and you're going to think you know more than the young whipper-snapper writers that haven't touched a baseball since puberty. But things change.  Coal ain't mined like it used to be and pitching isn't looked at the same way, either.  You can cling to the old way of doing things, but pretty soon, especially in the Internet Information age, you're just going to look old. Imagine what insight Joe Morgan or Rob Dibble or any of these guys could provide if they took an open-minded look at more modern statistics and applied it to what they learned as players.  Wouldn't that be something?