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I know that there's debate over whether or not too much emphasis is being placed on pitch counts these days, but like it or not it's now a part of the game, and probably will be for years to come.
I've had a problem getting a handle on what's a high pitch count at different points in the game. I know that if a pitcher has thrown 110 pitches, he's probably not going to be in the game much longer. But how many pitches is "a lot" after four innings? Or after six? And if a pitcher throws 35 pitches in the second inning, how quickly does he have to get through the subsequent innings to be back at a normal pace?
In Monday afternoon's IGT, I raised a question about the average number of pitches that a batter sees in a plate appearance. Seawolf (I think) directed me to ESPN's expanded stat page. I did some pasting into Excel, and came up with a few numbers. They're current through (I assume) the end of Sunday's games, and only apply to the 2006 season. It's a pretty big sample size, though, and should be enough to let us get a handle on modern day pitch counts. (I wonder, though, how different the results might be for 1980, or 1960, or 1940.)
Anyway, here's what I found.
Through Sunday, 569,729 pitches had been thrown in the major leagues.
This covered 151,164 plate appearances.
Therefore, the average hitter sees 3.77 pitches per plate appearance.
The average number of pitches thrown in an inning is 16.39. Doing a little math, the average number of plate appearences in an inning is 4.35
So if a pitcher throws 35 pitches in his first inning, for example, but then throws only 8 in each of the next two innings, he'll be back on a normal pace.
Given the average number of pitches per inning, an "average" complete game would involve about 147 pitches, which is probably why we see so few of them. To get a complete game, a pitcher has to keep his average number of pitches per inning at around 13 or fewer. Much more than that and he won't be allowed to finish the game.
I also filtered out the Mets pitchers, based on the team that ESPN listed them on. It seems that they're listing all pitches thrown by the player for the season, so we'll see the innings that Oliver Perez pitched for Pittsburgh, and Orlando Hernandez for Arizona. For some reason Jorge Julio is still listed as a Met, so we're seeing his Arizona innings as well. So these Mets totals aren't really exclusive to the Mets, but it will give us a general idea of the numbers that our guys have put up.
| Name | Pitches | P/PA | P/IP | | Tom Glavine | 2690 | 3.89 | 16.7 | | Steve Trachsel | 2373 | 3.80 | 16.9 | | Orlando Hernandez | 2326 | 4.10 | 17.8 | | Pedro Martinez | 1897 | 3.84 | 15.5 | | Oliver Perez | 1561 | 4.03 | 19.3 | | Aaron Heilman | 1217 | 3.98 | 16.6 | | Jorge Julio | 1079 | 4.30 | 18.7 | | Billy Wagner | 1032 | 4.20 | 17.1 | | Darren Oliver | 1024 | 3.82 | 15.4 | | John Maine | 1023 | 4.18 | 16.6 | | Roberto Hernandez | 964 | 4.08 | 18.4 | | Duaner Sanchez | 852 | 3.72 | 15.4 | | Pedro Feliciano | 819 | 3.72 | 15.9 | | Alay Soler | 789 | 3.79 | 17.5 | | Chad Bradford | 709 | 3.56 | 14.4 | | Brian Bannister | 598 | 3.96 | 17.6 | | Heath Bell | 437 | 3.87 | 17.3 | | Mike Pelfrey | 379 | 3.83 | 17.8 | | Jose Lima | 367 | 4.03 | 21.2 | | Victor Zambrano | 366 | 3.77 | 17.2 | | Henry Owens | 89 | 4.68 | 22.3 | | Royce Ring | 67 | 3.72 | 16.8 | | Bartolome Fortunato | 61 | 3.39 | 20.3 |
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