The Pussification of Baseball
Written by Sean Salisbury, Sunday August 07 2011
Baseball is my favorite sport, as I’d rather spend a day at Fenway Park than watching the Super Bowl or any other sport.
Man, do I respect all professional athletes and, as witnessed by my mediocre career, I know it ain’t easy! But I’m at my wit’s end with pitch counts and pitching coaches holding clickers to count pitches in the dugout during a game.
Enough with the pussification of pitchers in baseball. Who died and made 100 pitches the benchmark for when a pitcher has reached his limit? Let’s talk to Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan and Don Drysdale about clickers and pitch counts and watch them all throw up in their mouths.
Oohhh … maybe we should start limiting the throws of QBs – we sure wouldn’t want their arms to be sore! There is a reason we have more Tommy John surgeries now than we used to, because we didn’t baby the pitchers like we do now. The more you baby them, the softer they become, the less they can handle, the less we expect, the more problems we have and the fewer times we see a pitcher gut out a nine-inning, 130-pitch game for a win.
Maybe we should pay more attention to pitchers’ off-season conditioning to build up arm strength and durability. Instead, we tell them we need five innings and hope they can give us that every five days. This is also a reason why we’ll never see another 300-win pitcher, because even with new training techniques, we’ve programmed in our pitchers’ minds that nine innings, a complete game and 125 or more pitches is just too much to expect. It’s completely ridiculous.
This isn’t to say that guys like Roy Halladay aren’t tough, because we still have some old school mentality in our coaches and our players. What’s wrong with a pitcher if he’s going good to throw 10 extra pitches to win his team a game? He doesn’t pitch for five more days.
While athletes are stronger and bigger these days, as long as we have clickers in our hands and pitch counts on our mind, we will continue to soften up our pitchers, lower our expectations and continue the pussification of front-line pitchers.
Sean Salisbury, former NFL quarterback and NFL analyst for ESPN, covers sports for www.playerpress.com. Follow him on Twitter @SeanUnfiltered.
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