Dusty Baker Just Doesn’t Get It
On just four days of rest, Cincinnati Reds young hurler Edison Volquez pitched 7 shutout innings today, striking out 10 batters in the process. The Reds defeated the Cubs, 9-0.
Here’s the thing, though. After 5 innings, the Reds had a 7-0 lead. Did Dusty take his young fireballer out then to preserve his arm? No. After 6 innings, the Reds had a 9-0 lead. Does Dusty remove Volquez then? Nah. Old Dusty left Edison Volquez in for 7 innings, making the 24-year-old throw a total of 118 pitches on just four days rest in a 9-0 blowout. Why, Dusty? Why? Don’t you realize that you need to preserve this kid’s fragile arm? Did you learn nothing from your Chicago days?
We’ve said it here at the Fleece Factor before, and we’ll say it again. Dusty Baker seems poised to repeat the mistakes he made with Mark Prior and Kerry Wood in Cincinnati with Volquez, Johnny Cueto and eventually Homer Bailey. The fleece potential of his hiring is through the roof.
I just don’t get it. After watching Baker butcher the Cubs, and then listening to his incoherent banter on Baseball Tonight, how could anybody want to pay him millions of dollars to manage a professional baseball team? What am I missing?
Filed under: Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds
Trying to save the bullpen?
Why not just let Josh fogg throw 3 or 4 innings of mop-up, then?
The game has changed and not for the better. These huge multi-million dollar contracts make the cost of injury prohibitive.
Pitchers just don’t throw enough anymore, thats the real culprit behind all the arm injuries.
Back in the day of four man rotations pitchers pitched on three days rest and routinely threw 150 plus pitches per game with the expectation of pitching all nine innings.
Hell, Nolan Ryan averaged well over 250 innings and 35 starts well into his forties.
At the age of 27 he made 41 starts and pitched 332 innings and pitch counts were unheard of back in 1974.
Even Leo Mazzone had his pitchers throwing twice between starts back in the nineties. The 1993 Braves had what was essentially a four man rotation that averaged 243.5 innings per starter.
Don’t go blaming Dusty Baker for Kerry Wood, that kid had terrible mechanics. I knew his arm would blow out.
Carlos Zambrano never had arms issues pitching under Dusty Baker and neither did Greg Maddux.
The huge contracts and bloated payrolls of todays billion dollar money machine that major league baseball has become is dictating the way managers handle their pitchers.
The five man rotation has watered down the quality of pitching coupled with these bandbox stadiums to turn baseball into a game that favors the offense.
You can blame Dusty Baker if you want, past history tells me something altogether different.
Coach, for every Nolan Ryan, there are countless others that were lost to injuries, you didn’t hear about them cause… well they’re lost to injury!
we could look at the Braves, yes they got very lucky with Smoltz and Glavine, but what about Steve Avery? who actually was every bit as good as those two. how did his career end up? and you know two great current comp for Steve Avery? Dontrelle Willis and Barry Zito.
Hell, look at Justin Verlander’s current struggles and look back to his IPs over the last two years? remember Bill Pulsipher? Paul Wilson? we could even debate that Doc Gooden’s demise had something to do with overwork at his early stage.
look, there are freak of natures that defy the odds. but your arguement is like saying that people die of smoking because they don’t smoke enough.
Baker destroyed Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. Agree with Coach, the game has changed and not for the worse. They start these kids with “pitch counts” in high school now, it’s unreal. They never build up true stamina, and hence, multiple arm injuries. That being said, if that’s the culture, Baker can’t keep ignoring it. Don’t ruin these kid’s careers, Dusty.
Baker is out to get me personally since I have both Volquez and Cueto on my fantasy league roster. I guess he took exception to the eye rolling I did everytime I watched him on Baseball Tonight.
Baker is a terrible manager for managing a pitching staff and especially a young one. Why teams keep hiring him when he has yet to learn anything from his old school days learned from the 70’s Dodger teams is beyond me.
The near universal obsession with pitch counts has done nothing to prevent arm injuries. In fact, the backing off on pitchers’ workloads have increased their susceptibility to injury.
Pitchers from little league all the way up to the big leagues never get the chance to develop the arm strength needed to pitch without getting hurt.
What we are witnessing is the inferior development of young pitchers due to one factor : M-O-N-E-Y.
Kerry Wood was a disaster waiting to happen. His mechanics were non-existent right from the start. Wood never saw more than 114 innings in any one season down in the minors and yet he was seeing 200 plus innings back to back in 2002-2003.
Mark Prior was equally set up for failure. He had all of two seasons of College ball under his belt at U.S.C. with just 267 innings of work and was rushed straight to the big leagues after being drafted by the Cubs in 2001.
Prior and Wood are near perfect examples of what happens when young talented pitchers never get the chance to develop properly.
Blaming Dusty Baker is ignorance at best. Put the blame where it belongs, on organizations like the Cubs who manage with the pocketbook instead of utilizing the time tested lessons of experience and history that baseball has taught to generations of players.