Mon, Mar 06, 2006 page19

• Pitch limits upset baseball purists

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The World Baseball Classic, the sport's attempt at a world championship, has not been greeted warmly. With all the complaints -- the tournament should not be held during spring training, too many stars are dropping out, the pitchers will return to their clubs looking like the Venus de Milo -- the Australian shortstop may as well be Chicken Little.

  Nothing gets the naysayers more riled than the tournament's pitch limits, which restrict pitchers from throwing more than 65 pitches a game in the first round, 80 pitches in the second and 95 in the semifinal and final. A 30-pitch outing would require a day off, and a 50-pitch outing would require four days off. These ceilings have been ridiculed. But they will also force managers, players and viewers to adapt to a foreign presence in baseball: a clock.

  Time will not be measured in minutes and seconds, but will tick down with every pitch. The consensus among participants is that the teams that exploit that clock best -- with their pitchers getting outs quickly and, conversely, their hitters taking as many pitches as possible -- will gain a strategic advantage. As the US pitching coach, Marcel Lachemann, said, "Managing your pitching staff is probably the key to the whole thing."

  As a frame of reference, major league pitchers last season took an average of 16.1 pitches to complete an inning, with each inning consisting of about four plate appearances. So the limits of 65, 80, and 95 pitches would translate to about four, five, and six innings. But the dynamic between pitcher and hitter could change with the hitters' extra incentive to stretch at-bats, and the pitchers' incentive to conserve bullets.

  "You have to make adjustments," said the Mets' Victor Zambrano, who will pitch for Venezuela. "I know I only have so many pitches. I'm going to pound the zone."

  This vow would raise the eyebrows of Zambrano's various pitching coaches, who for years have begged him to throw strikes. Zambrano threw 16.8 pitches an inning last season, eighth most in the National League.

  His Venezuelan pitching mates, however, are among the best at getting outs efficiently. By walking only nine batters in 188 innings last season, Carlos Silva of the Minnesota Twins breezed through innings faster than any pitcher in the majors, with only 12.2 pitches each. His teammate Johan Santana also has excellent control, using only 14.4 pitches for every three outs. (The three American starters - Jake Peavy, Dontrelle Willis, and Roger Clemens -- all take 15 to 16.)

  "I'm not going to pitch any differently than I do in July or September," Willis said. "I don't think you can change that much on the mound."

  Hitters can change more easily -- after all, it is harder to throw a pitch accurately than to watch it go by. Small as the difference sounds, each batter's taking one extra pitch per at-bat would translate to about four more pitches an inning.

  And that would wind up forcing the opposing manager to remove his starter about an inning earlier. (In the first round, for example, 65 pitches would get pitchers through about three innings rather than four.)

  Going even deeper into counts would become baseball's clock-burning equivalent of tackling a ball carrier inbounds, or the Dean Smith four corners.

  The pitcher's competitive response must, of course, be to punish hitters' torpor by throwing strikes and getting a lot of 0-1 and 1-2 counts. This subduel exists in the regular season, but not with the pitch-limit guillotine hanging over the pitcher's arm.

  "They always say the most important pitch in baseball is Strike 1," Manny Acta, who will manage the Dominican Republic, said. "It's even more important now."

  Then again, bringing in a new pitcher does have its advantages. Hitters generally perform worse in their first at-bat against a starting pitcher than in their second and third, after assessing his repertory that particular day. Classic games will see so many new pitchers trotted in -- many will throw only one inning -- that hitters will be continually challenged by new deliveries and styles.

  This brings up another strategic option for the iconoclastic manager. With so many pitchers lasting only one inning, why not have a dominating closer pitch the first inning, which almost always features the most dangerous succession of hitters? Lachemann said he considered this but decided that starters would be unnerved by entering games in the second inning.

  The closer-starting idea was actually proposed in the early 1960s, by a self-described baseball scientist named Earnshaw Cook, who wanted to minimize the times weak-hitting pitchers came to the plate. Of course, the designated hitter fixed that problem, depending on whether you are a Hatfield or a McCoy.

  The World Baseball Classic's pitch-limit rules are considered even more perverse than the DH, and will alter the atomic structure of the tournament's every plate appearance. As objectionable as some find them, Mets closer Billy Wagner, who decided not to pitch for the US, thought the doomsayers were missing one major point.

  "If you throw that many pitches, you're not doing well anyway," Wagner said.
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