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« Last Year's Starters: First 7 Rounds | Main | The 3400 Club: 2007 Members »
The 3400 Club
Longtime RotoAuthority reader finite24 brought up an interesting topic recently: injury risk the following season for pitchers who threw 3500+ pitches. I decided to dig more deeply into this topic, pulling the benchmark down to 3400 pitches thrown in a season. I included playoff pitches, as well as an estimate of minor league pitches thrown by Brett Myers this year.
First up, your 2008 class (19 pitchers):
- Cole Hamels - 3914
- C.C. Sabathia - 3912
- Brett Myers - 3781
- Jon Lester - 3738
- Tim Lincecum - 3682
- A.J. Burnett - 3650
- Matt Cain - 3606
- Johan Santana - 3598
- Roy Halladay - 3560
- Gil Meche - 3555
- Joe Blanton - 3547
- Chad Billingsley - 3543
- James Shields - 3543
- Justin Verlander - 3528
- Ervin Santana - 3526
- Mark Buehrle - 3490
- Javier Vazquez - 3462
- Ryan Dempster - 3450
- Bronson Arroyo - 3436
How great is the injury risk for these guys? I'll go into detail on past years' results in future posts, but I'm seeing anywhere from 15 to 61% of those in this "club" deal with significant injury the following year. Best I can estimate is that anywhere from 3 to 12 of these 19 will be significantly injured in 2009.
My top ten pitchers for the risk averse (did not cross 3400 in '08 or '07 or have a major pitching injury in either year):
- Roy Oswalt
- Yovani Gallardo
- Cliff Lee
- Derek Lowe
- Kevin Slowey
- Ted Lilly
- Zack Greinke
- Scott Baker
- Andy Sonnanstine
- Joe Saunders
That list gets really tough at the end. It is a fact of life that you're going to have several injury risks on your staff.
Tomorrow we'll look at those who threw 3400+ pitches in 2007 - a group that responded horribly in 2008.
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