UTK Special 7/9/26

Introducing Crotonic Development

Milo of Croton did not begin by carrying the bull.

That is always the part worth remembering, and it is why I closed my landmark 2006 piece on pitcher development with Milo’s story. It is also why he is a good place to start again twenty years later. The old Greek wrestler, if we can trust the story more as parable than police report, began by carrying a calf. He carried it every day. The calf grew. Milo grew with it. By the time the calf had become a bull, the impossible had become ordinary through a thousand almost invisible adaptations.

Baseball used to understand that better than it understood almost anything else. It also used to abuse that understanding so badly that the correction was necessary. The game asked pitchers to carry bulls before it knew whether they had ever carried calves. It mistook survival for proof of wisdom. It let managers confuse stubbornness with science, and then it watched arms fail and careers collapse. The pitch count era was not some spreadsheet coup. It was a response to actual damage.

But pendulums do what pendulums do. They do not stop at wisdom. They swing way past it.

In 2006, the argument for progressive pitcher development was still being made against a culture that could remember Jack McDowell, Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan, Livan Hernandez, and the late-career shadows of a game in which 120 pitches was a checkpoint rather than a panic button. That world is gone. We are no longer debating whether pitchers should routinely be left out there at 130 because the manager likes the look in their eye. We are now in a league where 120 pitches has become an event, 140 feels like grainy footage, 150 has disappeared, and 160 belongs to another species of baseball. Quick - can you name who the last person to hit those pitch count milestones was?

As of July 7, 2026, the highest pitch count in a major-league game this season is 114, by Taj Bradley on April 29. ESPN’s 2026 top pitching performances by pitches thrown lists Bradley at 114, Parker Messick and Foster Griffin at 112, and no one at 120. [Of course, the night before this publishes, Dylan Cease went 118 in a near no-hitter!] That matters because this is not a fluke of one month or one cautious organization. Driveline noted in September 2025 that there had been only two 120-pitch outings in MLB from the start of the 2024 season to that point, one of them Justin Verlander’s 121-pitch start on August 31, 2025. (I’ll bet you can’t figure out the other without clicking this link.)

The last 140-pitch start in the majors appears to be Tim Lincecum’s 148-pitch no-hitter against the Padres on July 13, 2013. ESPN’s recap put it plainly: “Lincecum threw a career-high 148 pitches, struck out 13, and finished the no-hitter.” Sports Illustrated later wrote that when Livan Hernandez threw 150 pitches on June 6, 2005, he became the last pitcher to reach 150, and that only two pitchers had reached 140 since: Edwin Jackson and Lincecum, both in no-hitters.

The last 160-pitch start, in the reliable pitch-count era, takes us all the way back to Tim Wakefield’s 172-pitch, 10-plus-inning start for Pittsburgh on April 27, 1993. MLB.com notes that full pitch-count data dates to 1988 and identifies Wakefield’s 172-pitch game as the most exhaustive effort on record. It was a knuckleball game, which makes it both real and not quite comparable, but that is part of the point. The last true 160-pitch animal is now old enough to have children who think of Randy Johnson as a YouTube pitcher.

The mistake would be to read those numbers as a call to bring back 150 pitches as a goal. That was never the point. The point is that baseball has made the extraordinary vanish so completely that it has also weakened the ordinary. A league that cannot imagine 150 pitches may also fail to develop enough pitchers who can handle 100 with room to spare.

No one illustrates that shift better than Dusty Baker. For years, Baker became the public face of pitcher abuse, fairly or not. The images from Chicago in 2003 became shorthand for everything baseball wanted to leave behind: Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, October, high pitch counts, and careers that never became what they should have been. Baker has always pushed back on the idea that pitch counts alone explained those outcomes and Prior himself has said he does not blame his former manager. The truth, as usual, is more complicated than the mythology.

The fascinating part came later. By the time Baker was managing the Nationals and then the Astros, he had become one of the strongest advocates for letting established starters reach 100 pitches. Read that sentence again. The manager once portrayed as baseball’s cautionary tale had become the sport’s most visible defender of what had become a surprisingly controversial idea: that an ace should occasionally be allowed to finish what he started.

That tells you everything about how far the game has moved. Baker didn’t become reckless. Baseball became cautious enough that a manager willing to trust a healthy frontline starter beyond the century mark suddenly looked like a throwback. The line hadn’t moved a little. It had moved so far that the man once accused of pushing pitchers too hard became, almost accidentally, the spokesman for moderation.

The 100-pitch limit began as a guardrail, set first by Paul Richards and codified by Rany Jazayerli. It became a governor. Then it became a developmental ceiling. Baseball taught pitchers, coaches, front offices, agents, broadcasters, and fans to see 100 as a cliff rather than a point on a continuum. Once that happened, every part of the system adjusted. Starters were trained for five or six innings. Bullpens were built to absorb the rest. Pitch design rewarded maximum stuff in shorter bursts. Arbitration and free agency paid rate dominance more reliably than bulk. Amateur pitchers chased velocity and shape because those were the tickets to being seen. The sport did not merely manage shorter starts. It produced pitchers suited to shorter starts.

The numbers show the result. FanGraphs wrote in 2024 that starters were averaging 5.24 innings and 86.2 pitches per start early that season. A follow-up found that over the prior two years, starters were down 9.2 pitches and .67 innings per start compared with 2008–2014, and the decline held even among the top 100 and top 50 established starters. This is now a near-universal model, used by 30 teams and mirrored by the minors, but also by colleges and lower level development programs. No one is advertising “go deeper in games!” among the pitching factories. It’s still velocity, shape, and stuff.

Meanwhile, complete games have collapsed into museum pieces. The AP’s Ron Blum reported that MLB had only 26 complete games in 2024, a record low and four fewer than Catfish Hunter threw by himself in 1975. Things got little better in ‘25, with 29 total, but we’ve had just 10 so far in ‘26.

My 2006 framework needs updating because the tools have changed and the problem has changed with them. Back then, the best public argument was that pitch counts were crude measures, innings were cruder, and progressive workload made more sense than either abuse or blanket protection. That still holds. What has changed is that we can now see more of the workload, more of the stress, and more of the failure pattern.

The first modernization is simple: stop treating game pitches as workload. They are only the countable public portion. Zaremski et al showed in a high school study that game-day throws were dramatically undercounted when researchers included warm-up pitches and bullpen throws, with actual total throws about 42% higher than official pitch count. Baseball has built entire safety systems around the easiest number to display on television. That does not make pitch count useless. It makes it incomplete.

A modern progressive system has to track total throws, intensity, pitch type, velocity, between-start bullpens, plyo work, weighted-ball work, recovery state, sleep, soreness, travel, and calendar density. It also has to distinguish between a 93-mph fastball at 85% intent in the second inning and a 98-mph fastball at full effort with a man on third in the sixth. Those are both one pitch in the box score. They are not one pitch to the arm. We need a combination of a Motus sleeve, an Oura ring, and a Ring camera, all with AI powered personalizations.

The second modernization is to treat velocity as a load multiplier. In 2006, velocity was already central to injury discussion, but the sport had not yet become fully organized around max-effort velocity and pitch shape. Now the connection is harder to ignore. Chalmers et al found that higher fastball velocity helped predict UCL reconstruction among MLB pitchers, with higher weight and younger age as secondary predictors. A 2019 systematic review found increased velocity and workload were common risk factors for UCL injury. MLB’s own 2024 injury study, based on interviews with more than 200 people, pointed to rising velocity, pitch shaping, and maximum-effort throwing as likely contributors to the injury increase, while saying there was no evidence linking the pitch clock itself to the injury spike. (I confirmed the latter to be true in my own presentation from January 2026.)

This is where the old pitch-count debate collapses under modern reality. A 120-pitch start in 1998 and a 100-pitch start in 2026 may not be comparable. The modern pitcher throws harder, spins the ball differently, trains differently, rests differently, and is often selected precisely because he can access violence more often. If the sport wants starters to work deeper, it cannot simply tell them to throw more pitches. It has to teach them how to pitch below redline without becoming ordinary. The goal is maximum efficiency - getting the most outs with the least possible effort.

The third modernization is to bring back capacity as a measurable skill. We measure pitch quality obsessively. We can tell a pitcher that his sweeper gained two inches of horizontal movement, that his fastball plays better at the top of the zone, that his extension changes perceived velocity, that his changeup separation has improved. We do not speak with the same precision about sustainable capacity. We should.

Call it Crotonic Development.

Crotonic Development would mean the deliberate, individualized, progressive increase in a pitcher’s sustainable workload over years rather than weeks, with the goal of expanding capacity without outrunning adaptation. It would not be nostalgia. It would not be permission for a manager to chase a no-hitter into malpractice. It would be the opposite of that: a system that asks what a pitcher should be able to do at 21, 25, and 28 and beyond, then builds toward that outcome with the same patience used in strength training, endurance training, and return-to-play progressions.

The fourth modernization is using technology for durability rather than only nastiness. Hawkeye, TrackMan, Rapsodo, Edgertronic, force plates, markerless motion capture, wearable sensors, ball-flight models, and biomechanical labs have changed pitcher development. Too much of that change has been aimed at sharper weapons. The next advance should be aimed at keeping the weapons usable.

The sport can now monitor release-point drift, arm-slot changes, velocity decay, spin decay, command deterioration, stride changes, trunk rotation, elbow torque proxies, recovery markers, and pitch-mix efficiency. It can see when a pitcher’s delivery changes under fatigue and whether the change is benign, compensatory, or dangerous. It can compare the 20th pitch to the 90th. It can know whether a pitcher is still pitching or merely surviving. That is where the old framework becomes new. The question is no longer “How many pitches?” The question is “What is happening to this pitcher as the workload accumulates?”

The fifth modernization is developmental scheduling. A pitcher cannot be trained for 110 pitches if every level treats 85 as a moral victory. The minors should not be a random collection of workload caps, piggyback starts, shortened outings, innings limits, and end-of-season shutdowns. Some of those tools are useful, especially after injury, but as a default system they create pitchers with narrow capacity bands. If a major-league organization wants starters who can work through a lineup three times, it has to build that ability in the minors with planned exposure: not sudden jumps, not macho tests, but steady increases in sustainable workload paired with recovery surveillance and performance thresholds.

That is Milo’s calf for baseball. A pitcher who throws 75 pitches comfortably should not be asked to throw 120 because the big-league club had a bullpen game the night before. He should be moved, gradually and measurably, from 75 to 85, from 85 to 95, from 95 to 105, and eventually beyond that if his body, mechanics, stuff, command, and recovery say he has adapted. The key is not the number. The key is the adaptation.

This also means changing incentives. If every young pitcher knows that the fastest route to the majors is one inning at 99 with a mutant breaking ball, then Crotonic Development will lose to the marketplace. Organizations say they want starters, but they often reward reliever traits, then act surprised when the starter supply thins. They should systematically measure and reward efficiency, recovery, strike-throwing, third-time-through solutions, pitch conservation, submaximal velocity bands, and the ability to maintain mechanics past fatigue. A pitcher who can hold command and shape from pitch 85 to pitch 105 has added something real. That should be treated like adding two miles per hour.

That said, there is a reason that pitching has shifted this way. There’s no use in training people to go 120 if the third-time penalty is so high, it makes no sense to do so. It makes no sense if a ready-to-go reliever is a better matchup in the sixth and there’s sufficient available talent to be better than the fatiguing starter the rest of the game. However, that’s not always going to be true. Quick - who was better, Roger Clemens or Mariano Rivera? That question depends on a lot of things, but the answer is always contextual and we should never get away from that for any two pitchers in a situation. Again, this is very knowable in the moment and should be.

The better future is not a return to 150 pitches as a regular thing. It is a return to the idea that pitchers can be developed to carry more than they currently carry. Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens will remain rare because the extreme tail is always rare. Genetics, mechanics, competitiveness, recovery, and luck all matter, but they should not seem quite as alien as they do now. Justin Verlander should not look like the last mammoth wandering through a bullpen gate.