Vacation Post 4

Can Pitcher Abuse Points Be Negative?

In most athletic endeavors, fatigue is visible. A sprinter slows. A lifter stalls. In endurance sports, the toll is obvious. The gait shortens, the form degrades, and the body makes clear that it’s reached the edge. In baseball, especially on the mound, fatigue is a liar. A pitcher can still be pumping 98 mph in the seventh inning, still landing breaking balls with surgical precision, right up until something gives. By the time the body admits to being done, it’s usually too late.

Pitchers don’t pitch to failure in the traditional sense. They pitch through failure, often without realizing it. The arm is a whip, not a piston. The kinetic chain is long, complex, and sneaky. When one link weakens - say, a fatigued scapular stabilizer or an overloaded oblique - the others pick up the slack. For a while. Because the final product - the radar gun reading, the swing-and-miss, the crisp pop in the mitt -doesn’t betray that compensation, no one blinks. Until the elbow explodes or the shoulder starts barking.

Zach Littell currently (as of July 1) holds the season-high pitch count in MLB at 117, in a complete game that wasn’t a clinic of efficiency. This wasn’t Framber Valdez spinning an 83-pitch masterpiece. Littell’s 117 is what passes for a “workhorse” outing in 2025. Which tells you a lot. Not about Littell, but about how baseball has moved the ceiling to where the warning light used to go on.

Rewind 20 years and Livan Hernandez* had three starts over 140, topping out at 150. Admittedly an outlier even then, there were 135 starts over 120 pitches that year. Right now, we have zero and I’d be surprised if we saw double digits when we wrap up 2025.

That pitch count cap, that soft 100, has become an artificial barrier, a corruption of the work of Paul Richards and Keith Woolner. Managers now manage to it. Pitchers know it’s there. Pitchers are trained around it. While it’s dressed up as a safety measure, in many ways it’s become an excuse for not understanding what’s actually happening inside the body. There’s nothing magical about pitch number 101. It’s a guess. A guideline born of good intentions, corrupted by overuse and underanalysis.

Fatigue is the enemy. Always has been, but we’re still shockingly bad at measuring it. Velocity doesn’t drop? Spin rate’s still stable? Must be fine. Except those are outputs, not diagnostics. They’re results, not causes. Pitchers can maintain their numbers deep into fatigue because other muscles are compensating. That’s what bodies do and baseball, by and large, still doesn’t know what to do with that information.

Here’s a physiological reality: pitchers can throw their hardest pitch of the night in the eighth inning, but that doesn’t mean they should. Fatigue in pitching is rarely linear. You don’t notice it pitch-to-pitch. You notice it in patterns, like the way recovery lags the next day, or the next start. You see it in the way command quietly erodes even when stuff holds or the way shoulder strength is subtly down a week later. None of that shows up on the scoreboard or the box.

We’ve known for years that muscle fatigue changes mechanics. That as certain muscle groups tire, others over-engage. The kinetic chain gets out of sync. The timing gets fuzzy. Injuries, especially UCL tears and labrum issues, are almost always mechanical and accumulative. It’s not pitch 117. It’s the body’s slow, silent response to the 3,000 bad ones before it.

The real issue? We still don’t know enough about the muscles that matter most. Baseball has incredible motion capture labs, but not enough real-time application. We’ve got force plates and wearable sensors and high-speed cameras but too often, the data lives in silos or only gets used to flag red alert after something goes wrong. We’re better at rebuilding broken pitchers than we are at protecting healthy ones.

One company trying to change that is Oro Muscles, which is leading the charge on wearable EMG. EMG (electromyography) tracks actual muscle activation in real time. Unlike proxies like pitch count or radar gun readings, EMG shows what muscles are firing, when, and how hard. That’s the kind of resolution baseball needs if it wants to get serious about workload management. Yes, there are teams using it, though none in game that I’m aware of.

Oro’s tech aims to capture that data in the field, not just in a lab. Imagine seeing that a pitcher’s posterior chain starts to lag late in an outing, not because of guesswork, but because the EMG trace shows less activation in the glutes and more reliance on the shoulder. That’s not just data - that’s a warning signal. Not a red flag after injury. A yellow light before one.

Right now, MLB teams can see how hard a pitch was thrown and where it went. With Oro-level EMG, they could see how it was thrown. Which muscles were overused. Which ones weren’t firing. Whether the movement pattern was repeating or breaking down. That kind of insight changes everything from usage decisions, rehab protocols, to long-term development plans.

If the current model isn’t working - and it’s not, given how many high-end arms rent time in MRI tubes like they’re AirBNBs - then we have to rethink the paradigm. We can’t keep pretending that a hard pitch limit is a substitute for actual load monitoring. The next leap in pitcher health will come when we stop waiting for the body to scream. When we can tell a guy is “done” not because he gives up a double or hits 101 pitches, but because his internal workload crossed a red line ago even if the gun still reads 97 and the pitching coach knows before he makes another 15.

Until then, baseball will keep losing arms. Pitchers will keep pushing through the silent fatigue, because that’s what they’re trained to do. That’s what the radar gun says they can do.

Just because they can doesn’t mean they should.

** I haven’t thought about Livan Hernandez in a while, but he was perhaps the last of a kind, a pitcher that held back, pitched deep, and could really unload from that distinctive delivery when he needed to. I wondered where he was at now and it turns out he runs a baseball program in Hialeah, Florida, LHB Academy - Livan Hernandez Baseball, I’d guess - that plays in Perfect Game tourneys. They have camps!