IGNORANCE ABOUT PITCHING
It never ceases to amaze me how little people know about pitching. Specifically, how little people who write about baseball know about pitching. It all goes along with my theory of "all you need to have in order to write a weblog is a pulse and a computer".

I've heard it stated a lot lately that "oh no tomorrow's starter was warming up in the pen! He's going to struggle to throw five-innings tomorrow and will probably get rocked". It is obvious that people who have said this have never pitched before. Pitchers play catch every day in baseball. The starters throw off of the mound in-between starts. This usually is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 pitches. On the days that they play catch they usually do what is called "flat ground work", which is when somebody acts as the catcher and crouches about 40 or 45 feet away in the outfield or where ever the pitcher is playing catch. This is a way for a pitcher to work on his mechanics while not putting a lot of stess on his arm.

The reason I wrote this is that I think there is this myth out there that starting pitchers throw their game and then sit around for four days and only play a little catch until it is their day to start again. That simply isn't true. These guys do a hell of a lot of throwing, so warming up the day before a start isn't going to mean that the pitcher has no chance to be successful the next day.