As for injuries … my dad has a theory that you can tell a lot about a pitcher by looking simply at his lower body usage. Take Tom Seaver: drives through with his lower body, his right knee almost touching the ground. Now compare to someone like Heath Bell, who barely bends over when he releases. All Arm. Seaver didn’t miss a start until he was 35, Bell’s never had any arm issues. So I guess who really knows, right?

The point I always make to people criticizing Verducci’s “rule of thumb” is just that; it’s a rule of thumb, not a statistical analysis. But that usually falls on deaf ears.

But I think it is a decent rule of thumb to guide us, if for no other reason than high usage can lead to mechanics breaking down, and then coupled with Verducci’s additional knowledge of baseball, similar to what Gladwell discussed in Blink, his instincts help him identify the guys really at risk, which is why his personal list is very high.

My gut instinct is that biomechanics has a much bigger role than generally credited, and that injuries (assuming solid original mechanics) result from fatigue or stress altering mechanics in unusual ways, not sheer usage as Verducci says. But how they can predict that, I don’t know. I read one time that the Rays have people monitoring live camera feeds on all their pitchers during every game (minors or majors) and feed reports directly to to Maddon and the minor league managers in real time when they notice any alteration in a pitchers mechanics, and then they pull them right away. It sounds a little bit like an urban myth, but I think that kind of thing may be the future.