Joba's elbow, rules, the Verducci effect and sloppy thinking

As we think about Joba's injury I cannot help another Verducci effect rant.

As the Yanks brought the young prospect along they bent over backwards to try to protect him from the Verducci effect.  When he was in the pen they limited his innings and his appearances.  When he had a try as a starter they limited his innings by pulling him from games, skipping starts, etc etc.  At the time I thought they damaged what they were trying to protect. 

Now he has the injury they went nuts to avoid.  I feel badly and wish Joba the best.

So, it is time to look at the Verducci effect again.  Those of you with long memories will recall I've written on this before, usually to the effect that we do not know if the idea is valid because the evidence presented is not adequate show that things like Joba Rules are necessary or smart.

Let me talk for a minute about how industry thinks about machinery that breaks down periodically. They develop statistics in the form of mean time between failures.  These statistics are not time in the calender sense.  These stats are mean number of operating hours between failures.  If it were a fleet of vehicles the stat might be miles between failures.  By extension the number I'm interested in is pitches between injuries.

First let me say that human bodies are very different.  If we do stats we will find out about averages.  I do not know if we will ever be able to tell which pitching prospect is going to break down and which will pitch til his hair is grey.  Baseball has always had it's Nolan Ryan, Satchel Paige, Jamie Moyer, Warren Spahn's who pitch into their 40's.  What I think is that it's them, not how they were used that made them last.

The young pitchers who got hurt fairly quickly after a big work load increase?  Duh.  What I think is their arm had x pitches to throw before injury.  When they started pitching more the injury came.  No one has presented ANY evidence that the increased work load CAUSED an injury in a way that lightening the work load would prevent injury.  I think it's likely that delaying the date a pitcher throws his 100,500th pitch delays any injury he was always going to get around his 10.500th pitch (obviously the number is arbitrary and just meant as an example.)

I hope we will soon see the Yankees stop delaying the development of their prospect pitchers.  I'd love to see someone get hired to do the statistical project.  The country is full of people with enough stats to do a better analysis.  If we want to know the answer the best way would be to do it like medical research.  Randomly assign young pitchers to different groups, treat them differently, track them and see if the results are different.  I do not know how it could be done 'blind', but it would be better if it were.

Joba, get well man.  Get your treatment, or operation, rehab, and come back to us.