Eagles, Blazers equipped to deal with new pitching rules
In a seismic shift, the PIAA announced a few months ago that it would be moving to a standardized pitch count for the 2017 season, ditching the weekly innings limit that had previously been in place for a number of years for high school pitchers.
While there will be programs that struggle to adapt to the new measures, don’t count Exeter and Daniel Boone among them.
That’s because both programs have had a selfmonitored pitch count program, safeguards already in place, for the health and well-being of the young arms plying the trade for the Eagles and Blazers, respectively.
Exeter head coach Justin Freese and Boone head man Justin McCord were fairly in agreement that the new hard and fast pitch count rule won’t pose any major issues – during the regular season anyway. The postseason at the District 3 and PIAA levels will be an adventure and an adjuston-the-fly process when it gets here, simply because the state hasn’t had this measure in place before while coaches are dealing with potential elimination games – and the planning out ahead that will accompany that. It’ll be new for everybody.
McCord shrugged at the notion that anything would change with his Blazers.
“It’s an irrelevant thing in my mind, because we’ve worked off of a hard and fast number before,” McCord said. “I have, because I’ve always been more concerned about my players’ health than about wins and losses. We believe in building depth in our pitching staff, and we believe that we can run anybody out there to go and throw strikes and do a job. If they can’t that’s on me as a coach for not developing them.
“It hasn’t fazed us at all. It’s been business as usual.”
Freese ran into McCord and the Blazers last Wednesday, a buzzsaw 11-0 defeat in five innings that neither manager saw coming. Jon Wack, Exeter’s touted starter, just didn’t have it that particular afternoon. He went 2 1/3 innings and threw 60 pitches.
Freese revealed after the contest that Wack was on a pitch count anyway coming into the game. If anything, the lopsided nature of the clash with Boone made it, in some odd way, easier to allow Wack to get enough work it without coming close to jeopardizing the rest of his week.
“Jon was giving us between 60 and 65 pitches (Wednesday). If that lasted two innings, it lasted two innings. If it lasted five, it lasted five. Jon has been working his way back from some arm stiffness, so we’ve been on a strict pitch count anyway with him. He could have had a perfect game through five innings and at 65 pitches, he was done.”
Freese credited a program philosophy spearheaded by pitching coach Carl Solarek for somewhat insulating Exeter from the rules change that became concrete this past offseason, mixing a combination of pitch counts with performance.
Now that approach sounds basic and simple, until you realize one of the reasons the PIAA instituted a hard number in the first place was due to too many schoolboy aces being ridden too hard for too many games. The history of the high school game is littered with arms ruined before graduation.
“The pitch count rule hasn’t affected us too much because you’re still allowed 100 pitches, which for us, our pitchers never throw 100 anyway,” Freese said. “They usually top out at 85, and that’s due to our pitching coach (Solarek). He does an excellent job with our pitching staff.
“He focuses not so much on pitch count, but what they’re doing. If they’re starting to get up in the zone and are at 50 (pitches), he’s getting somebody else up. We max out at 85, 90 pitches most days with our pitching staff. … We don’t throw guys in back to back games. So someone who threw today won’t throw tomorrow, whether 15 pitches today or not. We keep close tabs on that.”
McCord’s approach prior to the new rule being in place was not much different.
“It depended on the portion of the season, the pitcher’s health and what I was seeing during game,” he said. “So if we’ve got a guy who is well-conditioned, looking strong, he’s go 100 pitches. If it was guy in early season, a little cold maybe, we’d be working off 70, 75. We’d often tell them before game, ‘here’s your number today’. It’s just the way we’d work.”
McCord threw ace Zach Brightbill at Hershey on Saturday, in an interesting interleague matchup of solid programs of roughly similar size. Brightbill was also Boone’s pitcher on Wednesday against Exeter in that mercy rule-shortened win.
“We got Zach out of there with an eye towards this game,” McCord said Saturday, after the win over Hershey. “We had Hershey in mind when he exited after three in Exeter. He was close to 40 pitches there, at best.”
Brightbill got plenty of run support in an 8-3 Blazers win over the Trojans. He went six innings, giving up four hits put the ‘W’ next to his name – and stayed south of 70 pitches.
“We wanted to bring him back for this one,” McCord said. “We figured we could save one of our top of the of the rotation guys for a tough team so we shut him down (last Wednesday).”