Maine prepares to set pitch-count limits for high school baseball – Bangor Daily News

AUGUSTA, Maine — A recent national mandate obligating most states to develop pitch-count standards for high school baseball beginning with the 2017 season came as no surprise to organizers of the sport in Maine.

“We’ve been planning for this,” Maine Principals’ Association baseball committee chair Phil St. Onge, assistant principal at Nokomis Regional High School of Newport, said recently. “We’ve been talking about this for about a year.”

The revised pitching policy — Rule 6-2-6 — was approved by the National Federation of State High School Associations’ baseball rules committee in early June and gained final backing from the group’s board of directors before being announced in a news release last week.

Member state associations — including the MPA — now will be required to develop their own pitching restriction policies based on the number of pitches thrown during a game to afford pitchers a required rest period between appearances.

“We’re pleased that the rules committee worked in conjunction with the NFHS sports medicine advisory committee to find an acceptable and reasonable modification to this rule in order to emphasize the risk that occurs when pitchers overuse their throwing arm,” said Elliot Hopkins, NFHS director of sports and student services and staff liaison for baseball.

The group’s sports medicine committee is chaired by Dr. William M. Heinz, a Portland-based orthopedist and longtime proponent of pitch counts throughout youth baseball as a more precise way to measure arm use than other methods commonly used at the high school level such as innings pitched.

“I would like to see everybody change over to pitch counts,” said Heinz, also a member of the MPA’s sports medicine committee, during an interview earlier this year. “Innings pitched are useless, it tells you nothing. We actually need to have something we can measure and is a valid tool to really determine how many times a player has thrown a ball, and pitch count is really the only way to do that.”

The backdrop for change

The Maine Principals’ Association has been imposing mandatory rest for high school baseball players — 3,275 of them representing 130 schools during the 2015 season — based on innings pitched.

A pitcher who works four or more innings in a game must have three calendar days off before pitching again, while a pitcher who works more than one inning and less than four innings in a game must have one calendar day off. A pitcher also is limited to 10 innings in one game, with one pitch thrown in an inning constituting a full inning.

The MPA baseball committee began discussing pitch-count restrictions well before the 2016 season, and schools were encouraged to track pitch counts during games at all levels this spring in order to help develop the most efficient way of tabulating pitches and tracking subsequent eligibility.

The MPA also has included an advisory in its recent annual baseball bulletins that says in part, “A coach who has the best interest of a player in mind will remove that player once a total of 90-100 pitches have been thrown.”

The momentum for using pitch counts throughout high school baseball nationwide has stemmed in part from its prevalence in youth baseball.

Little League Baseball employs pitch-count restrictions in all of its age divisions, including the Senior League (ages 14-16) level that stages its annual World Series in Bangor each summer — the scoreboard beyond the right-field fence at Mansfield Stadium, where the Senior League World Series has been held since 2002, includes a pitch counter.

“I’ve watched it implemented at the Senior League level and was kind of skeptical when it first came in, but you see a lot of different strategies with it that make things pretty interesting,” said Brewer High School athletic administrator Dave Utterback, a member of the MPA baseball committee and former varsity baseball coach at Old Town High School.

“You see in the Senior League World Series where a pitcher gets to that 30-pitch threshold and then the manager yanks him so he can pitch again the next day. They have five guys ready to go every game so they can do that every game and it works.”

At least three states previously approved the use of pitch counts in high schools. Delaware and Vermont already employ such restrictions while the Alabama High School Athletic Association Central Board of Control was set to switch from innings pitched to a pitch count beginning in 2017.

Also sparking the national drive for pitch counts are concerning health trends related to overuse.

In one example, a 2015 study by the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine found that 56.7 percent of all ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction (Tommy John) surgeries performed in the United States between 2007 and 2011 were done on 15- through 19-year-olds, with the number of such surgeries increasing by an average of 9.1 percent each year.

Concern for the health of young pitchers and the movement toward using pitch counts in the high school ranks even drew Major League Baseball’s interest in a recent news release.

“We are pleased to see the NFHS taking this significant step toward curtailing pitcher use and fatigue,” said Chris Marinak, MLB’s senior vice president of league economics and strategy. “The health of high school pitchers is critical to the future prosperity of our sport. We will continue to work alongside USA Baseball as we further proliferate this important initiative.”

Maine’s task

The Maine Principals’ Association, like other state members of the National Federation of State High School Associations, must develop a policy for instituting pitch-count restrictions before the start of the 2017 baseball season.

According to MPA assistant executive director Mike Burnham, the likely timetable for creating the policy will begin formally with an August meeting of the association’s sports medicine committee.

“They’re going to give us guidance as to what the numbers should look like for pitch counts,” said St. Onge, who is expected to represent the MPA baseball committee at that meeting.

The MPA baseball committee has scheduled a special meeting for October to draft language for a pitch-count proposal for consideration by the MPA’s general membership at its fall conference in November.

Before that final proposal is generated, several issues must be addressed — beginning with the actual pitch-count limits.

Most states are expected to use USA Baseball’s Pitch Smart standards as the template for their discussions.

USA Baseball has published recommended pitch-count restrictions for various age groups, with guidelines for ages 15-18 requiring no calendar days of rest for one to 30 pitches in a day, one day of rest for 31-45 pitches, two days of rest for 46-60 pitches, three days of rest for 61-75 pitches and four days of rest for 76 or more pitches, with per day limits of 95 pitches for 13- through 16-year-olds and 105 pitches for 17- and 18-year-olds.

“That’s going to serve as the framework for what a lot of states are going to end up doing,” said Utterback. “There’s that old saying about not trying to reinvent the wheel, and the people who put those numbers together are experts, they’ve got all the research and data that shows when arm fatigue happens depending on the age and the pitch count.

“If the wheel’s already been invented then we might as well roll with it.”

The USA Baseball Pitch Smart guidelines — developed by a panel that includes famed orthopedist Dr. James Andrews, Major League Baseball medical director Dr. Gary Green and team physicians for the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres — offer slight variations based on the age of the pitcher, and the MPA baseball committee will have to determine if it prefers using different pitch-count limits for different ages, different pitch counts for different levels of play or a single range of pitch-count restrictions throughout the high school ranks and what those numbers will be.

“I think there’s going to be some very good discussion around do you have different pitch-count levels for different age groups, like varsity versus [junior varsity] versus freshmen,” said Burnham.

A related issue is that while USA Baseball guidelines recommend four calendar days of rest after a certain number of pitches in a game (66 or more for ages 13-14, 76 or more for ages 15-18), many Maine regular-season schedules traditionally have been arranged to correspond with the current state rule that requires three calendar days off for a pitcher who works four or more innings in a game.

In addition, the state’s recent postseason schedule has enabled a pitcher who worked four or more innings in a regional championship game to also pitch in a state final after three days of rest depending on the rotation of games in the four statewide classes.

Every other year, for example, the Class B North and South finals rotate between Tuesday and Wednesday with the state finals always on the ensuing Saturday. That means a pitcher could work four or more innings in both games every other year when the regional finals are played on Tuesday but not in the years when the regional finals are on Wednesday.

“One of the things that might change from this is that you may see coaches developing more pitchers because of pitch counts,” said St. Onge.

Another concern involves how to manage and report pitch counts during and after games.

“The biggest move we’re going to have to make is how to monitor it,” said St. Onge. “To be honest we’ve kicked around a number of different ideas and we’re going to try to find the one that works the best for both our schools and our athletes.”

Keeping track of innings pitched under the current state rule traditionally has involved the honor system, though in some cases coaches have used newspaper accounts or other lines of communication to learn how opposing pitchers were used — particularly relative to their availability for future games.

At youth levels, pitch counts often are exchanged between opposing coaches after each inning or announced over a public address system.

How complicated the exchange of pitch-count information will become remains to be seen.

“As long as there’s a verification of X number of pitches so that if there is an issue it can be corrected, I don’t know how formal that reporting system needs to be or how public it needs to be,” said Burnham.

“Most of these coaches know who’s pitching when through the various communication systems that are out there, they’re very aware of who’s eligible to pitch.”

One other solution for the subsequent-game implications of the new rule may be an online reporting system through which pitch counts are reported at the same time game scores are reported to the MPA electronically for use in updating the Heal point standings.

Research is being done to determine if any such system already exists, though the belief among baseball officials is that if it doesn’t exist today an online reporting mechanism is likely to be developed soon in the aftermath of the new national pitch-count rule.

“It’s all going to be interesting,” said St. Onge, “but in the end we’re going to be looking out for what’s best for kids’ arms and their safety.”