It is, however, absolutely true that pitchers need to be better handled. Manuel has handled Joe Blanton very poorly this season. Coming off of an injury, you’d think they’d have been more watchful of when his stuff starts to go, which is a much better indicator than pitch counts. But he’s been left in time and time again, to fail. But by pitch-count, in most of these games, you’d think he should be fine (plus his rep as an innings-eater). But he wasn’t, far from it.

I seriously see no reason not to give Halladay the opportunity to get a 115-pitch shutout–again, unless he’s laboring. In that situation, he wants to finish. That actually matters, and should. Why leave him out there? Because he wants to stay out there; it’s his game. Being able to efficiently finish what you started is both a point of pride with a pitcher like Halladay, but also a big component of his value. If he’s laboring, for whatever reason, yeah, yank him. But don’t take him out simply because the WE is 98%. (That said, Manuel has taken him out a couple of times in recent weeks, once with a shut-out rout going. So it’s not as if he’s staying in all the damn time.)

Ah, but those “recent” games were not the complete games Bill is complaining about. In the CGs, Moyer was cruising, and had thrown very few pitches. There was no reason at all to take him out of either game. Complete games help the bullpen, which needs it (that sort of context, the bullpen-usage in the games prior to these games, is completely missing from this post). However, Moyer was left in too long in some more recent games. The game against Atlanta comes to mind, when it was very hot and he was clearly laboring only in the 6th inning. Remember, it’s not sheer number of pitches, it’s number of pitches thrown while tired. A big difference. In general, I have had little problem with Halladay’s complete games–110-115 pitches for him is no big deal–unless he seems to be laboring! If he’s getting balls up a lot, for example, which has been Blanton’s problem this year when he’s hit that 6th-7th inning wall.

Also, the win expectancy information is interesting, but not terribly useful when it comes to this kind of argument. It’s the kind of false precision that is to be avoiding in analysis. (In a different category, I’d recommend Colin Wyers’ series of articles on the problems with defensive metrics as a useful corrective.)

He’s a horse, but he’s also never pitched in the playoffs before, and if we go deep in the postseason he’s on track to toss over 300 innings. That’s absolutely insane.

I’m more upset with Charlie when he does nothing when his starting pitchers seem to lose it. Blanton’s a great ezample — cuises along for 5 or 6 innings and BANG the wheels fall off and Charlie sits in the dugout wathching.

If you pull pitchers for no good reason in the 6th and 7th innings they will become 6 or 7 inning pitchers.

Obviously it’s not quite the same situation with Halladay, but the point remains.

09: 165 IP, 2302 pitches (in the DH-AL East)
10: 171 IP, 2404 pitches (in P-NL)

He definitely needs to be mindful of how he handles the workload. May was a bad month for this. But I’m not too worried about uses like last night.