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Good luck and god speed to all the starting pitchers heading to the still ridiculously timed World Baseball Classic. My memory was that pitchers who threw in the inaugural WBC fared especially badly when the 2006 regular season got underway, and a run through the internets locates a spectacular article that partially backs up what I thought.

Enter Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus (pre-political superstar blogger days) with a May 2006 piece for BP that looked at the carnage being wreaked on starters that year through the first five weeks of the season who had pitched in the 2006 WBC in March. Relief pitchers came out of the deal okay, but starting pitchers? Carnage. Jake Peavy’s 2006 was an unmitigated disaster after he pitched the WBC. Can you draw a straight line from that to what happened to Peavy thereafter? Perhaps not, but the overall numbers were so sobering that it is worth a second look. The entire article is a must read but here are the money observations based on the numbers (read the whole piece for the numbers, the horrible horrible numbers):

These are very disturbing numbers. The relievers have emerged relatively unscathed–sixteen of the thirty-two relievers in our study have outperformed their PECOTA, and sixteen have underperformed it. But the starting pitchers have been brutalized. Nineteen of the 26 starters–nearly three-fourths of our sample–have underperformed their PECOTA. In most cases, they haven’t even come close to their projection. The weighted average ERA for the WBC starters is 5.49, a buck and a quarter higher than their PECOTAs. Keep in mind that these are supposed to be, quite literally, the best starting pitchers in the world, and that this performance has come over hundreds and hundreds of collective innings.

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I don’t think this is the result of overwork per se. The WBC pitch count limits were a necessary evil, and were relatively well-designed to prevent any one pitcher from bearing too much of the burden. No major league pitcher threw more than 14 innings in the Classic (Bartolo Colon and Jae Seo were tied at this threshold). Rather, I think the problem is that the pitchers had been taken out of their routines. They didn’t get to see their trainer, pitching coach, or manager for a couple of weeks, they weren’t able to relax in the low-pressure environment of the Grapefruit or Cactus Leagues, and so forth. The pitcher may have been throwing in a relief role for his national club, when he hadn’t done that in the major leagues in years. If a certain pitching coach doesn’t like his pitcher to throw breaking stuff early in camp, or his manager wanted to pull him out after a high-effort inning, there wasn’t the opportunity to play it safe. This is why I think that the starting pitchers have been disproportionately affected as compared to the relievers–starting pitchers are creatures of habit and routine.

I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news….Unless Major League Baseball is prepared to host the World T-Ball Classic, it ought to think long and hard about rescheduling and restructuring the event.

I don’t know that the changes MLB made were wholesale enough to address this problem. And any teams that have sent starting pitchers to this should be holding their breath. As should fans. The Reds are sending both Edinson Volquez and Johnny Cueto to the WBC to pitch for the Domincan Republic, and the breath holding is well underway in Cincy.

And then some. Any chance the Reds have of being good in the next five years rests, in no small part, on Volquez and Cueto becoming dominant starters. This diversion into the WBC experiment round two seems an unnecessary and ill-advised risk.