Sean Newcomb: The Rarity of 134 Pitches


Readers will recall that Braves pitcher Sean Newcomb did not pitch well when I saw him a couple of weeks ago.  Well, this past Sunday he came within one strike of pitching a no-hitter against a very good Los Angeles Dodgers team.  I watched as Newcomb got the first two outs of the ninth inning.  His pitch-count was unusually high for this day and age in baseball.  The Dodger lead-off batter Chris Taylor worked Newcomb into a 9-pitch at-bat by fouling off several pitches after the young Braves starter reached a 3-2 count against him.  The ninth pitch in the sequence was hit for a single. 

Newcomb was pulled from the game after that because of his excessive pitch-count.  He threw 134 pitches in 8 2/3 innings.  The entire time Newcomb battled Taylor I was wondering about the pitch-count.  When was the last time a Braves starting pitcher has thrown that many pitches?

After the game I was busy googling the internet and emailing friends to discover the answer.  My wanderings eventually took me to an article on Quora which mentioned that a pitcher for the New York Giants threw 211 pitches in a game played many decades ago.  More importantly for my quest, however, was the fact that the article mentioned a "Play Index" tool over at Baseball Reference that allows for all kinds of wonderful ad hoc statistical reporting on major league baseball.  The tool is a bit glitchy in terms of information, but I'm not a paying subscriber either.  Still, my queries yielded interesting results.

I played around with that for awhile and found the answer to my question regarding how long it has been since a Braves pitcher threw that many pitches in a game, along with other information.  Hall-of-famer John Smoltz  threw 152(!) pitches on May 3, 1989 in a 6-3 win against the Philadephia Phillies.  Since I am not  a paying customer, my ad hoc results were limited to the Top 11 records in my pitch-count query.  But I "cheated" by moving the pitch-count variable down a bit.  Smoltz threw 138 pitches on July 5, 1995 in a 4-1 win against the Dodgers.

If I switch the view to just left-handed pitchers it turns out turns out hall-of-famer Tom Glavine makes the Top 11 list five(!) times.  As I have mentioned before, Glavine is one of personal favorite all-time players.  I remember he threw a lot of pitches throughout his career but I never really paid attention to high pitch counts back in his day.  High counts were more frequent then than they are today with all the pitching changes and deep bullpens in contemporary baseball.  The most pitches Glavine ever threw was in the magical 1991 season when he hurled 138 pitches in a 5-1 win over the San Diego Padres. 

For the record, the most pitches ever through by a Braves pitcher according to the database is 159 - accomplished twice, once by Lew Burdette in 1954 and by Bob Buhl in 1956.  Looking at lefties, the great Warren Spahn, the lefty with baseball's most wins, threw 148 pitches for the Boston Braves in a 1947 6-3 win over the then Brooklyn Dodgers.  But, for reasons unknown, the database does not include the incredible performance between Spahn and the San Francisco Giants great Juan Marichal on July 2, 1963, when both pitchers went the distance in 16-innings - something that would never happen today.  Marichal beat Spahn that day with both pitchers throwing an astonishing 227 and 201 pitches respectively.  Incredible!

Back to the contemporary era, on June 6, 2000, Glavine threw 136 pitches in a 7-6 win over the Toronto Blue Jays.  That was the last time any Brave pitcher made that many pitches.  So, Newcomb's 134-pitch gem on Sunday is the only time a Braves has reached that high of a pitch-count in the 21st century.  In fact, according to the database, the most recent time any pitcher threw that many pitches was back in 2004 when it happened on three occasions.  Livan Hernandez did it twice that season, throwing 143 pitches in a 8-1 loss against the Braves on September 11, and 141 pitches in a 9-4 win against Toronto on June 27.  The other pitcher was former Braves player Jason Schmidt who threw 144 pitches for the Giants on May 18 in a 1-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs.

Looked at this way, Newcomb's pitch-count performance on Sunday is unmatched by any pitcher in baseball in the past 14 seasons.  Pretty cool stuff!

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