Viva El Birdos, a St. Louis Cardinals community

This is an article I wrote for True Blue LA, the Dodgers blog at SBNation. The article looks at pitcher abuse points and how they effect pitchers over the long haul. It is mainly concerning Chad Billingsley, but I look at other starters and how their overuse has effected them.

Joe Po once again makes me jealous my team doesn't get such great beat writing. Today he put up an interesting piece on what tends to happen by every count in a plate appearance. It would be even cooler with a look at what type of pitch is thrown most often (anyone feel like doing that?), and it's certainly fairly in line with anecdotal wisdom and homework we could all do ourselves. But, Posnanski did it himself and, as a bonus, it comes with Posnanski writing. What I find most interesting is that it may make more sense to swing on the first pitch than I realized. Hitters apparently OPS 52 points higher on the first pitch than they do on successive pitches. A lot of that, of course, is that hitters should only swing at first pitches than can actually hit. . . The second interesting tidbit is how close averages are between a 1-0 count and an 0-1 count. There's also a couple interesting old scout tidbits of wisdom in there that are, at the very least, intriguing baseball talk. Part II Here