The Brewers remarkable run of starters going deep into games and often completing them continued on Saturday night with Ben Sheets domination of the woebegone Washington Nationals offense. In a sense, this is a good thing. Obviously, having your starting pitcher shut down an opponent is a very good thing. Starters finishing off games also helps to keep the bullpen from being overworked (tackling the question of whether or not a bullpen can suffer from under-use is a topic for another post at another time) and overuse is one of the biggest problems bullpens face.

The problem is that the Brewers have been routinely asking their co-aces Ben Sheets and CC Sabathia to throw a lot of pitches, and the research that had been done on this shows that, in general the more pitchers throw the greater the chance of injury at some point.

Since the trade, Sabathia is averaging 110 pitches per outing, which is a very heavy workload and not something you can reasonably expect him to be able to sustain without a serious dropoff in performance. Sheets is averaging  just under 102 per start (taking out the start he left early due to injury) which is a lot, especially when you consider his injury history. 10 years ago, Rany Jazayerli of Baseball Prospectus devised a system that evaluates how hard a pitcher is worked called Pitcher Abuse Points. While it is far from a perfect system, mostly because we don't yet know enough about what causes pitcher injuries to devise a perfect system, it does accumulate some important data and put it in a usable context:

For this, I have created a system designed to award pitchers points - Pitcher Abuse Points, or "PAP's" for short - based on the number of pitches they throw in each start. It's not perfect, but it's a start. These points are cumulative: a 115-pitch outing gets you 20 PAP's - 1 for each pitch from 101-110 (10 total), and 2 for each pitch from 111-115 (10 total). A 120-pitch outing is worth 30 PAP's, while a 140-pitch outing is worth 100 PAP's - more than 3 times as much. This seems fair; a pitcher doesn't get tired all at once, but fatigue sets on gradually, and with each pitch the danger of continuing to pitch grows.

According to the current rankings, Sabathia is 3rd in pitcher abuse points in all of baseball and Sheets is 6th.

So how is this a problem? Well, since neither is likely to be here past this year the long term ramifications of this use are probably not problems for Brewers fans. Still, the Brewers have a lot invested in this year and they are best served by keeping these two healthy and productive for the stretch run and hopefully the playoffs. Many people think that Sabathia's jump of almost 50 innings pitched from 2006 to 2007 played a part in his struggles in the postseason last year. It's hard to know if that was the case for sure, but do you want the team taking that chance?

In the end, the ideal situation for the Brewers would be to use CC and Ben just as much as necessary to make it to the postseason, and hopefully give them some intentionally short starts in September should the opportunity present itself in the form of either blowout wins or a large lead in the WC race. In the meantime, it will be up to manager Ned Yost and pitching coach Mike Maddux to decide how far to push these guys. The games Friday and Saturday both presented reasonable but not obvious opportunities for giving a starter an early exit to save on wear and tear. Neither game was "locked up" but the Nationals offense is such that it is hard to see them mounting a 5 or 6 run rally after being dominated for 7 or 8 innings, so the opportunity for an early exit was there. My fear is that Yost is allowing the old baseball tradition of letting the starter have a chance to finish off a shutout and fan pressure (Yost was booed lustily when he removed Sheets from a start earlier in the year based on pitch count) to interfere with the long term best interest of the team.

Yost needs to start finding ways to limit the workload of his twin aces or the consequences could be dire for this squad's playoff aspirations.