For those who pay attention to pitch counts and know the score when it comes to the injury rate of young pitchers, the notion of allowing the Brewers' young phenom pitcher Yovanni Gallardo to throw 17 innings in 6 days is going to raise some eyebrows. After all, with the market rate for "ace" quality starting pitching being well out of the advisable price range of a team like the Milwaukee Brewers, the fate of the franchise is going to be strongly tied to that of the young righthander. They need to keep this guy healthy and overworking him is not the way to do that. So the question is, are they overworking him?

It is impossible to know exactly how much work is too much from a young pitcher. We can count pitches (and we will) but not all pitches are created equal in terms of the stress they put on the body. Baseball Prospectus came up with a system to try to define how much stress pitchers have to deal with in their Pitcher Abuse Points system. They give ever escalating numbers of "abuse points" for every pitch thrown over given numbers. After his start on Wednesday, Gallardo was ranked 15th in MLB in total pitcher abuse points. Gallardo has thrown at least 100 pitches in each of his first 5 starts this season, but had not pitched more than 106 until Wednesday's domination of the Pirates when he threw 116. Over the last two starts he has thrown 222 pitches, though, which is an average of 111.

So is this too much? Maybe, but there is some pretty good evidence that says that those 222 pitches probably weren't all that high stress. First off, 222 pitches in 17 innings isn't that many. It works out to 13.1 per inning, which is almost 4 pitches per inning below the league average of 16.8 so far this year. In other words, he's getting his outs and getting back to the dugout where he gets to sit and watch the Brewers rack up big pitch counts on the opposition while resting up.

Many pitchers will tell you that they really only bear down when there are runners in scoring position or a big HR threat is at the plate. While we cannot assume this is automatically true about Gallardo, it seems rather likely to be the case given his precocious nature on the mound. So how many times did Gallardo really have to bear down? He worked 10 of those 17 innings 1-2-3. Of the 59 batters who came to the plate in those 17 innings, only 15 of them came to bat with a runner on base and only 6 of them did so with a runner in scoring position. Furthermore, the lineups that he faced were pretty devoid of true "power threats". Sure, there's Lance Berkman, Carlos Lee and Adam LaRoche. In fact, Lee drove in the only two runs allowed in that time on a two run shot in Houston. There was also Michael Bourn, Kaz Matsui, Nyjer Morgan, Ramon Vasquez, Robinzon Diaz and a couple of pitchers. If Gallardo really does only "bear down" with runners in scoring position and with big time HR threats, he wasn't bearing down all that often.

All in all, you don't want Gallardo averaging 111 pitches this season as a whole. It will be rare that he will have so many "low stress" innings, and there will be days when 100 pitches will be enough. There will also be days where he's pitching as he has his last two starts, though, and inning and pitch counts just mean less in those situations. There is something to be said for watching for signs that a pitcher is laboring and factoring that into the equation. When Gallardo pitches like he has his last few outings he just isn't going to be laboring very hard and then the leash should be extended a bit in terms of the raw number of pitches.