Pitch counts and Al Jackson’s 15-inning game

Perhaps no issue in baseball today is more divisive than pitch counts. Advocates of pitch counts claim that it helps to protect young arms and that it is better to get 15 years of a guy throwing 200 IP a year than risk just getting five years of a guy throwing 300 IP a year before his arm gives out. Critics point to star pitchers of the 60s and 70s, who frequently pitched double-digit years while annually throwing 300 innings.

Generally, I fall on the side of pitch counts, although I believe they should be instituted on a case-by-case basis rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. But regardless of where you stand on pitch counts, it is still fun to look back and see some of the crazy games pitched in days of yesteryear. It is very rare to have actual pitch counts for games that old, so we have to use estimates and guesses to arrive at the number of pitches that were probably thrown.

Back in 1962, Al Jackson established a Mets record by pitching all 15 innings in a 3-1 loss to the Phillies. Eight times in the game, Jackson had a 1-2-3 inning, including the 10th, 13th and 14th innings. Overall, he faced 57 batters, allowed just six hits and five walks and fanned six. Jackson registered a Game Score of 96 for his effort.

Game Score is a device invented by Bill James to measure how well a starting pitcher performed. A score of 50 is around average and a score of 100 is legendary. Tom Seaver’s 19-strikeout game earned a Game Score of 97. Jackson’s 96 came about because the system rewards pitchers who go deep into games. According to Joe Posnanski, there are only 63 Game Scores in history over 100 and 60 of those happened in extra inning games.

So, no matter how you look at it, this was a tremendous outing for Jackson, even if it ended with a loss. Of course, it would never happen in MLB today, as no pitcher would be allowed to throw 15 innings. The question becomes: How many pitches did Jackson throw in this outing?

Tom Tango has a pitch count estimator where he uses batters faced, strikeouts and walks to estimate how many pitches were thrown in a game. Tango states that the estimator is valid when the opposing team’s balls in play rate is between 50 and 80 percent. In this game, Jackson had a combined 11 walks and strikeouts and 57 PA or a BIP rate of 81 percent, or just barely outside of where we would prefer to see for this simple model.

To estimate pitch counts in Tango’s model, multiply all PA by 3.3 and then add an additional 1.5 for each strikeouts and 2.2 for each walk. So plugging in Jackson’s actual results, we get:

3.3 x 57 = 188.1
1.5 x 6 = 9
2.2 x 5 = 11
Total – 208

For a comparison, Al Leiter threw 142 pitches in Game 5 of the 2000 World Series and was on fumes at the end of the game.

Jackson might have been the ace of the 1962 Mets. The old baseball saying is it takes a pretty good pitcher to lose 20 games and Jackson went 8-20 in the club’s inaugural season. Of course, Roger Craig lost 24 games that year and Jay Hook 19.

We think of the 1960s as a time when offense was hard to come by but the National League average runs per game was 4.5 in 1962. Last year the NL average was 4.33 runs per game. Offensive totals dropped a year later, as the NL averaged 3.8 runs per game in 1963.

But it was still tough for the Mets to score runs in 1962, as they finished next to last with 3.8 runs per game. Jackson went 8-20 that year and pitched shutouts in four of his wins and complete games in seven of them. In only one of his wins did he fail to pitch a Quality Start and in that game he went 7 IP and allowed 4 ER.

So, there is little surprise that Jackson was allowed to pitch 15 innings that night against the Phillies. His counterpart in the game was Dallas Green, who pitched 10.1 innings himself and left with a no-decision.

The big-pitch outing did not seem to have a major effect on Jackson the rest of the season. While he pitched just five innings in his next outing, he finished the year going at least eight innings in five of his final eight games and he posted a 4.53 ERA in that stretch. Prior to his 15-inning game, Jackson had a 4.65 ERA in 27 games.

Jackson went on to pitch seven more years in the majors. He finished his career in 1969, when he had a 6.81 ERA in 42 games as a reliever, split between the Mets and Reds. It was Jackson’s second stint with the Mets. He pitched with them until he was traded to the Cardinals following the 1965 season and was reacquired prior to the 1968 season. Unfortunately, Jackson’s Mets career ended in June of 1969, when he was sold to the Reds. He did not get to participate in the World Series after suffering through with the dreadful expansion-era clubs.

His career ended at age 33, although it appears due more to ineffectiveness than injury. Jackson never had a 300-IP season and his inning totals seem tame for the period. It’s likely that his high-pitch count in the 15-inning game had nothing to do with when his career was over.

But while the 15-inning game had little to no effect on Jackson, what the critics fail to point out is all of the pitchers who cracked under the weight of heavy workloads. For every Seaver or Nolan Ryan that succeeded with high pitch counts and inning totals, there is a Gary Gentry or Jim Bouton or Denny McLain who had promising careers end early due to arm trouble.

It is something to keep in mind when you watch a game and see a starter taken out because he’s at 100 pitches. While it would be fun to see someone duplicate Jackson’s 15-inning outing, it would have been fun to see Gentry have a 15-year career, too. The 1960s and 1970s are littered with pitchers who had great success early only to be done by the time they were 30.

We have fewer of those cases now than we did when 300-IP guys roamed the earth. And limiting work loads and pitch counts is *partly* the reason why.