Does that mean shutting him down will help matters or is the damage done?

I’ve heard the phrase that a running back only has so many tackles in him and he’s done whether it’s over 5 season or 10 seasons. Is there any evidence that a pitcher can “recover,” especially younger ones?

It sounds like they are going to be pretty careful with him for the rest of this year and presumably get him on a program for next year. It would be nice if the colleges did a better job with pitch counts, but its probably a case of college coaches not having the player’s best interest in mind. At least in the minors, the managers in the low minors can do what the MLB GM wants and not have to worry they will lose their jobs by keeping guys on strict pitch counts.

I wonder how much it helps that he often had 6 days rest between starts?

I guess it makes sense why Z tended to go after high school arms

I mean, it’s certainly common sense that huge workloads can damage a kid’s arm, but has anyone done any studies on the actual correlation between these high PAP scores and later injury?

Seems like delivery and body-type would play a large enough role that analyzing PAP alone might not be very useful. Randy Johnson apparently had a PAP over 400,000 the year that guy published the article you linked to (2001), as a 38 year old, and his arms didn’t fall off after the season.

I’m surprised Nolan Ryan’s Rangers didn’t draft him.

Let’s say Arnett pans out as a pitcher, and the Brewers get five years of big-league pitching out of him (presumably, the length of his first contract). If he’s excellent, he leaves Milwaukee anyways, before he hits the Tim Hudson/Mark Mulder self-destruction mode.

… but it sure seems like we’re borrowing trouble. Did Rogers, Parra et al have huge PAP’s when we drafted them? I’m guessing not, yet they broke down too. That doesn’t mean there’s no value to this sort of analysis. If the absence of high pitch counts and inning totals isn’t predictive of health, it doesn’t mean that the existence of high pitch counts and inning totals can’t be predictive of injury, but body type and durability to date would seem to me (without any numbers to back it up) to be just as valuable in trying to evaluate the likelihood of future injury.

… just by way of comparison. Were they predictive of his initial durability and his later fragility?

It really makes you appreciate just how much of a rubber arm he had. And not just concerning the 300+ innings per year, but also being a starter for 25+ seasons and the fact that he wasn’t a control pitcher by any means.

As I said before, it’s all a crap shoot. The analysis could consider his ability academically as well, which can have an impact. Maybe he’s less of a “thrower” and more of a “locator,” which means he’ll do better on pitch counts when he gets some smart managing. You could consider, as mentioned, body type. Family pedigree, standard deviation of break on his movement pitches, average velocity above pitch count 80, etc. What about his emotional strength? Has he had bouts of depression? All these things and more can have an impact on the player. Does he drink? Do drugs? Has he in the past?

And a player could provide all the answers the scouts and management DON’T want to hear and still develop into David Wells. The fact of the matter is that pitchers walk an incredibly thin tightrope to success, a balance that’s upset by any number of things (can can still be upset when they make it to the majors). It’s why MLB drafts until none of the GM’s want to draft anymore every year.

Which leads to my next point: signability. Like it or not, scouts and analysts alike have to admit that all the reports can go out the window with a team if the player is represented by Scott Boras. This is definitely the case with the Brewers.

To get a signable, top-flite lefty prospect that was on top of a lot of team’s lists is as close to a success as you can get. The rest hangs in the balance.

That would likely mean never pitching more than 5 innings per game for the rest of the season, and usually at most 4, with the corresponding low pitch counts. The question of whether the damage might already be done is pertinent, of course, but I suspect they won’t need to baby him to any degree not afforded to any other rookie pitcher in the system.

Correction to a previous post, he’s a righty. My bad. That being said, I think this is a good article to think about, actually. There are definitely college coaches that are focused more on their own success than the well-being of their young talent. They don’t need 10 years out of their kids; they only need two or three.
Ultimately, though, I’d like to make two key points. One, Mark Prior endured a full two seasons of hard work at USC, and while I haven’t seen the pitch totals, I know he averaged nearly 7.5 innings per start; for a comparison, C.C. Sabathia averaged just over 7.2 last year, and their control-ability is/was comparable. Eric Arnett was the starter only one season at Kentucky, though he did put in a Prior-like workload. Maybe a sidenote, Prior’s Trojans went deep into the CWS both years he was there, while Arnett’s hardly played a game.
The second point is that if there’s anything the Brewers should be concerned about, it’s that Arnett has only been pitching this well for one year.