Troy Percival to the Tigers at 2 years for $12M? Sorry, that’s just insane. I think at this point if you’re a big-league GM, the name of the game is to wait as long as humanly possible before going after free agents. It’s what the Pads did last year with Jay Payton. And just because Payton had a terrible year doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good strategy. Sit back, watch the big names go for too much money, then come in and cherry pick at the end. Works for me.

Meantime, the sludge merchant is at it again, signing four players, including Damian Jackson, to minor league deals. The Pads also are rumored to be talking to Mark “Better and Cheaper Than Terrence Long” Sweeney.

But enough of that. Back to 1995. As I’ve said before, there’s a lot of great information in the old Big Bad Baseball Annual volumes. The 1995 edition features a detailed look at pitcher workload by Brock J. Hanke (pp. 51-74). Two things stand out in this study:

1. It examines the question from a historical perspective, asking what rotations and individual workloads looked like in the 1870s, and how/why they have changed in the decades since then.
2. It uses innings pitched, rather than the trendier individual game pitch counts, as the basis for study.

The historical aspect of Hanke’s article is fascinating. He talks about schedule lengths and rules changes, how Old Hoss Radbourn came to win 60 games in 1884, and the steadily declining threshold of innings a pitcher can throw in a season before falling into the “abuse” category. Hanke also debunks the myth of the 300-inning pitcher, noting that such a workload hasn’t been commonplace in baseball since 1922.

Some of the more pertinent observations from the article:

• If a pitcher is overworked when he is very young, then that fact will dominate his later career.
• If a pitcher was not overworked when he was a kid, the main predictive factor in his workload is his innings over a threshold. This threshold has decreased over time, since 1884, in a curve that looks a lot like one arm of a hyperbola…. Right now, the threshold is about 200 innings per season, and going down, though very slowly.
• When you see a pitcher consistently pitch above the threshold, he’s almost certain to be someone like Roger Clemens or Greg Maddux. Someone who’s just at the very top of the field.
• Pitching over 200 innings will drag you towards mediocrity. [Ryan Dempster? Joey Hamilton? Kevin Millwood? It may have caught up with Javier Vazquez. Who's next: Roy Oswalt? Ben Sheets?]

All in all, the article is an informative and entertaining read. And I can’t help but wonder whether there is room for more study along these lines when it comes to pitcher workloads. I don’t doubt that pitch counts play a role, but it’s interesting to me that the inning as unit of workload measure has been largely abandoned in recent years.

Finally, one other item from the 1995 BBBA that should be of interest to Padre fans is Don Malcolm’s profile of the club (pp. 329-334). Although he doesn’t talk a lot specifically about the 1994 Padres, he does present a mini-study of teams that have won 65 or fewer games in a season since 1975 and how long it takes them to get back to respectability. Malcolm found that from 1975-84, such teams took an average of 3.81 years to have their next winning record and 5.54 years to win their next division title. From 1985-92, those numbers dropped to 2.55 and 4.3 years, respectively. Based on his findings and on the Padres’ recent track record at the time, Malcolm noted that the club was poised to “make it to .500 in 1995 or 1996 and win a division in 1997 or 1998.”

Bingo.

Fast forward. The Padres, you may recall, won 64 games in 2003. Last year they broke .500. If history is any indicator, the San Diego nine are a good bet to make some serious noise in 2005 or 2006. We’re all hoping it’s sooner rather than later, but even if the Pads can just hold ground next year, 2006 is looking pretty good. But it’s a little early to be settling for “holding ground” next year, don’t you think?