Aaron Harang pitched 10 innings last night.

It's just one of four such occasions in the oo's:

  Cnt Player            Date          Tm   Opp GmReslt App,Dec    IP   H  R ER BB SO HR Pit Str GmSc IR IS BF AB 2B 3B IBB HBP SH SF GDP SB CS Pk BK WP   ERA
+----+-----------------+-------------+---+----+-------+---------+----+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+---+----+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+--+--+--+--+--+------+
    1 Aaron Harang      2007-07-23    CIN  MIL W  2-1  GS-10     10    7  1  1  0 10  1 121  87   84       37 37  1  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  0   0.90
    2 Roy Halladay      2007-04-13    TOR  DET W  2-1  CG 10 ,W  10    6  1  1  0  2  1 107  70   78       35 35  2  0   0   0  0  0   1  0  0  0  0  0   0.90 

    3 Mark Mulder       2005-04-23    STL  HOU W  1-0  SHO10 ,W  10    5  0  0  0  5  0 101  75   87       33 33  0  0   0   0  0  0   1  0  1  1  0  0   0.00 

    4 Roy Halladay      2003-09-06    TOR  DET W  1-0  SHO10 ,W  10    3  0  0  1  5  0  99  70   90       35 33  1  0   0   1  0  0   1  0  0  0  0  0   0.00

As you can see, Roy "The Toy Boy" Halladay has done it twice. Interestingly, Harang is the only one not to get a decision, as the game went 12 innings.

Pitching 10 innings isn't really such a big deal. Harang threw 121 pitches, and plenty of guys have thrown that many pitches in 9 innings or fewer (there have been 41 such starts this year.) It is true that warm-up pitches between innings mean that throwing 10 isn't the same as throwing 7 if the official pitch count is the same.

Starters going 10 or more innings is become quite rare. As mentioned above, it's happened 4 times so far in the 00's. In the 1990s, it happened 37 times, including 3 times by Dave Stewart and 3 times by Bill Wegman, of all people. In the 1980's it happened a whopping 249 times, led by Mike Norris doing it 5 times and Charlie Hough 4 times. In the 1970's, we saw 576 such games, including 8 by Gaylord Perry and 6 by Bill Singer.

My guess is that the drop-off in 10-inning or more starts very closely mirror the drop-off in complete games. It's hard to pitch 10 innings when the manager takes you out for the middle reliever or the closer. I'll do that analysis another day coming up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.