Count quality, not pitches

May the spirit of the tough-guy old-timers rain down on baseball once more.

I write this while thinking about the brothers Weaver, Jered and Jeff, scheduled to take the mound in Anaheim today in an interleague, intrafamily duel.

I write this watching Chad Billingsley scuffle through six innings, looking at the end like a marathoner at mile 25.

I write this because baseball has become a game of diced-up stats and front-line pitchers who tremble once they've reached 100 pitches. The overarching subject here is pitch counts. And the Weavers figure in the conversation because the Dodgers' Jeff has had a workhorse career where years of immense production have been followed by years of disaster.

Did the older Weaver throw too much, too soon?

This is a question Anaheim's team is assiduously trying to avoid. As we see with iron-clad regularity throughout baseball, the Angels have taken a cautious approach to younger brother Jered, who at 26 is on the cusp of becoming a first time All-Star. Every fastball and funky sidearm twister gets tallied. Add up too many on a given day and it's "Kid, thank you much, now hit the showers."

Consider last Monday against San Diego: The eighth inning just ended and Weaver goes to the dugout three outs from his first complete-game shutout.

"Can you get it done in eight pitches?" asks Manager Mike Scioscia, knowing Weaver had already made 113 pitches -- which is where old-time toughs such as Nolan Ryan would have been just settling in the zone but about a dozen pitches past the number where modern managers start furrowing their brows with worry.

Luckily for Weaver, he gets his chance. Six pitches later, he has the win, 6-0.

On Friday at Angel Stadium, looking back on that game, Scioscia said he wouldn't have been a complete stickler if Weaver had wobbled a little past his allotted eight. But had that wobble turned into a complete tilt? "Different story," he said, "you are not going to be throwing 130 pitches. That would have been too much of a risk."

Funny, isn't it, how time and the insinuation of modern life -- stats and graphs and net-fueled probability theories -- change everything. For the Dodgers, of course, Scioscia played for the decidedly old-school Tom Lasorda, who let his pitchers hang on until their arms fell off. Scioscia also teamed with Fernando Valenzuela. "They didn't have pitch counts back then," Scioscia said with a laugh. "What did Fernando Valenzuela ever care about 130 pitches? The thing is, you have to have balance and that's why we view the pitch count as another bit of good information. It's just a tool."