Should Lincecum pitch every 5 days ... starting NOW?

…I think the whole pitch count thing is a whole lot more complex than most people want to make it out to be. Sure, there is strong evidence that pitchers - especially younger pitchers still of the age as to be in the so-called “injury nexus”- will break down more often as they throw more pitches, start after start. And I’m definitely in the ‘err on the side of caution’ camp — I still cringe every time I think of Bochy extending Lincecum last year for his CGs.

But pitch count is about as simple as a statistic can possibly be, and as a result, it doesn’t tell us anything that basic common sense doesn’t. It’s like evaluating how hard a trip was on a car by total revolutions. It’d be absurd to evaluate a car’s workload without taking into consideration the type and age of the car, its previous driving history, how the car was used in each specific gear on the trip, what the terrain and road conditions were like, etc., etc. – just as simply counting the number of pitches doesn’t take into account who the pitcher is and what his injury history is, what his mechanics are like generally and how consistent they are in the particular game at hand, types of pitches thrown during the game (and their varying strain on the pitcher’s arm), stretch v. windup and other contextual factors, and so on. Again, I’m not trying to make one of these stupid old-timer “in my day, we never heard of a pitch count” arguments; but I do wish we could use pitcher abuse points or some other, more useful stat; and when that’s not an option, I wish we could ascribe a little bit less importance to such a flawed metric.

I only bring this up because I find it kind of silly when people seem to have an arbitrary number in mind that is the “right” number of pitches. If there is such a thing, it almost certainly varies depending on a number of factors, from pitcher to pitcher and from appearance to appearance.

All that off my chest (pfew!), I am definitely opposed to shuffling the rotation to pitch Lincecum or Cain more down the stretch. The whole “but they’d be on regular rest” thing seems like a forest-for the-trees argument to me — by that reasoning, a pitcher could make 40 starts a year, if the season were extended another 30 games. Of greater importance, I think, is that we don’t make these guys spend any bullets they don’t have to. As much as Prior and Wood were overworked on a game-by-game basis in 2003, we should also remember that the postseason tacked on a ton of extra innings to their regular-season totals, overextending them even further on a macro level. I’d be willing to bet Prior threw 80 or 90 more innings in 2003 than he did in 2002, playoffs included. I just don’t think it’s worth jeopardizing Lincecum or Cain if we don’t have to. But then again, I’m still in rebuilding mode,so I’m less concerned about making the postseason this year than I am about setting things up for a nice little run of great baseball for several years in a row starting in 2010 or 2011. I realize this colors my opinion drastically…