Pitch Smart Guidelines

In competative baseball a team relies on their pitchers. When you are playing a game or two in a week you are looking at using somewhere between 4 to 6 pitchers depending on how well your pitchers are doing and spacing of games. This gets much more important when you are looking at tournament weekends and have 5 to 6 games. This becomes difficult to balance pitchers while trying to ensure you care for their arms.

Pitch Smart Guidelines are the MLB and USA Baseball guidelines for youth pitching to keep a healthy arm. These guidelines are quite strict, but you can see many leagues use them as their basis. If we don't take care of our youths arms, they may not be pitching in the future or have extended down times recovering from surgery and then require rehab over a year to get back into the game. That is not something I would want any youth player to go through.

Every tournament has different pitching guidelines and from my experience I have not been in a tournament that follows Pitch Smart Guidelines. Some of the tournaments have very loose guidelines for pitching, like 3 innings per game and 7 innings in the tournament. Pitchers can get out of innings with very few pitches(like 10), or other times if they walk someone and have a few hits, then the pitch count can be up to 30 pitches. You can see how guidelines for innings can become problematic really quick. Other tournaments will have guidelines of 35 pitches in a game and the pitcher can pitch again tomorrow, and then give a max limit of pitches for the whole tournament. This definitely is a tough balance, but carefully managing your pitchers, focusing on arm care(including warming up), and training everyone to pitch can help.