Interesting, you appear to be correct according to this page: https://admin.xosn.com/fls/8800/stats/baseball/2004/teamcume.html, which is from the official Georgia Baseball website, but The Baseball Cube has no stats for him here: http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/B/Mitchell-Boggs.shtml and I swear when I was doing the pre-season post I read that he took a year off to try his hand at being a quarterback somewhere.

Thanks for the correction.

The bottom line is that many of these guys pitch a lot of innings that may not show up in formal records both prior to being drafted and even sometimes afterwards. I don’t know if those innings are as stressful or not (maybe more so?) or how well temas track them.

I probably should have been more explicit about this in the post (I think I explained this in the comments during the pre-season post, too), but innings pitched are sort of a proxy for workload. Lou is absolutely right: pitch counts would be a much more valuable method of tracking workload, but we don’t always have that information and sometimes the information is unreliable. Instead, we have to assume that for every 6 pitch inning that a pitcher throws he’s going to have a 20 pitch inning and over the long haul it probably evens out fairly well. It isn’t perfect, but it is the best we have. I feel the same way about summer ball, instructional leagues (notwithstanding that I did include Garcia’s 8 IP of instructs), winter leagues, fall leagues, team USA innings and spring training. Including all that stuff would be great, but a lot of that information isn’t available or is unreliable (plus it would have made the post unwieldy). So I just use regular season innings as a proxy for all those things. As a result it can make it look like the college players had a bit of a bigger jump than is realistic when they start pro ball.

As for whether those innings are different – it is difficult to say. You wouldn’t think so, but Will Carroll has said that his studies have shown that minor league innings don’t translate (as far as workload towards the Verducci Rule goes) to MLB innings, so perhaps the further away from MLB you get, the less the innings mean workload-wise.

Again, I don’t think there is a one-for-one causal relationship here, but I think there is a lot of value in tracking the workload of a young pitcher and refraining from any huge jumps. That being said, I think the Cardinals did a pretty solid job of that this year with all of these guys.

Just for the sake of discussion, I wonder if IP is the best way to assess workload.

Garcia was a ground-ball-throwing machine. He also had a healthy strikeout rate but low walk rate. So how many pitches per inning was he throwing, typically?

I have to guess that guys struggling with their command, like Ottavino, throw more pitches per inning. Garcia was just breezing through the low minors, so those 159 innings might’ve been less stressful on his arm than they’d have been if his pitch counts were higher.

Wonder what history is like here? How did Dan Haren, Anthony Reyes, Chris Lambert, Chris Narveson do on these charts?