From Pitch Count To OP10: A Smarter Way To Protect Arms

What if the number you trust most to protect pitchers is the one hiding the real risk? We break down OP10—outs per ten pitches—a clear, practical stat that blends results with context by adding errors back into the equation. Instead of worshiping a pitch count, we show how OP10 reveals true efficiency, flags fatigue early, and helps coaches decide when to pull, when to push, and how to plan training with purpose.

We walk through the simple formula and why it matters at every level, from youth leagues to varsity. Think of a kid burning 41 pitches in the first inning versus another who weathers multiple errors but keeps the pitch load low; OP10 makes the difference obvious. We also revisit Greg Maddux’s surgical efficiency to illustrate what strong OP10 looks like across innings, and why fewer pitches per out is the real currency of healthy, sustainable performance.

Numbers are only part of the story, so we pair OP10 with quick, coach-friendly checks: range of motion screens, simple strength and sequencing tests, and on-the-mound fatigue cues tied to command and velocity drift. With injury rates rising and position players now joining pitchers in UCL surgeries, waiting for a pitch cap to save the day isn’t a plan. OP10 offers a smarter lens for game management, offseason design, and honest conversations with athletes and parents about workload, mechanics, and recovery.

If you care about healthier arms, better decisions, and more efficient innings, this is your blueprint for moving beyond pitch count to what truly matters: outs with less stress. Subscribe, share with your staff, and leave a review to help more teams protect their pitchers and win smarter.

Transcript

Welcome And Mound Ready Offer

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Hey everybody, it's Dr. Kevin McGovern, and it's time for another Velocity RX podcast. Today, we have a brand new stat for pitching efficiency. But first, attention baseball pitchers. Have you been injured, gone through surgery, or have been off the mound for an extended period of time, tried to go back, and you just can't without pain. I want to introduce you to Mound Ready. Mound Ready is unlike any product in the world. Mound Ready is going to do a complete evaluation of everything you have done, from physical therapy notes to training notes to rehab throwing, everything. Plus, we're going to run you through our own battery of tests to find the reason why or reasons why you are not back on the mound. Once we have those reasons why, we're going to correct them and get you back on the mound throwing. If this rings true to you at all, please visit velocityrx.org, click on the mound ready page, sign up to be on our waiting list so that we can help you get back on the mound throwing pain-free. Alright. So for those who have listened to me in the past, I've had I've complained. My other colleague, Clay Hammond, have complained. And probably complain is not the best word, but we definitely have challenged the status quo for a better measure of in-game pitch efficiency, other than pitch count, right? We all know that we sat there on a Saturday and watched the opponent throw 35 pitch innings, come back with a 40-pitch innings, three walks in a row, and a hit batter, and still all fall within the allowed pitches for the game, right? So I have very grandiose ideas about pitch count in that there needs to be some functional tests. We need movement tests, we need strength tests that are both pre-game, in-game, and post-game to keep junior on the mound. Or anyone for that matter, right? Just an arbitrary number, I don't think, tells everything about the story. So being bored this week, one day, really pitches comes down to outs. I know the analytic people have you know gotten away from pitching wins and everything else having to do with pitching, but at the end of the day, we need outs, right? That's how you move on between innings. So I wanted a measure of quality of pitching. Are we getting outs? Yes, it would be great, I guess, to have seven innings and you struck everybody out. That would be great. But did you strike everybody out on three pitches? And even if you did strike everybody out, that's still a lot of pitches to throw, right? Well, we won outs, so isn't a three-pitch inning more efficient on the pitcher? And then I thought, of course, defense and how bad defenses can be, even at the high school level. And I didn't want to penalize the pitcher, so I came up with OP 10 out per 10 pitches. Now that could be a stat used for the entire game, that could be a stat taken in the first inning compared to the fifth inning. It's essentially a measure of out for every 10 pitches. So let's take you through the formula, which I have, but but basically, we have to add on the end of this little thing times 10 to get it to the proper decimal point, right? But we take innings pitched times three, three outs printing, and then we add back in errors. And errors of any kind, right? I was just thinking about errors that got you know the people to the player to reach base, but even though throwing error and he, you know, he the runner advances two bases or or whatever, whatever it was happens in the game, that still puts pressure on the pitcher, and we want the pitcher to be able to bear down and get out. So I came up with this kind of chart, right? Of you know, and I'm still fiddling with these with these numbers here, right? You can see I've repeated 15 to 18, but we'll scroll this down here. But you know, at the high school level, we want to see 1.75 to 2 out for every 10 pitches. So again, innings pitched times three plus added back errors plus total pitches for that inning or that game, or however you measure it. Okay, and that is OP 10. And I posted it, and I you know, I got a lot of positive response, and then somebody reminded me of a game a long time ago. I actually have the game, I have it somewhere as to what what it was, but it was a game that Greg Maddox pitched, right? And of course, when we talk about pitching, everything everything goes to Greg Maddox, doesn't it? Like he seems to be the master of efficiency. So Greg Maddox threw apparently. Well, he did, he threw a 77 pitch, nine-inning complete game, right? So let's take you through what that looks like on our OP ten. Let's get my whiteboard up here. So we have nine innings times three outs equals twenty seven. I believe that's correct. I don't know if there was any errors in the game. Well let's just let's just say for argument's sake, let's just add in that there were two, all right? So we're gonna add in two errors, right? So that's 29. Okay. This is for the whole game now, and then he threw some say 77, some say 78, but we'll say it's 78. Okay. So 29 divided by 78 comes out to 0.37. So just so we don't end up being a decimal point, we'll times it by 10. Okay, and that OP3 or OP ten comes out to 3.7. Right? Pretty darn good, don't you think? So for every 10 pitches Maddox threw in that game, he got 3.7 outs. Now, maybe he had different innings, right? So maybe in the let's say the fourth inning, okay, so he had three outs, okay, and he threw eight pitches, okay. So three divided by eight is also three point seven five, right? Times ten, I'll call it the three point seven five. Or let's say he had this, let's clear this again. And let's say he was facing my New York Yankees and had a lot of strikeouts. So let's say he went 14 pitches, so he got three outs, 14 pitches. Okay, so three divided by 14 is 2.14 when you multiply it by 10. Okay, so you'll see the more pitches, obviously, the lower the OP 10 is, the less pitches, the higher the OP10 is. And to me, this is really prevalent. We could use this in the youth game, okay? And we can use it, you know. Let's say we have a kid who the pitch count, and we've all seen this. The pitch count for the day is 80. Okay, so after 80 pitches, junior's got to come out. All right. So injury doesn't occur like on the 79th pitch, right? We want to protect arms. And when someone is struggling badly, okay, that things are going wrong. Things are going wrong with their mechanics, things are going wrong with their human movement, things are just mentally, things are just going wrong. So just because this 80 is some you know arbitrary pitch count number, that doesn't mean that we have kept that kid healthy. So let's just go through a couple of innings. So in the first inning, Junior had three outs plus two errors. Okay. Or five. Junior threw 41 pitches to get those, you know, three outs, five outs with the added error, right? That's gonna be a one point two OP ten. And he's lost half his pitches already. So he's not having a good day already. So let's just go down that road. Now he comes out for the second inning. There's it's a clean inning, no errors. Okay, but he threw 24 pitches. So he went from 41 to 24. Did a pretty good job, but 24 is a lot. Okay, that gives him an OP ten of almost the same number. Right? Because the two errors we didn't add back in there of 1.25. Okay. So now he has so he went twenty he went forty-one. He lost twenty-four.

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Okay.

Beyond Counts: In-Game Testing And Safety

Call To Action And Mound Ready Details

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He's got sixty-five. Eighty is the number. Why do you send that kid out for the third inning? He's obviously not doing well. He's having a bad day. It's not his day, right? So just because the number is eighty, that sports medicine doctors said that that's enough for a game for an 11-year-old on a Saturday. But the number of that 80, I can guarantee you, in the spirit of the pitch count, didn't mean we're gonna do it in three innings. I can guarantee you that. Okay, maybe they're talking about six innings, but not three. All right, but let's do another scenario. All right, let's say on the other team, the kid comes out and defense is horrific, right? So he gets his three outs, okay, but there's four errors. Okay. That gives him seven. But he only threw twenty-four pitches. That gives him a 2.9. Significantly better number, right? And that shows that he battled back under adversity with the errors. Now he came for the second inning, clean inning, okay. He threw 12. Okay. Also, you're gonna get a 2.5. So now this young man has got 36 pitches, right? Almost halfway home, right? Maybe he can get into the fifth inning, but you're gonna feel much better, even though there were four errors, okay. He's getting out, okay. And I know this, I mean, when you look at it, it's really kind of a I didn't invent rocket science here. It's not it's a it's a mundane stat, but we just can't look at this number, right? Okay, now I want to expand the pitch count that we are looking at mechanics. I would like to have three or four mechanic numbers down. I want pre-game testing. We're sending these kids on the mound, and we have no idea what their condition is. We haven't run them through any tests, there's been no range of motion, there's been no strength testing, nothing. Go out to the bullpen, warm up, after the national anthem. I'm gonna see you. Right? We have no idea, right? How his arm feels. Maybe we asked, okay, but pitchers can change day to day, hour to hour. We have no idea. And then, of course, we have no idea what's happening in game, other than again, the number. And now maybe we have our OP 10 number, right? But we don't know how the arm is feeling. Yeah, pitcher's never gonna say, maybe they will give you the truthful answer. I know I never did, but we have to be above that. We have to be testing in game. There has to be some very simple tests that a coach can do that can learn in a weekend course the hows and whys and what's of how to do it, how to test to keep kids' arms safe. Because the injury rate is up 500% in adolescence, right? And it's not just pitchers. I saw a number the other day. One out of every seven people with Tommy John surgery are not pitchers, all right? They're position players. It's a huge epidemic. I'm trying to save a million arms. Please use OP 10. Do it for last season. Grab, I think it's game changer. You can do it, you can you know, put a spreadsheet and really geek out and and see a fatigue, right? Maybe you see a change from innings three on that your son is really not son or pitcher, but you know, the kid playing for you, it's really fatiguing, and then that can change your entire process of training, of winter training. Okay. We know that fatigue is a huge part of the cause of injury, mechanics, strength. There's you know, it's not just one. But you but we at the end of the day, we want out as efficiently as possible. We want 27 up and 27 down and 27 pitches. That would be fantastic. We know it's never gonna happen. But we need to start doing a better job than just pitch count and relying on pitch count and getting people to the brink, right? Taking someone out at 77 pitches so they can when that when the number's 80 and then come back in two more days and throw 50, right? When they're and their 77 pitches was in two and two-thirds innings, right? We gotta start using our heads. We're all part of this, we're all responsible for this. So use this stat. I hope that it helps you. For more information on how I can help you, visit velocityrx.org. Okay, I've got pitching training, and you've heard the in the commercial. I've got a new mound ready, which is a really a second opinion, a medical second opinion, which lasts a month, right? It takes three to four weeks to get all this done. The all the reviews of all the documents, the training. This isn't like a day thing. Plus, I bring you through my own battery of tests, game tests. Anyone who's listening out there who has taken the game test knows the how powerful that test is when we put the body and measure its neurological sequence. And I'm gonna find the answers to why you are with a pretty highly degree of medical certainty of why you are still pitching in pain. And I'm gonna do my best to fix it. So thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next.