One of the more fashionable debates this baseball season has been over the impact of pitch counts. The debate intensified when Gil Meche threw a career-high 132 pitches in a complete game win over Arizona on June 16 then proceeded to offer up his worst outing of the year before then complaining that his arm felt dead.

Whether or not you believe that there is a specific pitch count number that all managers should avoid crossing with their starters, you’d have a hard time finding much evidence that overwork doesn’t have an adverse effect on a pitcher’s future performance both in the short and long runs.

While Meche’s 2009 season is a good case study for the short-term effects, the best one I’ve found for the long-term impact of overwork is one you have probably heard me reference before.

The starting rotation of the 1980 Oakland A’s.

We’ve scratched the surface of Billy Martin’s Party of Five but I thought you might like to take a look at them in a format that allows for closer inspection. The 1980 Oakland A’s had an incredible 94 complete games, an even more amazing number when you consider that they only won 83. Here are the seasons for each:

Rick Langford (28 years old, 19-11, 3,26 ERA, 28 CG, 290 IP)

Mike Norris (25 years old, 22-9, 2.53 ERA, 24 CG, 284 IP)

Matt Keough (24 years old, 16-13, 2.92 ERA, 20 CG, 250 IP)

Steve McCatty (26 years old, 14-14, 3.86 ERA, 11 CG, 221 IP)

Brian Kingman (25 years old, 8-20, 3.83 ERA, 10 CG, 211 IP)

Five starters, all under 30, all with ERA’s under 3.90. The quintet led Oakland to a 29-game improvement from the year before. In 1981, they led the A’s to the ALCS but, in the process, Langford, McCatty, Norris and Keough combined for 56 complete games in a strike-shortened season in which Oakland only played 109 times. Pro-rated for a full season, their numbers are just as shocking as they were the year before:

Rick Langford (27 CG, 289 IP)

Steve McCatty (24 CG, 274 IP)

Mike Norris (18 CG, 255 IP)

Matt Keough (15 CG, 207 IP)

So, whatever became of those guys? Well, I wish I could tell you that they all went on to long, successful careers. I wish I could tell you that but high-pitch-count is no fairy tale world.

Only two pitched past the age of 30. Only one – Langford – pitched past the age of 31. Norris and Kingman were done at 28. As a group they would combine for only a pair of 200-innings seasons (Langford and Keough both did it in 1982).

And check those 1980 numbers again. These weren’t guys who just didn’t have the talent to stay in the bigs. They were all legit. It defies logic to believe that ALL FIVE of these guys just happened to suffer almost immediate drop-offs at almost the exact same time. Is it crazy to believe that it had something to do with having their arms used as lab experiments?

Monday, Gil Meche threw a bullpen session to see if his arm still felt dead. Two days later, there he was throwing 121 pitches in a six-inning effort against the Twins. "I was still throwing in the mid-90s," said Meche. "I tried to squeeze out that sixth inning and just couldn't get (Joe) Mauer to finish the inning." I wonder how much extra effort he used trying to “squeeze out that sixth inning”. And how much it will affect his next start.

As he entered the dugout after the eighth inning of his aforementioned complete game, Meche told manager Trey Hillman, “I’ve got this one”. Pitchers are fond of saying that they have the right to finish their own game. But it isn’t “their” game. There are 24 other players, a manager, a coaching staff and countless other who have just as high a stake in the outcome of a game – or a season – as they guy on the hill. This is where the manager has to step in and make sure that the team’s interests are served, even at the expense of the player’s.

To this point, Trey Hillman seems more like an enabler than a regulator.