Spring Loaded

What Mark Buehrle did on Thursday afternoon was truly amazing.

He pitched a perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays, the 18th perfecto in major-league history. Yes, that was amazing.

But what was really amazing was that he threw 116 pitches without his arm falling off.

How is that possible? I thought baseballs carried a warning label: Exceeding 100 pitches may be hazardous to health. I thought that each pitch beyond 100 could take innings off your life.

Nonsense.

Once upon a time when pitchers were athletes and their managers weren’t nannies, pitchers routinely racked up pitch counts well past 100. On rare occasions – horrifying as it might seem to today’s five-inning warriors – the pitch count topped 200.

And that was at a time when four-man, not five-man, rotations were the rule. That meant pitchers went on only three days rest.

Startling.

Back then, a pitcher took great pride in throwing a complete game. If a manager went to the mound to yank his pitcher, he knew he was often going to have an argument on his hands.

Three examples demonstrate the standards set by the men on the mound in earlier eras:

-- Pitching for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Don Newcombe once went nine innings in the first game of a doubleheader and then came back to start the second game and go seven innings.

-- San Francisco and Milwaukee once played a 16-inning won by the Giants 1-0 on a Willie Mays home run. Both starting pitchers, Warren Spahn of the Braves and Juan Marichal of the Giants, went the distance. Spahn was 42 at the time.

-- In his last two seasons with Dodgers, Sandy Koufax went 26-8 and 27-9. In each of those seasons, he had 27 complete games.

Despite such heavy workloads, pitchers lasted as long or longer than their counterparts of today. Koufax was the rare exception, suffering an elbow injury that forced him to retire at 30. Spahn pitched 21 years, appearing in 750 games, Marichal 16 years and 471 games.

And pitchers back then didn’t have the advantage of modern surgical procedures. There were no Tommy John operations, no routine rotator-cuff repairs.

But, somehow, those guys shrugged off the normal aches and pains, sucked it up and went out on the mound with the intention of staying there until the game was over.

There was no short relief and long relief. No setup man and closer. The starter had every intention of being his own closer.

When Dodger closer Todd Worrell was struggling, then manager Bill Russell was asked who would replace him.

Russell said it was going to take some time to figure that out. Not just anyone, he said, could pitch the ninth inning.

Why not? These guys get millions to pitch in the major leagues and they can’t pitch in the ninth inning? Are there hitters who can’t bat in the ninth inning?

Maybe managers should get the scoreboard operator to tamper with the numbers so the ninth inning appears as the eighth inning. That might set the closer’s mind at ease.

The most ridiculous safeguard thrown on today’s pitchers is the 100-pitch limit. Who came up with that? No one seems to know.

Why not a 97-pitch limit? Or a 103-pitch barrier?

Can you imagine a manager going out to the mound to tell a Don Drysdale or a Bob Gibson he had reached his 100-pitch limit. The manager could expect a torrent of four-letter words along with a demand for the manager to slink back to the dugout because that pitcher still had plenty of throws in his arm.

Along with the pitch count came another ridiculous standard, the quality start, which is six innings of work with no more than three runs allowed.

And then along comes a game like Buehrle’s on Wednesday. No manager would dare remove a pitcher throwing a perfect game. So manager Ozzie Guillen left Buehrle in there and, incredibly, he was just as strong at the end as he had been all afternoon even though his pitch count had soared above 100.

Nine innings, all 27 men retired. Now that’s a quality start.