In Jazayerli’s article, he makes passing mention of a disconcerting postseason situation in which then-Marlins manager Jim Leyland left rookie Livan Hernandez on the mound to rack up a particularly high pitch count. He also notes Hernandez’s inclusion—as a 23-year-old — near the top of the leaderboard for Pitcher Abuse Points the previous season.

Inexplicably, however, Hernandez’s career calling card became his superhuman ability to withstand arm “abuse.” Even as the 120-plus pitch start became largely obsolete during the 2000s, Hernandez zigged while everyone else zagged. He made going long his signature move, once even tallying 150 pitches in a 2005 game.

Hernandez’s stuff was never electric — even during his prime. His real value lied in his maturity, his ability to slow things down, and pace himself. As a result, he remained a valuable pitcher well into his late 30s.

Pitch F/X data is only available since 2007 — meaning most of the relative information from Hernandez’s prime is lost forever — but we still have enough information to formulate a fairly solid hypothesis as to how he managed to gorge himself on innings, season after season, without succumbing to the Tommy John Monster.

Here’s a graph of his average pitch velocity, distributed by year:

Data from BrooksBaseball.com

And, for contrast, his maximum velocities:

BrooksBaseball.com

Even as Hernandez’s career came to a close, and his natural ability waned, his velocity remained steady. Even more telling is the fact that he showed a gap of barely five miles per hour between his average fastball and his max-velocity fastball.

Last May, USA Today’s Ted Berg argued that the pitchers who can slow down their average fastball by the biggest margin are, generally speaking, the ones whose elbows and shoulders hold up. Hernandez’s career only bolsters an already-solid argument.

This theory also echoes a sentiment that Schwartz briefly touched upon in 2004 regarding old-time workhorse pitchers and their habits. He references an issue of Baseball Magazine published in 1913 that ran a feature on the Giants’ dead-ball-era legend, Christy Mathewson. There, he noted, Mathewson “takes things comfortably where he can, not exerting himself, once he has the game well in hand, pitching only enough to win, and using the minimum amount of strength.”

Even with the old-timey speed-up effect his delivery looks effortless!

Mathewson, it should be noted, threw 200-plus innings every year for over a decade straight, and never suffered from the dreaded “arm fatigue” that destroyed countless pitching careers before the development of magnetic resonance imaging in 1973 led us to diagnose overuse as the root cause of elbow injuries.

Highly educated for a ballplayer of his time, Mathewson actually published a book on the game in 1912, Pitching in a Pinch: or Baseball from the Inside. In it, he noted always being asked by fans why he didn’t throw his famously unhittable fadeaway pitch more often:

“The only answer is that every time I throw the ‘fade-away’ it takes so much out of my arm. It is a very hard ball to deliver. Pitching it ten or twelve times in a game kills my arm, so I save it for the pinches.”

Hernandez and Mathewson are examples of pitchers who were capable of pacing themselves and pitching with strategically varying intensity. Surgery namesake Tommy John, by his own admission, was not. In the autobiography he wrote with his wife, John mentions the fact that, up until he was 19 years old, toiling in the minor leagues, he would consistently throw his hardest on every single pitch. Thirteen years later, he needed the first successful reconstructive elbow surgery in medical history.