The art and science of pitching in baseball are in constant evolution. New pitches, new patterns, new ideas, and new philosophies are always bubbling up and being put into practice. Most take their lumps at the highest levels and fail, but some (like the Splitter and Cutter) will stick and become part of baseball lore and lexicon.

One thing about pitching has not changed: the goal and purpose of pitching a baseball is to make it as difficult for a batter to hit it as possible. Simple. Straightforward. Clear.

But pitching is none of these things anymore. Pitching has become a myriad of different things. Buzzwords and phrases all designed to help a pitcher accomplish his sole purpose of being difficult to hit. Coach speak designed to help a pitcher understand a concept or a short term point of emphasis on a particular day. On the surface these little mind tricks are useful to accomplish the goal. But in the ground hogs day grind of baseball, it's all too easy for somebody to lose sight of the big picture and focus solely on the short term task at hand.

We commonly hear phrases like "Throw strikes", "Get ahead in the count", or "Repeat your delivery" and take them as good advice and strategy for any pitcher to employ. However, these are just examples of coach speak trying to enable a pitcher to have success. In reality, we are really trying to break successful pitching down into smaller pieces that all add up to success. Or, if you prefer, we're dumbing pitching down to make it less difficult to think about and not such a difficult puzzle to understand.

What has ensued, however, is that the art of pitching has slowly withered away and the art has been replaced by an army of mindless cookie cutter pitching machines that have lost sight of the big picture of what pitching is truly all about: being difficult to hit. In our efforts to find consistency from pitchers, pitching mechanics have been simplified and duplicated to all new levels. "Repeating your delivery" has become synonymous with "throw the exact same way every time". One could make a substantially valid argument that delivery a pitch to a batter from exactly the same arm slot, in exactly the same rhythm, while throwing the same 3-4 pitches exclusively, is not maximizing your chances of being difficult to hit. In today's game, this is just one example of pitching being too rigid and losing sight of the real goal.

Beyond that, there is little to no tangible evidence that supports the idea that repeating your delivery will prevent injuries (long theorized to be true). Pitchers are suffering arm injuries just as commonly, if not more so, than at any time in history. True, there is a significantly greater awareness and attention paid to arm health now than ever before, but the pitchers themselves are in better shape and have lighter workloads than at almost any point in baseball history. So what gives?

In a generally accepted school of thought, most pitchers and people around baseball believe that each arm only has a limited number of pitches it can make before it breaks down. Each arm has a different number and that number is unknown until it is reached. This finite limit can be influenced by external factors such as workload, throwing lots of high stress innings, or throwing a high percentage of pitches that are proven to be stressful on an arm (like sliders and splitters). All of these can generally be lumped together into "overuse". If overuse is real and can have an impact on the lifespan of a healthy arm, would it not stand to reason that "repeating your delivery" (at least as it is thought of today = throw exactly the same way) is contributing to overuse and leading to injury? What if "repeating your delivery" is part of the cause, not part of the solution?