Rich Waltz on Brandon Backe

but I've heard way too many stories of high school(and even college to a lesser extent) coaches completely abusing their pitchers.

Here is an article that might be at least a little interesting to anyone about this topic.

Link

You'll recognize at least one doctors name in here...

about Backe throwing 200+ pitches in a high school game. Backe seems like the type of person whom the coaches have to protect from himself; if he made his own decisions, he probably would continue pitching beyond the point that he should. Dice K supposedly threw something like 250 pitches in an extra inning game in the Japanese equivalent of high school. That made American scouts wonder if it just proves he is durable or whether there would be a day of reckoning.

For a contrarian point of view, I read an article about a professor at the medical school in Dallas who studied the X-rays of Nolan Ryan and some other durable pitchers of the past. He said that those pitchers may have benefited from an era in which young kids were not protected from throwing curveballs, high pitch counts, etc. He theorized that their shoulders had undergone structural changes while they were young which allowed them to throw without the normal stress, thereby avoiding surgery in their later years. I'm not saying I agree with his conclusions (and I'm not qualified to do so anyway). My immediate reaction to his article is that maybe some pitchers are genetically predisposed to pitching without injury.