(from the book Baseball Prospectus, by Rany Jazayerli and Keith Woolner)
Pitcher Abuse Points are a statistical tool designed to measure wear and tear on a baseball pitcher's arm. It's used by analysts to determine if a pitcher is being over worked by his manager, and can help predict any future breakdown. If a pitcher looks to be "abused" by his manager, then it reasons that a person in Scoresheet fantasy baseball or Rotisserie baseball would not want to draft that pitcher for fear that he will suffer a season (or career) ending injury.
PAPs are awarded during each appearance by a starting pitcher, like so:
- Pitches 1 - 100: no PAPs awarded
- Pitches 101-110: 1 PAP per pitch
- Pitches 111-120: 2 PAPs per pitch
- Pitches 121-130: 3 PAPs per pitch
- Pitches 131-140: 4 PAPs per pitch
- Pitches 141-150: 5 PAPs per pitch
- and so on, until the outing is over.
An adjustment is made based on the pitcher's age (Age Adjusted Workload) which is applied after finding the average PAPs per start: multiply the PAPs by a factor of (1 + n/6) where n = the number of years under 32. Therefore, a 29 year old pitcher would have a multiplier of 1.5, a 23 year old pitcher has a multiplier of 2.5 and any pitcher 32 years or older would have a multiplier of 1.0.
The AAW shows which young pitchers are being abused. In 1999 (data from the Baseball Prospectus 2000), the most abused pitcher in baseball was 24 year old Livan Hernandez, who had a total PAP score of 924 (over 30 starts), and an AAW of 71.9. The AAW is more than 10 points higher than the next pitcher on the list (Russ Ortiz). The average AAW in MLB in 1999 was 13.74.