http://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/2012/0 ... strasburg/
Hutchison was 21 when he was called up to the majors ahead of schedule on April 21 because there were no better options in the system, and he had just 234.2 career minor-league innings under his belt.
Seven starts into his big-league career he made a conscious decision to create more power in his delivery and pushed his velocity up to 95 m.p.h., and three starts after that blew out his arm on his ninth pitch of a June 15 outing.
One key discussion point for the Blue Jays since has been on the importance of young pitchers logging at least 450-500 innings in the minors before graduating to the next level.
Hutchison underwent Tommy John surgery in early August after trying to rehab his elbow, and while Farrell stopped short of blaming his injury on the extra effort and relatively small body of overall work, they are both factors that are not easily overlooked.
"You take a young guy and you put him in this environment and the stress level increases ten-fold form what they've previously experienced," he explained. "At Dunedin, where you've got 600 people versus 42,000 with a third deck and every pitch you throw goes to the back of your baseball card, there's quite a bit of difference."
Once a pitcher gets 450-500 innings of work, particularly for those drafted out of high school, a rhythm and pace on the mound becomes more ingrained that is more repeatable at the big-league level.
"They know their deliveries better, they know their bodies better," said Farrell. "They've been in certain situations inside a game that the game doesn't speed up so much that they begin to overthrow consistently.
"That's where you see a lot of excess wear and tear on a young pitcher, that grinding mentality that can cause their body to be ahead of their arm ever so slightly but it's a cumulative effect, it builds up, things can get weak and that's where injuries take place."
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Farrell says that next season, if there was another pitcher in Hutchison's situation and the Blue Jays had other options for a callup, they'd probably handle things differently.