I really liked Joe Poz’s tribute, but I liked yours more because it comes from the heart of a Tigers fan, not some Royal lover :)

When I interviewed Fidrych as a child, he didn’t blame Houk for overusing him (what man with class would?). He told me that he threw differently after he injured his knee goofing around in spring training, which altered his delivery and then injured his shoulder.

I agree w/tmh…
His injury, from all accounts, was a result of the knee…not his use. Couple it with the fact that Firych was not exactly the “peak” of physical fitness nor mechanically sound, its no wonder he suffered injury with the change in his delivery.
IMHO, there is way too much emphasis on pitch counts and use. So many of the old timers threw huge numbers of innings: Carlton, Ryan, Niekro, Palmer, Morris, Blyleven and all the generations before them. The Asian pitchers still do as Dice K, for example, came up throwing 200+ pitches per game.
Yet in this country, the “accepted” practice is to extremely limit throwing/innings/pitches, ever since Billy Martin’s young A’s rotation in the early 80’s. Anecdotally, I haven’t seen any real decline in injuries as a result. In fact, I would argue its been worse in some cases.
Evidence: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/IP_leagues.shtml
No manager will challenge the “norm,” because he’d be blamed for any resulting problems.
Let’s face it, pitching is an unnatural motion and one has to be lucky and pretty sound to avoid problems over the years, but I have yet to see any real research that says the 5 man rotation and limiting guys to less than 250 IP is preventing injury, and in some cases, I would say its contributing to the problems because guys are NOT strong enough for the burden they’re given. One needs to only look at Bonderman or Zumaya from our roster to see how the coddling has NOT helped.