Starting Monday, a brand new day dawns for prep baseball teams in West Virginia.
If you have enough pitching, it's likely to be a sunny day. But if you don't, get ready for the storm clouds to gather.
Monday marks the start of the state's revised double-elimination sectional tournament format, with larger, seeded fields across the board.
The new approach is meant to get the better teams into the regionals and, ultimately, the state tournament at Appalachian Power Park. Gone are the days when you could ride one stud pitcher into the big show.
Not only does this year's format demand more quality pitching depth, but with the first year of pitch-count regulations in West Virginia, even the stud pitchers are now limited to no more than 110 throws in a game. Previously, limits were based upon the number of innings pitchers worked in a game, not the amount of pitches.
So just how many pitchers do you need to survive the new-look sectionals, which have ballooned as high as six teams for most AA schools and as many as seven for single-A schools?
Well, if you're a top seed and you keep winning, you might only need to play three games to capture a sectional championship. But if you somehow get knocked into the losers bracket early and try to battle back, you may have to play six games in a six-team sectional or seven games in a seven-team sectional.
That's a lot of innings for a pitching staff to work, especially since sectionals are all mandated to begin on Monday and keep playing every day without a break unless foul weather intervenes.
"That's the problem with this sectional rule the way it is,'' said veteran Buffalo coach Jimmy Tribble, whose team is involved in the seven-team Class A Region 4 Section 2.
"I would think you're going to have to have a minimum of three good pitchers, and probably five or six overall because there's a pitching count. It's not like last year. Last year, you threw a guy on Monday and if you take him out after six innings, he can come back on Wednesday. Not now. If that guy pitches Monday, he might be done until Friday, and you may be out of the tournament by Friday. It's a dilemma.''
Bill Mehle, coach of Charleston Catholic, which is also competing in a seven-team sectional (Class A Region 3 Section 1), agreed with Tribble about having three good pitchers, since even a top seed might play three straight days, making any of those starters off limits for a while.
Under current regulations, anyone throwing 51 to 75 pitches needs two days of rest, and anyone who throws 75 to 110 pitches requires three days of rest.
"We tried to pump up the pitch counts over the course of the season,'' Mehle said, "so that in the postseason, we'd let [the starter] run the max if we needed to. So if we have three pitchers able to do that, we should be pretty competitive.
"I don't know over the course of how many days you'd have to play. We hope to have five, six, seven pitchers that we can send out there. We needed to keep the pitch count reasonable over the last three weeks so that everybody's fresh and ready to go.''
An interesting part of the situation is comparing the plight of Class AAA teams with their counterparts in the lower classes.
With only 29 teams in AAA statewide, none of the eight sectionals in that class has more than four teams - and three sections show only three teams each. So they won't need as many arms to survive a drawn-out sectional struggle - curious, since as a larger school, they probably have more pitching depth at their disposal.
"In triple-A, you've got more pitchers,'' Tribble said. "But at this level, it's going to get interesting.''
Brian Withrow, the first-year coach at AA Nitro, finds himself in the six-team Region 4 Section 1. He realizes his team is going to need some backup for its front-line pitchers, who he's tried to identify over the course of the regular season.
"We're looking at least at four, five guys we can throw out there,'' Withrow said, "and possibly start and get relief out of. If we can keep our pitch counts down and move forward, that's the key.
"Realistically, we're working for having six [pitchers ready]. We want to have those four, five guys we can run out there and get some outs for us if we need to, and if we get into a situation, we've also got some guys to suck up innings for us and get us to the next day.''
The new rules not only affect coaches pulling the strings, but also players trying to get through the next inning and keep their team from dipping into the unknowns of the bullpen too soon.
Sissonville senior Zac Boggess admitted that pitch counts are now part of his mindset, and pointed to his complete-game effort at Winfield where he finished just in time, resting at 108 pitches.
"It's definitely in the back of my mind,'' Boggess said. "So far, in my freshman through junior years, I never had to worry about pitch count - you can go the full way. But with this pitch count rule, it puts more on the fielders because if they don't make plays, the pitch count goes up.
"We definitely had some big plays, nice plays [at Winfield], and all those plays is why I was able to finish the game.''
Contact Rick Ryan at 304-348-5175 or rickryan@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @RickRyanWV.