Zack Greinke has more than $35 million coming from the Royals. Gil Meche is owed more than $29 million.</p><p>These are enormous sums, obviously, more than twice what the team chipped in for stadium renovations, and these investments come with all the requisite care. Greinke has had issues with social anxiety, and Meche&rsquo;s problem is a tricky back, but the biggest worry for each is the arm.</p><p>This is one of baseball&rsquo;s eternal debates, and it&rsquo;ll fire up again today, maybe around the seventh inning or so, when Greinke approaches his 100th pitch. <em>Save the arm, play it safe? Or let it ride, get your money&rsquo;s worth?</em></p><p>It is an impossible situation to handle perfectly, and so the second-guessing floods in from all angles. The Royals need to get maximum return on their big-money spending, but if they push too far, they risk losing it all.</p><p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a fine line,&rdquo; says Glenn Fleisig, research chair at the American Sports Medicine Institute, and one of the country&rsquo;s leading experts on pitchers&rsquo; injuries. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re getting closer to being able to determine where it is.&rdquo;</p><p>Baseball Prospectus came up with a stat called &ldquo;Pitcher Abuse Points&rdquo; to quantify how much big-leaguers are put in danger, and that measurement is scary for the Royals. Meche ranks fourth, in part because of a 132-pitch shutout he completed despite a five-run lead and rested bullpen.</p><p>Greinke is 24th, in part because he&rsquo;s gone 111 or more pitches in seven of his 15 starts. Even Kyle Davies &mdash; demoted to the minor leagues &mdash; ranks 14th.</p><p>The Giants are the only other team to have three pitchers among the top 30 &ldquo;abused.&rdquo; Only the Tigers have more &ldquo;Pitcher Abuse Points&rdquo; than the Royals. So according to this measurement, Royals manager Trey Hillman is putting his pitchers in as much risk as any other manager in baseball.</p><p>These are the points that fans and others are making, sometimes in screaming for Hillman&rsquo;s job.</p><p>They may be surprised that Hillman and the Royals are said to be better than most at protecting their pitchers.</p><p>&bull; &bull; &bull;</p><p>Nolan Ryan was tired. People say he never got tired, but that&rsquo;s not true. He was tired on this particular night, trying to finish off a start for the Rangers when his pitching coach came out.</p><p>&ldquo;How ya feelin&rsquo;?&rdquo; the coach asked.</p><p>&ldquo;Horse(bleep),&rdquo; Ryan responded. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;m better than what you&rsquo;ve got warming up in the bullpen, so get the hell off my mound and let me finish this game.&rdquo;</p><p>Ryan, you may have noticed, had a pretty good and long career without much worry about his pitch counts. He is the posterboy for the old-school baseball people who see pitch counts as the wussification of baseball. Ryan supposedly threw 259 pitches in 12 innings against the Royals in 1974, and 162 in a 1989 game &mdash; at the age of 42.</p><p>So why are we supposed to worry now when a guy gets to 110? Not tough enough?</p><p>&ldquo;The thing we need to remember,&rdquo; says Tom House, a former big-league pitcher and coach who has led research into prolonging careers, &ldquo;is that pitch counts are just part of it. People bring up Nolan Ryan, well, Nolan physically prepared himself like nobody I&rsquo;ve ever been around. He prepared himself to throw that many pitches. It&rsquo;s different now.&rdquo;</p><p>Stats LLC started keeping pitch counts in 1988. MLB began its official tracking in 1999. Today, virtually every big-league stadium has real-time pitch counts on a scoreboard for everyone to see.