The premise of your question does not allow for it to be a 'complimentary issue.'
I didn't say "complimentary", I said "complementary". Different word.
Here's how they are complementary (or reciprocal, or contrasting in a symmetrical way): one is a negative goal, the other is a positive goal. And this is not just about Bundy. It's about various comments various folks have made about how it's dumb to take pitches away from a guy in the bus leagues. Which is why I asked what opinions are if we forget about the no-cutters-for-kids policy.
The NCFK policy is about a negative goal: While there may be collateral benefits from taking the cutter away from kids, the main reason they say they have that policy is because they think they can avoid a negative result (long term damage to FB ability). The core purpose of the policy is not to achieve a positive goal (improving some ability in and of itself), it's to avoid a negative, some kind of future damage that presumably cannot be undone. (Forget the evidence issue, that's what they think. For me, whether they're right or wrong is an unknown.)
The more conventional reason for taking pitches away from kids in the bus leagues is to achieve a positive goal: making them less dependent on whatever they've been able to skate by with so far, and forcing them to develop capabilities they don't currently have (or don't have enough of). They might not need those capabilities in the bus leagues, but they will need them in the bigs. The core purpose here is not to avoid any damage to the P's future ability but rather is to improve his future ability... whether the kid likes it or not.
Now, the nature of the negative goal is that they have to intervene by just banning the damn pitch for an extended period (based on their expectation of harm to the P's future FB ability if they don't). In contrast, the nature of the positive goal is that they have much more room for judgment about exactly how to apply their intervention. It's not about stopping something bad, it's about adding something good. So, they can take whatever steps they feel are appropriate and necessary to achieve that addition. By the complementary nature of the two goals, the policy associated with the positive goal can be much more flexible and much more individualized for each kid-P's strengths and weaknesses than the policy for the negative goal can be. So, the fact that the negative-goal policy is rigid and across the board, while the positive-goal policy is flexible and individualized is inherent in the different nature of the two goals, not in the misguided judgement of whoever is filling in the details of policy implementation. To make a completely ridiculous analogy, a policy of not eating rat poison is about a negative goal and is properly rigid and across the board, while eating a healthy diet is about a positive goal and is by its nature much more flexible and individualizable.
So, just forget about Bundy and his dang cutter and just focus on the positive-goal aspect of taking pitches away from kid-pitchers in the bus leagues. I think there is a wide range of how that positive goal might be implemented as policy.
At one extreme is the M's thing I heard about and read about: the FB is the foundation, they do that first, they learn to master that and command it thoroughly as their baseline foundational tool. While they're doing that, we don't want them getting distracted or changing the subject by fooling around with other pitches. The batter expects a FB? Well, what else is new? They all expect FB's. Your job, kid, is to learn how to get them out by mastering exactly what they're expecting you to throw. In, out, up, down, faster, slower, 2-seam, 4-seam. Beat the hitters at their own game. I can see how they want a kid to do that first, and I can see how they don't want the kid cheating on the goal by throwing a CB to get a guy out... because they wanna see that he's able to throw a FB to get the guy out. Throwing a CB is just a distraction. If he does that, you cant tell if he succeeded at the goal, because he cheated about what his assigned goal was. (Since it's a pos-goal and not a neg-goal, there is no reason he can't throw CB's on the side.) The kid is impatient to throw his breaking stuff? Good... tell him the sooner he masters his FB, the sooner he gets to impress everybody with his CB. (Over the last several years, how many kid-P's did we see the O's bring up who simply didn't know how to throw their FB the way they wanted to? 10? 15? 20? more than 20?)
At a less extreme level, you do what I mentioned before: Wait until the kid is about to start the game and then tell him and his catcher, "Oh, by the way... no sliders anywhere near the strike zone today... deal with it." Do that a bunch a times, and do it with every pitch the kid's got, until both you *and he* can clearly see exactly what he can succeed with and what he can't... and then make sure he gets better at what he can't.
But this is more than just helping him get his pitches better. You also want to get the kid absolutely comfortable with being on the mound with only a partial arsenal... because, let's face it, the days when all the pitches in a SP's arsenal are working right for the whole damn game are few and far between. A partial arsenal is really the normal state of affairs, it's not some weird occurrence, and you want him prepared for what's normal. It's not enough to dev a kid to the point that he can win when everything's working, he's gotta be able to win when things aren't working, so that's what you want him to get lots of practice at... and bus league hitters wont give him the same kind of taxing practice at being challenged when his repertoire is diminished that big league hitters will, so you artificially and arbitrarily up the difficulty of his situation on the mound, because that's what will become normal once he makes it to the bigs and you want him used to coping with that so he doesn't get rattled when it happens.
Now, with somebody like Bundy who is supposed to be special, this applies to his cutter for reasons that have nothing to do with the NCFK policy. From what everybody says, he doesn't throw it a lot, but he throws it when he needs it. That right there is a good reason to take it away... and take it away more than just once in a while. The only reason you'd take it away for years is because of the negative goal, the NCFK thing. But even if that didn't exist, you still wanna deprive him of it a bunch, just to force him to dev a pitch that's good enough to be an out pitch. If you let him get by with throwing the cutter as his out pitch, he'll never do that on his own. Why would he? Because it will make him better later? He's not gonna want to hear that, he's gonna want to just K everybody now and get to the bigs ASAP. And next thing you know, he'll be standing on the mound in Yankee Stadium with runners on 1st and 3rd, facing $200 million worth of hitters and, oops, his cutter doesn't work. Then what?
I have no clue about whether the NCFK policy has merit or not. And, to tell you the truth, seeing guys fuss about it on a message board isn't gonna tell me much about that either. (It can certainly clarify what the issue is, but it's not gonna resolve the issue because nobody here knows enough about it.) Plus, even if I had some kind of clarity about that, so what? My opinion isn't gonna change what the O's do, and I don't get any particular pleasure from ranting forever about how everybody but me is stupid.
The O's have their policy and they believe in it. That alone is a refreshing change. Now, nomatter what policy they have about anything, people will say it's stupid. If it's a blanket policy, they're not being individualized enough. But if they individual everything, then they don't have enough of a system. On a message board, they're gonna lose nomatter what they do. But in the meantime, Bundy doesn't have his cutter. The only thing that really means to me is that he'll have to dev another out pitch, and I don't see how having another one is a bad thing. Best case is that we later find out that the O's policy is the right one and they essentially extended his career by being on top of the issue before everybody else realized it was a good policy. Worst case: if he's half as good as he's supposed to be, then he learns how to succeed without it, and then once he's in the bigs and successful, he does whatever the hell he wants to do anyway, except now he's better because he's got 2 out pitches instead of one. I just don't see how it's worth making a federal case about. I'm much more interested in seeing what good can come out of it.
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