So I will readily admit that while I am very interested in advanced metrics, I am by no means anywhere close to fluent in them. With that said I had a question. I know there has been much debate on pitch count and I hear talk about difficult pitches (i.e runners on 2nd and 3rd, no out, late in a one-run game) vs. easy pitches. Has anyone developed a leveraged pitch counter. Basically what I was thinking was some metric to account for number of pitches along with the difficulty as judged by leverage. Maybe this could account for why Shields and Price can go higher pitch counts (more skilled pitcher would mean not as many tough situations, thus less-leveraged pitches and less wear on the arm) then say, a Jeff Niemann. Does anyone think that teams may have already developed a metric of this type and it's just proprietary info? Also can anyone give me a good place to start in terms of research if I wanted to try and create this on my own?

Thanks.