We’re approaching the playoffs in baseball. I covered the silliness of the baseball playoffs last year and now I’m tackling another major problem in baseball, the state of pitching. Major League Baseball teams have been using a five man rotation for decades. With a five man rotation, four days rest is regular rest. I heard today on a podcast that the Dodgers have had six starts all year made by pitchers on four days’ rest. Between days off, calling guys up from the minors, bullpen games, and so on, all their other games have been started by pitchers on at least five days' rest. The Dodgers are averaging 5.04 innings per start. The Mariners lead the league at 5.83 innings per start. Fifteen years ago, the Orioles were last in the league at 5.42 innings per start. This year, only seven teams average more than 5.42 innings per start. Surely, everything is going well for the Dodgers’ starters with all that rest and limited innings, right? No, of course not. Since the Dodgers won the World Series four years ago, they’ve run out of pitchers every year. It’s happening again.
Earlier in the year, I was pretty pessimistic about the Dodgers because their lineup just wasn’t very good (especially when Mookie Betts got hurt). But now, I actually like their lineup a lot. Mookie Betts is healthy, they made some good acquisitions, and they have guys who are hitting better than they were earlier in the year. But they only have two dependable starting pitchers (and I’m counting a pitcher who has made two starts for a total of eight innings after coming back from injury as one of the dependable starting pitchers). Fifteen years ago, they had three starters make at least 30 starts. Those three pitchers all pitched at least 171 innings and they had a fourth starter make 20 starts with 117 ⅓ innings pitched. This year, Gavin Stone will end up leading the team in starts and innings. Unless he comes back from his injury before the end of the regular season, he will end up with 25 starts and 140 ⅓ innings pitched. Tyler Glasnow is the only other Dodgers starter to reach at least 90 innings (Yoshinobu Yamamoto might get there). Speaking of Glasnow, he had career highs with 22 starts and 134 innings pitched. And now he’s done for the year.
So why can’t pitchers stay healthy? It’s quite clear to me, but people keep looking for other explanations. It’s not because they’re pitching too many innings or because they’re not getting enough rest. It’s not because of the pitch clock (go back 30 years and there was no thought of a pitch clock because pitchers pitched at a much faster pace than they did in recent years before the pitch clock was brought in). It is because they are throwing too hard. In 2008, the average four seam fastball was 91.9 miles per hour and the average slider was 83.4 miles per hour. Last year, the average four seam fastball was 94.2 miles per hour and the average slider was 85.2 miles per hour. Pitchers’ bodies clearly can’t handle this. There might be some freaks that can handle throwing that hard or harder. Randy Johnson comes to mind. But if he was pitching today, maybe he’d be throwing his fastball at 103 instead of 100 and he’d break down because of that. Tyler Glasnow is done for the season, but at least he averaged 96.3 miles per hour on his fastball for 134 innings from March to August. So I guess his $136.6 million contract was worth it.
The biggest problem is pitchers getting hurt all the time, but pitchers throwing too hard creates other problems as well. There are too many strikeouts and not enough balls in play. Starting in 2017, teams have struck out an average of at least 8.25 times per game every year (it got all the way up to 8.81 in 2019). In 2009, the average was 6.91. In 1993, it was 5.8. The league batting average this year is .244. In 2009, it was .262. It got up to .271 in 1999 (steroids). Looking at the numbers over the years, I feel like .255-.265 is ideal.
So let’s stop pretending the problem is something else. Pitchers are throwing too hard. They can’t handle it. So how do we fix it? This is another problem. The way pitchers are handled is like the idea of having nuclear weapons. Much like it would be better to do things differently, it makes no sense to change anything unless everybody else agrees to it also. Ronald Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist. Of course, he did not get rid of nuclear weapons. Because it wouldn’t make sense to just give up nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union, China, and other countries still had them. By the way, as a Reagan Republican, this will be the third straight presidential election that I write somebody in. This year I will be writing in Peter Sonski from the American Solidarity Party. I wish more people realized that you don’t have to vote for one of these two horrible candidates.
Anyway, back to baseball. Teams aren’t going to change the way they handle pitchers because there’s no incentive to do so. And there’s no incentive for pitchers either. Hitters are trying to hit as many home runs as possible and they don’t care about striking out. If pitchers don’t throw as hard as they can all the time, they’re going to give up more home runs. And then they won’t stick around in the Majors and get big contracts. And if teams don’t have their pitchers throwing as hard as they can all the time, they’re going to lose more games. There’s no long term thinking involved. All the short term incentives are for pitchers to throw as hard as possible. But in the long run, it’s probably bad for everybody. Walker Buehler got off to a great start to his career, but injuries have derailed that. It was obviously bad for the team and for him (he didn’t get a big free agent contract before getting hurt).
So what can be done? My brothers and I watch a wiffle ball league on YouTube. There’s a speed limit for pitchers. If you violate the speed limit, it’s an automatic ball. You could do that, but I think that’s too extreme. For somebody like Randy Johnson who can handle throwing 100, he should be able to. There’s been talk of a six inning minimum for starting pitchers. There would be exceptions to that. I think it was if you give up four runs or reach 100 pitches or get hurt before six innings, you could be taken out. So it’s pretty much if you’re pitching well, you pitch at least six innings. I like that idea, but one problem would be guys coming off the injured list. Maybe there could be an exception for somebody making his first start or two after being activated from the injured list. The other issue would be what happens if you need an emergency starter? Like if you had to replace your starter at the last minute because he got sick or had a family emergency or got hurt warming up, do you have to have a relief pitcher make the emergency start and go six innings or 100 pitches or whatever? I don’t think it makes much sense to just start that rule in the Majors. I think you would have to gradually work that rule through the minors and into the Majors. Like if you started it at single-A one year and then the next year it was single-A and double-A and so on until it was used in the Majors. It would force teams to train their minor leaguers to go deep into games.
The thing that I’ve been a fan of for a long time is the double hook DH. I hate the DH with every fiber of my being. But if we’re going to have it, we could use it to help fix the state of starting pitching in baseball. If you take out your starting pitcher, the DH also comes out of the game and that becomes the pitcher’s spot. It would give teams an incentive to have their starters go deep into games. It would also bring back strategy in terms of handling a lineup. You would have to think more about where to put the DH in the lineup and it would bring back late game double switches.
Another issue that contributes to this problem is that teams have 13 pitchers on the active roster and they’re going to use them. Having 13 pitchers on the roster 20 years ago would have been absurd (unless it was September and you had 40 man rosters). And these days they would probably have 14 active pitchers if they were allowed to. With the union, there’s probably no way to reduce the number of pitchers on the roster. But what I would do is make it so that you have to decide that some pitchers are inactive for each game. I would make it so that seven pitchers are inactive each game. So teams would automatically make their starting pitchers who aren’t pitching that day inactive, but then they would also have three relief pitchers inactive. I would have an exception for games that go to extra innings. So for the first nine innings, you would have your starter and five relievers available. You should be able to get through nine innings with a starter and five relievers. I guess you could also make an exception for injuries. If a starter left the game before completing five innings because of injury, then you could activate two of your inactive pitchers for that game. Teams wouldn’t take their starters out of the game so quickly if they didn’t have eight relievers available.
And lastly, I would deaden the baseball. Pitchers should be trained to pitch deeper into games. That would mean lower velocity. Lower velocity would mean more home runs. Give hitters less incentive to try to hit the ball as hard as they can all the time and more incentive to make more contact. If the hitters had less incentive to hit the ball as hard as they can all the time, pitchers would have less incentive to throw the ball as hard as they can all the time. We would get pitchers going deeper into games, fewer pitching changes, fewer strikeouts, and more balls in play. All of those things would be good changes for Major League Baseball.
No comments:
Post a Comment