Let's Banish the 5-Inning Starting Pitcher
Why don't teams groom kids to go the distance?
FreeForAll Thursday is here, chock fulla nutty thinking and Nuke LaLoosh his ownself. If you’re interested in a longer-term relationship and unlimited barstool privileges at The Morning Line Lounge, it’ll cost you $8/month or $80/year. Enjoy.
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It’s cold and gray, my mood sucks, my feet are freezing and all I really want is some damned baseball.
Baseball would not exist without summer. Save golf, it’s the most weather-dependent sport in the world, if only because the mere concept of the game crumbles when faced with the prospect of lousy meteorology. Without summer, the MLB mythology would freeze to death. Nobody spring-trains in Fargo.
I don’t write about baseball in February because it’s interesting, even though it can be. I write about baseball in February because it keeps me warm. It’s a spiritual link to summer, the only great season. Deck-cigar-beer-ballgame is less of a concept every time the calendar flips.
I’m sick of layering. So let’s talk pitching.
The wonder of the Substack platform is the light it shines on the written word. Anybody can be an Author and as it turns out, many of the Anybodys are pretty good at what they’re writing about. The Sub-network explodes daily. Jim Acosta, the erstwhile White House reporter at CNN, just started a ‘Stack.
The best, most sensible political pundit I read is someone named Heather Cox Richardson. Several times a week, her “Letters From an American’’ is a highly sourced take on the events of the moment. When I want smart sportswriting, I lean on Mark Whicker, a longtime newspaper guy who writes The Morning After, and Michael Weinreb, an Ohio guy, who entertains me smartly with Throwbacks.
Is there a point today, Doc?
This morning, I came upon another ‘Stacker, named Lewie Pollis. He writes a baseball-centric, necessarily nerdy newsletter, Lewsletters Substack,
His most recent effort concerns the under-use of starting pitching. Lewie’s point is, the fewer innings teams get from their starters, the less effective their bullpens become, largely because of overwork. Lewie didn’t illustrate his tome with a photo of David Bell, but he could have. Lewie:
“Going to the bullpen earlier risks watering down their effectiveness.
“Forty-one percent of MLB starts over the last three years lasted either 15 or 18 outs. The league-wide bullpen ERA when the first reliever enters after five innings is 4.04. After six innings, it drops 33 points, to 3.71. People usually conceptualize saving the relievers’ bullets as an abstract aspiration, not as a managerial decision with a tangible impact. The freshness and flexibility of the bullpen is not a side effect of optimizing pitching strategy. It is a key component of it.’’
I’ll take it a step further and suggest that running a bullpen intelligently has become as important a duty as any a manager attempts, save creating a winning, accountable clubhouse atmosphere.
As Lewie notes, “a starter is more likely to pitch four or fewer innings than to record even a single out in the seventh.’’
That prompts a couple questions I’ve had about pitching for a long time and written about in This Space:
Is there any thought in any organization given to reversing the trend of The Ever Diminishing Starting Pitcher?
Does any club see the value in having its starters habitually go deeper into games? These days, starters throw their arms off for 4 or 5 innings, then look longingly into the dugout, hoping to see the manager pick up the bullpen phone.
Is any club making an organizational effort to get more out of its starting pitchers, from rookie ball up? With arm injuries as common as hangnails, is there not big value in grooming kids to go 7?
Less reliance on relievers might even open a roster spot that could be used on a dependable bat off the bench.
It’s not as if the Old Guys of a couple generations ago were physically superior to the pitchers today. Mickey Lolich across his 16-year career averaged 229 innings a year. He pitched 200-plus innings 11 years in a row. He had a four-year run of 300-plus.
Lolich was no physical specimen. He was as wide as he was tall. It’s possible he couldn’t look down and see his toes, let alone touch them.
Starting pitchers get break-the-bank contracts. Why don’t teams expect break-the-bank results?
If I’m the Reds, I look at going back to the future. I make six innings a base-line expectation for any major-league=ready starting pitcher. I put my organizational focus on it, from the day a kid pitcher reports to Low-A ball.
Tell me why I’m wrong.
Lewie Pollis: “My suggested takeaway from these numbers is: When in doubt, leave the starter in. Then these overworked bullpens may finally get some relief.’’
Now, then. . .
PROUDLY KILLING BASEBALL FOR AN ENTIRE GENERATION. . . That’s what My Erstwhile Pirates Who Suck have done and keep doing. The one category the Buccos dominate annually is what I call The Willful Suckage Standings. That’s when your team is awful without end and the owner doesn’t care and MLB says nothing about it.
Pirates owner Bob Nothing
If it’s February, it must be national baseball publications giving Fs to Pittsburgh for its offseason moves. The Pirates lucked into drafting Paul Skenes, because they always draft high in Round 1 because of their Willful Suckage. Skenes has a chance to be the best pitcher in baseball this year.
How’d the Buccos capitalize on that and on the quality arms of Jared Jones, Mitch Keller and the kid Bubba Chandler?
By acquiring Tommy Pham and Adam Frazier and bringing back Andrew “Methuselah’’ McCutchen.
There has to be some way to prevent owners like Bob Nutting from holding fan bases hostage. Willful Suckage is not a strategy. You want a pile of rev-sharing cash? You want an optimum draft order? Do better this year than last. Move up in the standings. Show you’re at least competitive. Try, for god’s sake.
Meantime, relegation would be too kind for the Pittsburgh Nuttings, pronounced “Nothings.’’
MR. LUDDITE LIKES THIS. . .
The NFL will make a 21st century approach to its first down measurement system for the 2025 season, getting rid of the chain gang and instead going with a technology tracking system.
Some of us moan weekly at the subjectivity involved in spotting the ball after a play. Lots of games are decided by inches, literally. KC got a great spot on a Bills 4th-down try in a January playoff game. The Chiefs held, their offense scored, game over. It was as borderline a call as I saw all year.
I’m generally against any change that slows down play, kills tempo and turns a game over to robots. Not this time.
And finally. . .
JUST HIT THE DAMNED BALL. . . My late father-in-law taught me the most important rule in golf:
Cheat creatively.
No, wait, He didn’t teach me that. Sid Phillips said, “If you can’t play well, play fast.’’ No one especially cares about your game. They do care if your game takes forever to play.
PGA Tour pro Michael Kim hasn’t gotten the message. Golf magazine:
During Golf Channel’s broadcast of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am’s final round earlier this month, he was shown taking 40 seconds to address his ball, then another 25 to take a swing.
I saw that. I wanted to stick my Size 9 Timberland up Kim’s keister.
Keister. Haha.
The problem with taking 65 seconds to hit one shot is, it usually means you’re tentative, scared and thinking yourself to death. Tension is the enemy of the golf swing. Standing 65 seconds over a shot is not a calming act. I mean, I got tense just watching Kim statue himself for a full minute and change.
The best golf I play occurs when I put myself in what I call IDGAF Mode. I-don’t-give-a. . .
Meat.
IDGAF Mode removes my brain from all but the most rudimentary calculations. Club selection, alignment, grip. Head down, follow through. As Crash Davis said to Nuke LaLoosh, “Don’t think, Meat. You’ll hurt the ballclub.’’
TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . If I had a personal Hall of Fame for bands/solo acts, the top shelf would be reserved for Van Morrision, the Rolling Stones, Jim Croce and this guy.
My favorite of his is Sky Blue and Black, off the I’m Alive set. Then this one, from Late For the Sky.
It’s like you’re standing in the window/
Of a house nobody lives in/
And I’m sittin’ in a car across the way. . .
Great tune by Jackson Browne. He is high on my list of great songwriters.
Before the fame, out in LA in a cheap apartment building lived Glenn Frey and Don Henley in one apartment and in the apartment below them was Jackson Browne. You don't always associate discipline with rock musicians, but for many its part of the process. Here is a story from Glenn Frey about that time and the process of writing songs.
Glenn Frey, tells the story:
“Every morning we’d wake up and we’d hear Jackson’s piano coming through the floor from the apartment below. He would play one verse, then play it again, and again and again. Twenty times in a row, till he had it exactly the way he wanted.
“Then he’d move to the next verse. Again, twenty times. It went on for hours. I don’t know how many days we listened to this same process before it suddenly hit us: This is how you write a song. This is how it’s done.
“That changed everything for us.”
I hate being one of those old geezers who claim everything was better back in their youth. But, I have to say, baseball was better when I wore a younger man’s clothes. Batters were up there to swing the bat, they weren’t concerned about working the count and trying for a walk. Putting the ball in play was the minimum expectation, striking out was an embarrassment. And, one of my biggest criticisms of today’s baseball managers is that so many of them burn out their bullpens because the analytics say a starter can’t go through a lineup a 3rd time. How are pitchers supposed to learn how to go deeper in games if they aren’t given the opportunity to do so? Modern analytics might illuminate the most efficient way to play baseball, but a game dominated by analytics and the “three true outcomes" is certainly not the most entertaining game to watch. I’ll have more to say about baseball next month in a post on my own Substack, but thanks, Paul, for providing a forum for me to gripe about it today.
And, by the way, on behalf of Pirate fans, thanks for blasting Bob Nothing.