It won’t come as a shock, or even fall under the heading of breaking news, but from all appearances baseball is losing the numbers game big-time when it comes to the pitching department.
It has nothing to do with all those exotic parlay odds that revolve around matchups and dominate pregame shows, though that certainly is a legitimate matter for another day. This is all about how much is too much or not enough when it comes to rotation size, pitch counts, innings pitched, controllable service time, career highs and annual projections.
As is often the case in everyday life, the numbers don’t always add up to the way we think. While the rest of the world deals with Artificial Intelligence (AI), baseball is dealing with Artificial Barriers (AB, if you will). And AB seems to be moving every bit as fast as AI.
The game long ago, sometime around the turn of the century, moved on from the standard four-man starting rotation to five, occasionally six, starting pitchers. Along the way, 35-40 starts and 225-300-plus innings pitched were reduced to 30-32 and 175-200, respectively.
The changes haven’t been easy, or without controversy, as medical evaluations and baseball strategy altered the approach to what is generally considered the heart of the game. “It all depends on the pitching,” is one philosophy that hasn’t changed from one century to the next — but the workload definitely has, for better or worse.
For no other apparent reason than it’s a nice round number, 100 pitches has almost become maximum for a game. Given that 15 is considered a good number of pitches per inning, that means the starting pitcher is not expected to complete seven innings. In order to avoid facing the batting order the dreaded third time, he would have to be perfect for six innings, so you get the drift.
And that drift leads to less than 200 innings in an average year for even an above-average starter, based on 32 outings per year. The numbers become more overwhelming as they are monitored year to year. Somewhere around that turn of the century, it was deemed practical to limit a pitcher to an increase of 30 innings per year, which naturally limits the number of pitches per game — and leads to the kind of dilemmas facing the Orioles this year as innings pile up for pitchers like Kyle Bradish and Dean Kremer, in particular.
Those two are good examples because both started in other organizations, Bradish with the Angels and Kremer with the Dodgers, thus presenting an industry-wide approach to a common problem. It has been duly noted many times that both pitchers are nearing, or have passed, their career highs in innings pitched, meaning by the formula they would have no more than another 30-60 innings before reaching an Arbitrary Barrier this year.
Fortunately, evidence exists that both can handle an additional workload. Bradish threw more than 100 innings in each of his four minor league seasons before logging 144 last year. As for Kremer, he logged his career high in his very first year, 2016, when he threw 145 innings, with 80 of them coming in his final college season.
The problem is those “30-plus” totals are rarely adhered to in the minor leagues, so exactly where these two should be in the process is for those who decided on the Arbitrary Barriers. Fortunately for the Orioles, GM Mike Elias doesn’t sound like he’s committed to some of the ABs. A former left-handed pitcher for Yale, whose career basically ended with labrum surgery, Elias gave a hint at such when discussing plans going forward following the trade deadline.
“There’s really not a ton of science, any science, there,” he said. “We try to use common sense, try to use our experience. I don’t know of any single number in any way, shape or form. [Orioles starters are] having the season of their lives, they’re competing, the team’s in first, they’ve got their careers ahead of them.”
Those encouraging words indicate the Orioles won’t be making the kind of decision the Nationals made with Stephen Strasburg in 2012. Nor do they indicate that the Orioles are committed to any foregone conclusions about pitch counts or innings pitched.
Might the Orioles break those trends? For sure, this is a team committed to analytics, and getting starters beyond the fifth inning is as difficult here as anywhere else in MLB, but manager Brandon Hyde has shown with his handling of Kyle Gibson, and even newcomer Jack Flaherty, that he’s willing to push his veteran pitchers through difficult parts of the game.
No doubt he does so with the hope that the examples, and the opportunities, are available to the younger members of the rotation. The imminent fate of the Orioles’ rush to the postseason may depend on how that strategy works. Getting beyond the sixth inning without having to commit half the pitching staff to one game is the immediate challenge — not only here, but throughout the industry.
Back in the day, injuries were generally blamed on breaking pitches putting too much strain on arms of the young and old. Gradually that thinking has changed. Velocity, thus exertion, is now considered the culprit causing what often seems like a never-ending stream of injuries that generally lead to surgeries that have become commonplace.
The result has been arbitrary limits on just about every aspect of pitching, even as the industry promotes the area of most concern — velocity. We can talk about spin rate, command and pitch mix all we want, but it is the velocity that lights up the radar gun and puts strain on the arm that every team desires.
The end result has been the reduction of all the pertinent statistics — but not the number of surgeries. This epidemic has become so severe that drafting pitchers in the amateur draft, once considered a team’s lifeline, is now considered such a gamble that it has become almost an afterthought for some teams.
The Orioles, under Elias, have become the poster team for the new-age philosophy as they try to navigate through the change in industry philosophy. Complete games are no longer as important as “quality starts,” which at the very least are subject to considerable debate.
So too are the Artificial Barriers that seem to block so many pitching paths. Including the “quality start,” which too rapidly is becoming unattainable.
Time to break down the Artificial Barriers.
Jim Henneman can be contacted at JimH@pressboxonline.com.
Issue 282: August/September 2023
Originally published Aug. 16, 2023