Why do managers yank pitchers in the midst of no-hit and perfect-game bids?
Something that would never have happened 30 years ago happened twice in four days this month.
The Pittsburgh Pirates deservedly lost when manager Don Kelly pulled starter Jared Jones six innings into a no-hit bid, and the relievers proceeded to implode. The baseball gods visited no such karma upon the Miami Marlins when manager Clayton McCullough called the bullpen to relieve Eury Perez 92 pitches into a perfect game. But the wrath of the opposing team’s fans did come down on him in chants of “Shame!” in Sacramento.
Paul Kengor writes @ The American Spectator on this subject that I occasionally ponder: “Once upon a time in baseball, pitchers went the distance. To complete a game was the objective, if not the norm. The record for the most complete games is 749 by the immortal Cy Young (who threw a grand total of 7,356 innings in 22 seasons). We always hear that a certain record ‘will never be broken.’ In this case, that’s surely true. Cy Young’s number will never be surpassed because today’s managers would never dare let it. Last year, there were only 29 complete games in MLB by all pitchers combined, out of a total of nearly 2,500 games. That’s about 1 percent of games.” (RELATED: Baseball’s Increasingly Rare Complete Game)
Kengor has addressed this subject several times in recent weeks. The paucity of complete games interests me less than a related, though much less discussed, change to the game (more on that a few paragraphs down). (RELATED: MLB’s Pitching Craziness Continues)
From the first article, it seems very clear that Paul played baseball better than I did. My eyes mainly did me in. So did a bigger kid’s beaning of me very early in my Little League tenure. Psychologically, that ruined me for my rookie season. Years earlier, at a batting cage, I saw two older kids laughing as the pitching machine kept hitting me with the ball. The two kids, laughing harder as they noticed me noticing that home plate had been moved, then started to run away. This did me no favors. I boasted three hits, all singles and probably at least one a “Little League” single, my first season. But I later worked as an umpire ($8 a game) and a vendor at Fenway Park (anywhere from $28 to $190 a game). So, the sport interests me greatly, even if calling me a mediocre player insults mediocre players, and my “expertise,” interpreted most charitably, does not surpass even the average fan.
Yet, like the average fan, I harbor strong opinions. This remains especially true on one aspect of the game that existed at the major-league level when my unfortunate incident at the batting cages occurred but now appears as extinct as the eephus pitch.
The penchant for shifts, the inability to bunt to counteract them, the lack of complete games, and, especially, the death of the four-man rotation all fascinate me. Earl Weaver used a four-man rotation for the entire 1978 season. Did this hurt the careers of Mike Flanagan, Dennis Martinez, Jim Palmer, and Ross Grimsley? They all won more than 100 games throughout their careers and pitched for at least four seasons after 1978 (Flanagan pitched until 1992 and Martinez pitched until 1998!).
Bob Boone tried a four-man rotation in 1995 for the Kansas City Royals. “For the first half of that season,” Rob Neyer wrote, “Boone often sent Kevin Appier, Mark Gubicza, and Tom Gordon to the mound on three days rest. But Appier, their best pitcher, got hurt in July, and that was the end of that experiment.” Then, after Neyer issued his four-man-rotation observations, the Blue Jays tried it for a stretch in 2003.
Why did the four-man rotation die? Performance, surprisingly, did not dictate the change.
“There was no indication that pitchers did better or worse based on how many days of rest they got,” Russell Carleton of Baseball Prospectus wrote in 2013 after analyzing the impact of rest on pitcher performance. “What was significant was the number of pitches that the pitcher had thrown in his previous start. Longer outings made for slightly less effective pitchers (more walks, more hits, fewer outs in play). It’s something we’ve seen before. Using more modern data, I found that a pitcher who threw 140 pitches might expect to perform slightly worse than expected in his next start, and that the effect was gone by the second start.”
Possibly this explains the obsession with pitch count that Paul, and myself, lament. Carleton suspected that the popularity of the five-man rotation owed less to performance than fear of injury. Pitch counts overrule fan and maybe even managerial desires for complete games for similar reasons. But if analytics now manages the managers, why do none of them even consider a four-man rotation when statistically an extra rest day does not offer any predictability on how a pitcher performs in his next start (though pitch count can and does influence performance in the next start)?
When Earl Weaver started managing the Baltimore Orioles, 10 clubs comprised the American League. Fifteen do now. Possibly league expansion watered down starting pitching, and possibly the influx of foreign players more than offset expansion’s dilution of talent. Independent of either conclusion, one can make a strong case, especially for lower-budget clubs with a couple of very good starters, that a four-man rotation makes sense.
Weaver certainly believed in it. The seventh of his 10 baseball laws? “It’s easier to find four good starters than five.”
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