SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Bold decisions to change Major League Baseball’s longstanding rules quickened the pace of games and revived the popularity of stealing bases over the last few years.
A similarly creative move may be needed to help starting pitching regain the relevance it enjoyed as recently as a decade ago.
Only four pitchers (Seattle’s Logan Gilbert, Kansas City’s Seth Lugo, San Francisco’s Logan Webb and Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler) threw as many as 200 innings last season, down from 34 in 2014.
During that same 2014 season, all 30 major league teams got over 900 innings from their starting pitchers and five had over 1,000. Last year, only four teams had their starters pitch at least 900 innings, led by Seattle with 942 2/3.
While this shift has been years in the making, the numbers themselves provide a cold slap of reality to longtime fans who remember seeing Bob Gibson throw three complete games in the 1967 World Series or Jack Morris pitching 10 shutout innings in Game 7 of the 1991 Fall Classic.
Going back to the days of Cy Young and Walter Johnson, part of the game’s beauty was watching a pitcher work his way through a lineup three or four times.
With every team having multiple relievers who can come out of the bullpen and throw in the high 90s, what could prompt teams to let their starters work deeper into games?
Managers and players struggle to come up with a solution.
“Outside of just changing rules to incentivize managers to keep guys in games longer,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Roberts’ Dodgers exemplified the bullpen emphasis during their run to the 2024 World Series title. Their starting pitchers worked as many as six innings in just two of their 16 postseason games.
Texas’ Nathan Eovaldi went 5-0 with five postseason quality starts (defined as going at least six innings while allowing no more than three earned runs) a year earlier while helping the Rangers win their first World Series championship. Yet even he understands how much things have changed for starting pitchers since he made his big-league debut in 2011.
“Bullpens are a lot different now than they were back then,” Eovaldi said. “You’ve got a lot more guys who aren’t just eight- and ninth-inning guys. They can come in, in the sixth or seventh, go multiple innings. They all have multiple pitches now as well. I think that’s one of the fascinating things about the bullpen. You don’t have guys who are just a two-pitch mix anymore. They’ve got three or four pitches coming out, and two of them are really, really elite.”
And that’s why there seems only one way to get starters working more innings.
“Putting in rules that you have to,” San Francisco Giants manager Bob Melvin said. “We’ve created our own monster. It is what it is.”
What rules could MLB create to promote starting pitching?
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred says it’s too early to explore rules changes.
“Our focus right now is training methods, particularly offseason training methods,” Manfred said. “It’s going to be somewhere between education and recommendations. It’s very hard to tell people you can’t do X, Y and Z, right? They’re grown men and there’s no way to monitor it during the offseason.”
One problem is the lack of a clear consensus on what rule changes could work best.
For instance, MLB had the Atlantic League experiment in 2021 and 2023 with a rule change that would force a team to lose its designated hitter if its starting pitcher didn’t finish at least five innings.
Instituting that kind of rule could be a tough sell in the majors, where some of the league’s most bankable stars such as Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper have received ample playing time at DH the last few years. Fans paying to see those stars likely wouldn’t be happy to see them get removed as collateral damage from an early pitching change.
MLB hasn’t announced any similar types of rules experimentations in the minors this season.
The maximum number of pitchers allowed on MLB rosters was lowered from 14 to 13 in 2022, though that limit rises to 14 when rosters expand from 26 to 28 on Sept. 1. A more extreme rule change would be to require starters to work at least five or six innings unless they get injured, throw a certain number of pitches or allow a particular number of runs.
Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said he wouldn’t mind seeing the minor leagues try out more rule changes designed at lengthening starting pitchers. He wants those pitching prospects to get accustomed to working deeper into games.
“That’s the way it used to be with starters,” Bochy said. “Now I think the mentality can be, ‘Hey, I’ve done my job. I’ve thrown four or five innings.’ “
Giants pitcher Robbie Ray says the history of the game shows that starters can adapt to longer outings.
“I think starting pitchers are capable of doing it,” said Ray, who won the 2021 AL Cy Young Award with Toronto. “It’s just a matter of kind of training our bodies to do that again because what’s been expected of us has changed over the years.”
Restoring endurance as a valued skill
A 62-page MLB study released in December showed how the focus on rising velocities and maximum effort on each pitch had resulted in more injuries among pitchers. That study also revealed that starts of five or more innings dropped from 84% to 70% in the majors from 2005-24 and from 68.9% to 36.8% in the minors.
“Because we’re trying to create this engine and this repetitive thought of just pure stuff each and every pitch, yeah, starters are going to fatigue sooner,” Cleveland Guardians pitching coach Carl Willis said. “And at the same time, we’re training them that way. We’re training them to do so.
“Everybody still talks about wanting to go out for the sixth, wanting to go out for the seventh and getting deep into games. I don’t know that we’re training them to do that, and I don’t know how we are kind of teaching nowadays can allow that to happen.”
A change in approach could allow those starters to get that endurance. Right now, it’s the older guys who seem more used to that workload.
The MLB leader in quality starts last season was the 34-year-old Wheeler, who had 26. Lugo, 35, had 22 quality starts to tie for second place.
Even so, the 2024 season did offer some encouraging signs for the future of starting pitching.
MLB pitchers threw 5.22 innings per start last season. That represented the most since 2018, though it was still far off the 2014 average of 5.97.
The 2024 season also featured an MLB average of 85.5 pitches per start, the highest since 2019. Starters haven’t thrown as many as 90 pitches per appearance since 2017.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that the pendulum swing at least a little more toward getting starters to work longer. The recent focus on relievers puts more pressure on them, causing bullpens to break down.
There’s one obvious method to change that.
“I don’t think necessarily the game is going to all of a sudden turn back the other way, but there’s a huge push to understand how you can keep a bullpen healthy,” Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “And one of the biggest ways is those starters getting through that first bulk and getting you into the sixth or seventh.”
Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how those starters can pitch deeper into games more often.
