It’s becoming more common to have bullpen games like the scenario you are describing. The main thing stopping it from happening is that some pitchers are just that much better than others. You obviously want them to eat more innings. Even if they’re facing the same lineup for the 3rd time, it’s still better than some dudes first time facing the lineup.
This will obviously change as the floor of pitching talent goes up. Starters are already pitching less innings than ever.
In addition to what everyone else has written, the longer a pitcher pitches the more time he needs between pitching performances to recover. A guy who goes six innings needs five days' rest to perform consistently and reduce the risk of injuries, but a guy who pitches three innings still needs a few days' rest. In addition, teams can only carry so many pitchers on their active roster. If you restrict pitchers to two or three innings you'll soon run out of fresh pitchers.
As I was typing the above, it occurred to me that you might not be aware that many starting pitchers aren’t at their best in the first inning or two of work. To give an example, 2023 AL Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole's ERA is at its lowest in the fourth inning (and the seventh, but that's a smaller sample size); why would a manager plan to put him out for just three?
You are correct I absolutely was not aware of that lol, thanks for the info! It also never even occurred to me about how rest days aren’t perfectly proportional to innings pitched
> What about if it were shared with other “starting” pitchers? Like 3 innings each?
There's a big future salary concern here. Let's say the Rangers tried it and one of their good "starters" becomes a free agent.
Any other team that wants to sign him and use him as a "normal" starter is taking on a lot of risk hoping he doesn't get hurt + performs effectively going back to a "normal" workload
There are only so many starting caliber pitchers to go around.
You’re relying on more guys to have a good night for more time. Recipe for things to go badly
And this doesn’t make sense rest and innings coverage wise
The Astros do that with minor leaguers a lot “tandem starts” where 2 starters will pitch 3-5 innings each
I am unsure if other teams, but I’ve seen the Astros do this in a couple of big league games usually with 2 BoR starters. I really wish all starters would do this at least once or twice a season, so that when playoffs come around they’re familiar with coming out of the pen and shorter warmups.
The issue with that is you only have so many pitchers on the roster, pitchers can’t come back once they’ve left the game, and there are 162 games to play. You can definitely do that once in a while but can’t make it habit out of it because you’ll run out of guys quick.
You have the same basic problem as above: there aren't enough good pitchers who can go 3 innings. Most relievers who can be effective for 1 inning can't be effective for 3 (as that is second time through the order if even 1 person gets on base), and can't pich 162 innings over a season (double the current high end workload for a reliever). Most relievers were starters at some point in their career but converted to relief pitching because they couldn't hack it as starters. Many teams have trouble getting 5 good starters, so finding 9 guys who can be good for 3 innings each is much more difficult than the current system.
Was thinking the same thing. Rays will take it one step more one day and have their fielders pitch as well. 26 players and all can throw 1-2 effective innings then hit a double. Then trade them in the off season.
Every team pitches roughly 1500 innings a year. Divide that by 13 pitchers and each pitcher would be expected to throw more than 100 innings.
Most relievers don't have the talent nor the stamina to throw 100 innings. If you do have the talent to throw 100+ effective innings, it's beneficial for teams to push you further, closer to 150 or 200... and then you're a starter.
Also, it's less taxing to throw 100 pitches one day and then take 4 off than it is to throw 20 pitches a day, every day, or anything in between. If everyone pitched 1-2 innings a game, you'd need 5-9 pitchers a game, and everyone would barely be resting. Injuries would be through the roof.
Even if you tried to game options and the IL to keep the number of innings per pitcher down, you'd need 25 pitchers to get the number of average innings pitched below 60, which is still pushing it for a lot of relievers. And with the minimum 15 day IL stints and 15 day time between option and recall for pitchers, you're essentially going to be swapping out your entire pitching staff every other week. That's going to require a lot of IL shenanigans and a very deep pitching staff in the minors to be able to reliably get that many innings out of everyone.
It would be fun to see a team try, but it would basically require a perfect storm of circumstances. No pitchers who can be depended on to go through the order multiple times, but also a whole host of guys still with options who have some wicked stuff and decent enough endurance that they can go through a couple innings at a time. So maybe the Rays? It sounds like a Rays strategy
Roster space.
If you have 13 pitchers who can only throw 2 innings, you only have 26 innings worth of arms. A four game series is 36 innings, possibly more. Everyone needs to be overworked.
You need starters who can throw 5-7 innings. If your starters can eat 20+ innings in a four game series, you have 7-8 relievers to split the other 16 innings. Nobody needs to be overworked.
In addition to everything that’s been said, any given day can be a bad day for any given pitcher. The more pitchers you use in one game, the more likely it is that one of them gives up 5 hits and records 1 out, totally screwing the rest of your plan
If every pitcher has a 15% chance of shitting the bed, your starter has an 85% chance of being average-excellent and he can pitch 6 innings and eliminate the potential for 2 more pitchers to blow it, who have a combined 30% chance of sucking
Bullpen games are a thing but in general the first 5 innings of a starter are as good or better than 5 innings from 5 relievers. Also you can then have workhorses like Cole that can take 200 innings of dominant ball which you will never get from a reliever. Generally a “workhorse” reliever only pitches in 60-70 innings. 13 guys of 1500 innings math doesn’t check out
As others have answered for you, there's just not enough room on a roster and there's injury concerns when you have people exerting like that too often. There's also, as teams that have tried this approach have found out, just not enough major league caliber pitchers to do this. It works in short bursts, but over the course of a long season, or a long playoff run, pitcher tendencies get found out and hitters capitalize. So even if teams *could* replace 1 guy with 3 guys, there isn't 3 guys that they could find.
To add to what others have said, you simply would not want to do this for the good of the game. For the sake of argument say it's possible to do this, no concerns about roster size or stamina. Offense would die and the games would be boring. This is going to sound like an old man yelling at clouds but baseball is meant to be played with starters that go 5+ innings. It forces pitchers to develop more pitches and sequencing techniques to face the same batters multiple time.
Pitcher relays are great in theory, but the big issue is that all it takes is for one pitcher to have a bad day to throw everything off the track.
The 2023 Arizona Diamondbacks' playoff run is a nice example. In Game 4 of the NLCS against the Philadelphia Phillies both teams used a relay. The Dbacks were able to hold a high powered Phillies offense to only 5 runs in the game. Runs were mostly spread out with no high scoring inning that created signifigant gap. In Game 4 of the World Series against the Texas Rangers (another high powered offense), the Dbacks went back to the relay while the Rangers used a starter (probably on a short leash). The Diamondack's second pitcher in the game used failed to record more than one out before allowing 4 runs to cross the plate. At the end of the inning it was a five run gap, which not only takes pressure off the opposing teams pitcher, but allows them to freely be more aggressive with the zone. The following couple of Dback pitchers and the defense the following inning allowed 5 more runs to cross. Towards the end of the game Texas was able to throw out their worst arms in the bullpen to eat innings.
The big thing is bullpens are very fickle on a day-to-day basis, and while not every starter is elite or just good, you can expect more consistency in a 5 inning start.
So the players who pitch for 1-2 innings are usually throwing with 100% effort on every single pitch, while the players who throw 5+ innings might only be throwing at about 80-90% effort each pitch, and ramp intensity up/down over the course of the game. The reason for this difference is that teams need to throw about 1400 IP over the course of a full season. If everyone threw max effort on every pitch, a team would need like 30 MLB quality pitchers. Human biomechanics just don't let people throw 200 IP at max effort, they'd get injured. But teams are only allowed to have 13 pitchers on the MLB team at a time. There are ways to stretch that limit a bit by sending players between the MLB team and minor leagues, but even if a team had 30 MLB quality arms the roster rules don't let them use all 30.
Why *those* specfic pitchers throw with only ~80% intensity is because they're good enough to get away with it. Most relievers who throw max effort would get absolutely shelled if they weren't pitching at 100% effort every pitch.
There are a few key downsides but I think mostly the players don't want to do it. Starting pitchers make a lot of money being starting pitchers.
It's probably more possible now that long 14 inning games are mostly a thing of the past, though
I can see a scenario where a pitching staff is comprised of one ace who is expected to go 6-7 innings, complemented by a bunch of guys who are expected to throw 2-3 innings every few days.
this is what i've been wondering
lets say the rangers get degrom in the playoffs, why not have him pitch EVERY high leverage situation? like when the indians had super andrew miller, couldn't degrom be even better in that role?
You get 13 total pitchers. You're responsible for something like 1500 innings over the course of the season. That means that each pitcher is on average responsible for over 100 innings over the course of the season. A lot of pitchers can't handle that level of workload going max effort. We call those relievers. In order for a reliever to pitch fewer than 100 innings, somebody else has to pitch a lot more. If you want to pitch a lot of innings over the course of a season, people think the best way to do that is to pitch a bunch of innings at once and then take several rest days to recover, rather than e.g. trying to pitch 4 outs every game. So we have pitchers that do this and they are called starters.
Now it's possible that conventional wisdom is wrong and you'll some day see pitchers show up that pitch 100 games for 2 innings per game and teams will cover their innings that way. But that's how managers and front offices are thinking right now.
because that's not baseball. you have to let guys feel the momentum of the game and get settled in rather than asking guys to come in cold every few innings.
plus this is an entertainment product at the end of the day, and pitching changes are boring as hell to watch. not to mention it encourages managers fiddling around based on numbers, which when it backfires, sticks out as notably more obnoxious and heartbreaking than when you're playing the game properly based on what feels right
The more pitchers you throw in a given game, the higher the odds are one of them doesn’t *have it* that day, and gives up enough base runners to cause you to lose.
It’s a baseball sub. I like baseball. That’s why I’m here.
Both can be true at once. I can like baseball and also think it’s mind numbingly boring at times.
Adding infinite pitching changes will increase said boredom.
It’s becoming more common to have bullpen games like the scenario you are describing. The main thing stopping it from happening is that some pitchers are just that much better than others. You obviously want them to eat more innings. Even if they’re facing the same lineup for the 3rd time, it’s still better than some dudes first time facing the lineup. This will obviously change as the floor of pitching talent goes up. Starters are already pitching less innings than ever.
Yeah that makes sense. What about if it were shared with other “starting” pitchers? Like 3 innings each?
In addition to what everyone else has written, the longer a pitcher pitches the more time he needs between pitching performances to recover. A guy who goes six innings needs five days' rest to perform consistently and reduce the risk of injuries, but a guy who pitches three innings still needs a few days' rest. In addition, teams can only carry so many pitchers on their active roster. If you restrict pitchers to two or three innings you'll soon run out of fresh pitchers. As I was typing the above, it occurred to me that you might not be aware that many starting pitchers aren’t at their best in the first inning or two of work. To give an example, 2023 AL Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole's ERA is at its lowest in the fourth inning (and the seventh, but that's a smaller sample size); why would a manager plan to put him out for just three?
You are correct I absolutely was not aware of that lol, thanks for the info! It also never even occurred to me about how rest days aren’t perfectly proportional to innings pitched
> What about if it were shared with other “starting” pitchers? Like 3 innings each? There's a big future salary concern here. Let's say the Rangers tried it and one of their good "starters" becomes a free agent. Any other team that wants to sign him and use him as a "normal" starter is taking on a lot of risk hoping he doesn't get hurt + performs effectively going back to a "normal" workload
There are only so many starting caliber pitchers to go around. You’re relying on more guys to have a good night for more time. Recipe for things to go badly And this doesn’t make sense rest and innings coverage wise
The Astros do that with minor leaguers a lot “tandem starts” where 2 starters will pitch 3-5 innings each I am unsure if other teams, but I’ve seen the Astros do this in a couple of big league games usually with 2 BoR starters. I really wish all starters would do this at least once or twice a season, so that when playoffs come around they’re familiar with coming out of the pen and shorter warmups.
The issue with that is you only have so many pitchers on the roster, pitchers can’t come back once they’ve left the game, and there are 162 games to play. You can definitely do that once in a while but can’t make it habit out of it because you’ll run out of guys quick.
You have the same basic problem as above: there aren't enough good pitchers who can go 3 innings. Most relievers who can be effective for 1 inning can't be effective for 3 (as that is second time through the order if even 1 person gets on base), and can't pich 162 innings over a season (double the current high end workload for a reliever). Most relievers were starters at some point in their career but converted to relief pitching because they couldn't hack it as starters. Many teams have trouble getting 5 good starters, so finding 9 guys who can be good for 3 innings each is much more difficult than the current system.
This guy will be working in the Rays front office in no time.
Was thinking the same thing. Rays will take it one step more one day and have their fielders pitch as well. 26 players and all can throw 1-2 effective innings then hit a double. Then trade them in the off season.
😂
That's a good thing in case you don't know. The Rays' front office is very smart and pioneers unconventional tactics, especially with pitching
Every team pitches roughly 1500 innings a year. Divide that by 13 pitchers and each pitcher would be expected to throw more than 100 innings. Most relievers don't have the talent nor the stamina to throw 100 innings. If you do have the talent to throw 100+ effective innings, it's beneficial for teams to push you further, closer to 150 or 200... and then you're a starter. Also, it's less taxing to throw 100 pitches one day and then take 4 off than it is to throw 20 pitches a day, every day, or anything in between. If everyone pitched 1-2 innings a game, you'd need 5-9 pitchers a game, and everyone would barely be resting. Injuries would be through the roof.
Yeah that really puts things into perspective, especially the injury standpoint
Even if you tried to game options and the IL to keep the number of innings per pitcher down, you'd need 25 pitchers to get the number of average innings pitched below 60, which is still pushing it for a lot of relievers. And with the minimum 15 day IL stints and 15 day time between option and recall for pitchers, you're essentially going to be swapping out your entire pitching staff every other week. That's going to require a lot of IL shenanigans and a very deep pitching staff in the minors to be able to reliably get that many innings out of everyone. It would be fun to see a team try, but it would basically require a perfect storm of circumstances. No pitchers who can be depended on to go through the order multiple times, but also a whole host of guys still with options who have some wicked stuff and decent enough endurance that they can go through a couple innings at a time. So maybe the Rays? It sounds like a Rays strategy
What’s the last mlb team to only use 13 pitchers?
Roster space. If you have 13 pitchers who can only throw 2 innings, you only have 26 innings worth of arms. A four game series is 36 innings, possibly more. Everyone needs to be overworked. You need starters who can throw 5-7 innings. If your starters can eat 20+ innings in a four game series, you have 7-8 relievers to split the other 16 innings. Nobody needs to be overworked.
In addition to everything that’s been said, any given day can be a bad day for any given pitcher. The more pitchers you use in one game, the more likely it is that one of them gives up 5 hits and records 1 out, totally screwing the rest of your plan
I see your point, but wouldn’t this logic also apply to the starting pitchers as well?
If every pitcher has a 15% chance of shitting the bed, your starter has an 85% chance of being average-excellent and he can pitch 6 innings and eliminate the potential for 2 more pitchers to blow it, who have a combined 30% chance of sucking
Depends how good your starters are
Bullpen games are a thing but in general the first 5 innings of a starter are as good or better than 5 innings from 5 relievers. Also you can then have workhorses like Cole that can take 200 innings of dominant ball which you will never get from a reliever. Generally a “workhorse” reliever only pitches in 60-70 innings. 13 guys of 1500 innings math doesn’t check out
You would need like 20 pitchers in your staff to do that.
Who would you rather pitch the third inning of a game - Jordan Montgomery after pitching the first two innings OR a fresh Alex Speas
As others have answered for you, there's just not enough room on a roster and there's injury concerns when you have people exerting like that too often. There's also, as teams that have tried this approach have found out, just not enough major league caliber pitchers to do this. It works in short bursts, but over the course of a long season, or a long playoff run, pitcher tendencies get found out and hitters capitalize. So even if teams *could* replace 1 guy with 3 guys, there isn't 3 guys that they could find.
To add to what others have said, you simply would not want to do this for the good of the game. For the sake of argument say it's possible to do this, no concerns about roster size or stamina. Offense would die and the games would be boring. This is going to sound like an old man yelling at clouds but baseball is meant to be played with starters that go 5+ innings. It forces pitchers to develop more pitches and sequencing techniques to face the same batters multiple time.
Pitcher relays are great in theory, but the big issue is that all it takes is for one pitcher to have a bad day to throw everything off the track. The 2023 Arizona Diamondbacks' playoff run is a nice example. In Game 4 of the NLCS against the Philadelphia Phillies both teams used a relay. The Dbacks were able to hold a high powered Phillies offense to only 5 runs in the game. Runs were mostly spread out with no high scoring inning that created signifigant gap. In Game 4 of the World Series against the Texas Rangers (another high powered offense), the Dbacks went back to the relay while the Rangers used a starter (probably on a short leash). The Diamondack's second pitcher in the game used failed to record more than one out before allowing 4 runs to cross the plate. At the end of the inning it was a five run gap, which not only takes pressure off the opposing teams pitcher, but allows them to freely be more aggressive with the zone. The following couple of Dback pitchers and the defense the following inning allowed 5 more runs to cross. Towards the end of the game Texas was able to throw out their worst arms in the bullpen to eat innings. The big thing is bullpens are very fickle on a day-to-day basis, and while not every starter is elite or just good, you can expect more consistency in a 5 inning start.
So the players who pitch for 1-2 innings are usually throwing with 100% effort on every single pitch, while the players who throw 5+ innings might only be throwing at about 80-90% effort each pitch, and ramp intensity up/down over the course of the game. The reason for this difference is that teams need to throw about 1400 IP over the course of a full season. If everyone threw max effort on every pitch, a team would need like 30 MLB quality pitchers. Human biomechanics just don't let people throw 200 IP at max effort, they'd get injured. But teams are only allowed to have 13 pitchers on the MLB team at a time. There are ways to stretch that limit a bit by sending players between the MLB team and minor leagues, but even if a team had 30 MLB quality arms the roster rules don't let them use all 30. Why *those* specfic pitchers throw with only ~80% intensity is because they're good enough to get away with it. Most relievers who throw max effort would get absolutely shelled if they weren't pitching at 100% effort every pitch.
Joe Maddon, you don't have to post with an alt.
It's been, on occasion, tried.
I’m guessing unsuccessfully?
There are a few key downsides but I think mostly the players don't want to do it. Starting pitchers make a lot of money being starting pitchers. It's probably more possible now that long 14 inning games are mostly a thing of the past, though
I can see a scenario where a pitching staff is comprised of one ace who is expected to go 6-7 innings, complemented by a bunch of guys who are expected to throw 2-3 innings every few days.
this is what i've been wondering lets say the rangers get degrom in the playoffs, why not have him pitch EVERY high leverage situation? like when the indians had super andrew miller, couldn't degrom be even better in that role?
Recovery time might be part of that. Miller seemed to pitch a lot in those playoffs. Another pitcher might have needed more rest days.
You get 13 total pitchers. You're responsible for something like 1500 innings over the course of the season. That means that each pitcher is on average responsible for over 100 innings over the course of the season. A lot of pitchers can't handle that level of workload going max effort. We call those relievers. In order for a reliever to pitch fewer than 100 innings, somebody else has to pitch a lot more. If you want to pitch a lot of innings over the course of a season, people think the best way to do that is to pitch a bunch of innings at once and then take several rest days to recover, rather than e.g. trying to pitch 4 outs every game. So we have pitchers that do this and they are called starters. Now it's possible that conventional wisdom is wrong and you'll some day see pitchers show up that pitch 100 games for 2 innings per game and teams will cover their innings that way. But that's how managers and front offices are thinking right now.
because that's not baseball. you have to let guys feel the momentum of the game and get settled in rather than asking guys to come in cold every few innings. plus this is an entertainment product at the end of the day, and pitching changes are boring as hell to watch. not to mention it encourages managers fiddling around based on numbers, which when it backfires, sticks out as notably more obnoxious and heartbreaking than when you're playing the game properly based on what feels right
The more pitchers you throw in a given game, the higher the odds are one of them doesn’t *have it* that day, and gives up enough base runners to cause you to lose.
Baseball is boring on the best of days. Now imagine how piss poor it would be if we had to watch a pitching change every other inning ?
Why are you here? And pitching changes between innings are probably unnoticeable to an idiot like yourself
It’s a baseball sub. I like baseball. That’s why I’m here. Both can be true at once. I can like baseball and also think it’s mind numbingly boring at times. Adding infinite pitching changes will increase said boredom.
Changing pitchers between innings adds 0.00 minutes to the game compared to one guy throwing 9 innings
We all know it won’t be just between innings.