Last season, Logan Webb led Major League Baseball in innings pitched with 216. With him, there were four other pitchers who tossed at least 200 innings in 2023.
In 2003, Roy Halladay led baseball with 266 innings pitched, and there were 51 pitchers who threw at least 200 innings. Twenty years earlier, in 1983, Jack Morris was one of 54 pitchers who logged at least 200 innings and led them all with 293.2 innings pitched.
Of the many ways baseball has evolved, especially in the last 20 years, how starting pitchers are handled has perhaps changed the most. Their outings are shorter, and they don’t make as many starts. Jack Morris was able to pitch nearly 300 innings in 1983 because he made 37 starts, four more than Logan Webb last year. Morris averaged close to 8 innings per start, where Webb averaged about 6 and a half per start.
Much of this shift has happened because relief pitchers are so much more effective than in years past. Teams build bullpens of hard-throwing relievers who can get outs for three or four innings a game. As a result, premium relief pitchers are commanding more in free agency — consider Josh Hader, who signed with the Astros for five years, $95 million dollars — but one of the costs is the de-emphasis on starters. They’re still important, of course, but only three of them got contracts larger than Hader’s this offseason. That group of three includes Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Aaron Nola.
To remedy this de-emphasis on starting pitching, the league is floating the possibility of reducing the size of teams’ pitching staffs by one, from 13 to 12, and potentially doing it as soon as next year. But this idea isn’t gaining much traction among players, though they agree there is a problem.
“We need to incentivize keeping the starter in the game longer,” Max Scherzer told the Associated Press. “We’re going to have to come up with rules to do this. It’s not going to self-correct.”
Managers are incentivized to win, making it a hard sell to keep starters in the game for more innings, even if fans might enjoy that experience more. Cubs starter Jameson Taillon said he used to choose which games he’d attend growing up based on when Astros pitcher Roy Oswalt was starting.
“We would look at pitching matchups, that’s what we would do,” he told the AP. “Nowadays, I feel like that allure is gone a little bit.”
But for the guy calling the shots from the dugout, allure isn’t factoring into his decisions.
“From a fan perspective, yeah, to see a guy in there to go seven, eight innings, I absolutely get it,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told the AP. “Doesn’t necessarily help you win baseball games, and I’m in the business of winning games.”
With organizations focused on developing pitchers with “stuff” rather than pitchers who can go deep into games and managers (rightfully) focused on the strategy needed to win games, a rule change of some kind is probably necessary. But reducing the size of the pitching staff likely isn’t the right way to do it.
MLB has already changed how managers handle their pitchers; in the past three years rules have changed so that relievers have to face at least three batters in an appearance and the pitch clock dictates how much time they can take between pitches. These rule changes were put in place to affect the pace of play and length of games, but both have also impacted how managers do their jobs.
Instead of rule changes, Scherzer and others argue that the real solution is in how pitchers are developed. Organizations need to focus on helping the pitchers in their systems develop so that they can go deeper in games. It’s not as if managers decide to pull a starter after five innings regardless of performance. A starting pitcher who is getting outs and controlling at-bats is staying in the game, even in 2024.
The problem with the organization-centric approach is that developing young pitchers who can go deep in games like starters of yesteryear has to become a competitive advantage. As long as a powerful bullpen is still the most effective way to preserve a lead and help secure a win, managers are going to keep turning to their relief pitchers.
As baseball evolves, different skill sets take the forefront. It’s not without precedent for rule changes, even drastic ones like the lowering of the mound after the 1968 season, to be put in place to compensate. It’s possible that organizations will shift how they work with young pitchers and starters will naturally again become as important as they were 20 or 40 years ago. It’s also possible that the problem will worsen to the point where commissioner Rob Manfred puts a new rule in place. If it does come down to the latter, reducing the number of pitchers a team can carry on its active roster may cause more harm than good.