The way pitching staffs are used in the major leagues has changed drastically over time. Not only do teams carry more pitchers, and groom pitchers to fill specific reliever roles, but we’ve seen a constant downward shift in the amount of innings starting pitchers are allowed to throw.
In part, that’s because pitchers are valuable commodities that are more prone to injury as the wear and tear on their arms builds up. It’s also partly because that’s a more effective strategy in each game, as hitters tend to do better against a pitcher the third or fourth time they face him on a given day.
Regardless of the reasons for this reduction in workload, it’s unmistakable and has become more pronounced in recent years. We’ve long since stopped seeing pitchers throw 300 innings in a season, but now we’re struggling to even have pitchers who throw 200. Just to illustrate, here’s the number of pitchers to surpass 200 innings each season in the division era, in five-year increments:
1973: 64
1978: 59
1983: 50
1988: 55
1993: 52
1998: 56
2003: 44
2008: 34
2013: 36
2018: 13
2023: 5
It was pretty constant for thirty years or so, then started to creep downward, then crashed downward in the last decade. Gerrit Cole led the American League in innings last year with 209. That figure wouldn’t have cracked the league’s top-20 thirty years earlier. It’s a drastic shift.
Whether this trend is good or bad for pitcher health or for baseball in general is open for debate. Tommy John surgeries are up. Shoulder surgeries are down. Is that because of new usage patterns or changes in healthcare practices? Or both?
Pitching changes each game were up so much that MLB had to institute the three-batter rule a couple of years ago to slow the tide of one-hitter specialists that was grinding each game to a near-halt. Aesthetically, it would be nice to see the game flow better with fewer pitching changes, and it would be nice to see pitchers have to pace themselves more and figure out ways to gets hitters out later in games. Maybe that would cut down the parade of strikeouts as well, since pitchers wouldn’t be free to throw 102 MPH gas in the second inning if they knew they were expected to still be pitching in the eighth inning.
On the other hand, the point is to win, and if pitchers are more effective in shorter outings, bullpen arms are readily available, and hitters continue to eschew batting average for power and strike out at epic rates, why should managers change their staff usage?
Clearly, it’s fair to debate the value of these changes in how pitchers are used. What is NOT fair is to cherrypick the stats of two pitchers from completely different eras and point out how different they are. For instance, Denny McLain and Blake Snell:
That’s a pretty misleading way to compare two multi-time Cy Young winners who pitched in entirely different eras, were trained in completely different ways, and had completely different expectations from their teams and managers. They can be compared, of course, just not in this way.
A more fair way would be to compare McLain and Snell at the same ages. McLain was 24-25 when he won his two Cy Young awards. Here’s how he and Snell compared at those ages:
That’s precisely what we would expect, isn’t it? McLain pitched in a lower run-scoring environment at a time when pitchers threw longer and more often, so he piled up more than twice as many innings as Snell with a lower ERA. But, on the flip side, Snell was better inning-for-inning. He struck out more hitters per inning and his ERA was better in the context of the time he pitched, 49% better than league average compared to 42% for McLain. His WAR per inning was .027 compared to .022 for McLain.
This is a great illustration of the different eras in which they pitched, and different expectations under which they operated. How would Snell have pitched under the same circumstances McLain faced, or vice versa? I have no idea, and I’m not going to speculate. Both were about equally excellent at those ages in the context of what was expected of them.
Another fair way to compare them would have been to look at just their Cy Young seasons. Here’s McLain’s 1968 next to Snell’s 2018:
A similar picture as before. McLain pitched more frequently and went deeper in each game, and collected more decisions as a result. But, again, Snell was better on an inning-for-inning basis and his ERA was better, both as a raw number and in comparison to his league. Their WAR scores are nearly identical, but Snell achieved his in just over half the innings McLain threw.
Here are their second Cy Young seasons, 1969 for McLain and 2023 for Snell:
Different seasons, same story. McLain had the bulk, Snell had the quality. It’s very clear are this point that they were both outstanding when they were at their best but were asked to fill very different roles on their pitching staffs. This doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know.
But then there’s this story that could have been told. The original poster on Twitter used Snell’s seasons from ages 26 to 30, but didn’t use McLain’s. Here’s what that would have looked like:
Huh, look at that. It’s almost as if having a pitcher throw 661 innings in the two seasons before he turned twenty-six isn’t great for his long-term health and career prospects. McLain had any number of factors that screwed up his career, from his attitude to his lifestyle to gambling issues, but he also had significant arm trouble just a couple of years after his final Cy Young season and never threw a pitch in the major league after the age of twenty-eight.
Snell hasn’t been the healthiest, most durable pitcher in the world, and it’s certainly fair to question if the current trend of shrinking workloads for starting pitchers has gone too far. But he was still pitching at the age of thirty, winning a Cy Young Award and setting himself up for hefty free agent contract (albeit less hefty than he’d hoped for). At the same age, McLain was playing shortstop in a Canadian semi-pro league and was earning money hustling golfers and playing music in nightclubs.
What I’m saying is that pitcher usage patterns are perfectly fair game for discussion. Modern pitchers aren’t asked to pitch as much, and while that may or may not have helped their health, it has impacted how games are managed and staffs constructed, along with how we watch the game and what we expect from them. It’s impossible to know if modern pitchers could have been effective in earlier eras with greater workload expectations, because they were simply never trained to pitch under those conditions. Regardless, it’s a fair discussion to have.
What isn’t fair is to cherrypick the statistics of a couple of pitchers from wildly different eras and imply one was better simply because of the volume of innings he threw in his best seasons.
But, if you’re going to do that anyway, don’t use Denny McLain as your example of a durable pitcher from the good old days. He’s basically the poster child for why modern pitchers aren’t used that way any more.
I enjoyed this a lot. I think the starkest decline is from 2013 to 2023 and it illustrates, for me, the problem with baseball today: the lack of opportunities for starting pitchers to rack up innings and the sheer lack of great, durable starting pitchers. Pitchers today are undoubtedly more talented than ever before. But MLB has a problem as the starting pitcher, part of the romance of baseball for 100 years, degrades before our eyes. It is the optimal strategy to carry 14 pitchers, build a super-pen, have a succession of anonymous guys throwing 100 mph with insane off-speed stuff who are all under 26. Ted Williams can't bat .400 against that. But what is, analytically, the correct thing to do is plainly bad for the entertainment product.
I grew up in the 90s and 00s and it's insane to think how many great workhorse starting pitchers I can think of off the top of my head from that era - Halladay, Schilling, Johnson, Maddux, Clemens, plus guys who would be workhorses by today's standards like Pedro, Cone, and Mussina - and how virtually none exist in 2024. There aren't even pitchers like David Wells or Charles Nagy or Chuck Finley in the league, guy who could throw 200+ innings with relative ease, make an ASG here or there, and fill out a rotation. Ironically, the *only* workhorse left in MLB today is Gerrit Cole, and he's probably not getting into a big league game until June. All of it is downright bizarre if you think about it. And it gets to the incentives and training: young pitchers today are trained from childhood to throw as hard as possible in short spurts. They don't play other sports. They get their first TJ surgeries as a teen. The current regimen does not safeguard the durability of pitchers. For every Denny McClain and Koufax someone throws up - look at the Old Dudes who burned out, har har - there's a Mickey Lolich, a Nolan Ryan, a Don Sutton, a Jim Palmer. Of course, pitching in the 70s was far easier than today, no argument. But it does hit you how radically different baseball got in the 2020s. There will have to be rule changes to save the starting pitcher.