Fixing the Starting Pitcher

Baseball has had to adjust so much in recent years. One thing analytics has done is to make the game smarter, but another thing it has done is take a game that already tests athletes in weird ways and then pushed their ligaments and joints and muscles beyond the point of human endurance. That’s true of both pitchers and hitters, but especially of pitchers. Between spin rates and an emphasis on nothing but speed, pitchers just break down. The human body can’t handle pitching 103 mph over and over again and then contorting the arm in weird ways to create a sweeper or whatever comes next.

The Athletic talked to a bunch of pitchers and other experts on how to save the starting pitcher. The answers are pretty illuminating. Four changes came to the fore. The first is to require starters to go 6 innings, with caveats around sucking or injury. The second is that you lose the DH when you pull the starter. The third is to limit pitchers to 11 spots on the roster. The fourth is to outlaw the sweeper.

Honestly, I think the answer is partly a fifth–you simply don’t allow pitches over 100 mph.

All of this might sound weird, but you don’t have a good sport if all your pitchers are hurt. Moreover, even the crappy pitchers can toss it 100 these days, though often to less effectiveness. But if you also want to continue to increase hitting, thus getting people to actually want to watch the game, and you want pitchers to survive for longer than a couple of years in the majors, you have to take unprecedented steps, as the league did last year to do things such as create the pitch clock and ban the shift.

Moreover, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander were happy to go on the record and endorse some of these ideas and they are two of the greats of my lifetime, so it’s not like these are crazy ideas. As Verlander points out, in the modern game, Greg Maddux couldn’t exist. That’s no good.