Whatever happened to pitching?
March 2, 2009


With a number of marquee starting pitchers suffering from sore arms this spring, Ruchard Justice of the Sporting News and Houston Chronicle fame wondered in a recent column whatever happened to the tough guys who used to pitch 300 innings back in the 1960s.  I've never been a big fan of Justice, largely because he usually asks rhetorical questions without meaning to do so.  For example, in this case to demonstrate his point he chose 1968 to cull his data from.  For the uninitiated, that year just happened to be the most dominant year for pitching since before the American and National leagues merged in 1901 to form Major League Baseball as we know it.  There were years before then when pitchers were more dominant, but part of that was due to the fact that the mound was five to ten feet closer to the plate than it is today.  In any case, asking why pitchers don't pitch like that any more is akin to asking why don't more people study philosophy: they should but there just isn't as much money in doing so.

The simple fact is that after 1968, the pitchers mound was lowered six inches and over the subsequent 20 year period the strikezone devolved into an area significantly smaller than the one written into the rule book, a fact that remains true today.  Both of those developments mean pitchers have to be more precise with their pitches which in turns puts more stress on them.  more stress leads to more injuries.  I'm not the first person who has suggested that raising the mound would help keep pitchers off the DL.  Nor am I the first to suggest that calling the rulebook strikezone will help pitchers immensely.  Expanding the strikezone and making it harder for hitters to get under pitches will get us back to those good old days of the 1-0 game.  The problem is that the powers that be like the high scoring game because they think fans like the high scoring game and as long as that holds true and the fans keep paying money to see slugfests every game, pitchers will suffer. 

Frankly, I miss the excitement of a pitcher's duel.  Any achievement a pitcher accomplishes is by definition more exciting to me than anything a hitters does largely because there is more anticipation in the build-up.  The game is just designed that way.  A no-hitter or a perfect game has to go 27 outs.  And when a pitcher is going for a strikout record, he only has 27 outs to work with, so his time begins to run out with each non-strikeout he records as he gets closer to 27.  No matter how great a game a hitter has, he only gets 3-6 at bats to do something in most games, maybe as many as 8 or 9 in an extra-inning game, and maybe as many as 10 chances to particiapte in an out defensively unless he's the first baseman.  That's still less than 27.

But I digress.... speaking of the good old days of pitching, I was watching the MLB Network - which I love, by the way.  Not so much for their statistical analysis; as I've said many times "any fool can read numbers".  I love it for the sheer joy those guys bring to every broadcast.  That to me is what baseball is all about.  Having fun telling great stories about the on the field and off the field exploits of the characters of the game.  And talking about talent, scouting the players.  Anyway, the commentators on one of their highlight shows were having a discussion about pitchers and were lamenting the notion that when Randy Johnson passes 300 wins this year - he's five shy of the mark - that he will probably be the last of the 300-game winners. 

At first, that seemed like a feasible factoid with 46-year old Jamie Moyer more than 50 wins away and no one else closer than 80 and all of those guys in their mid-late 30s.  But you know me, I can't take people's word for something; I always have to go looking for the facts.  After doing so, I'm not so sure that the 300-winner vault will be closed permanently after the Unit retires.  I will offer that it will be a few years before we see another one, but I think we can hold out some hope.

One of the reasons cited by Kim Kaat was that pitchers get fewer starts than they did back when he was pitching and guys like Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton were getting their 300th.  THis is true.  But Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux pitched the majority of their distinguished playing careers in the 5-man rotation era and they ended up with more than 350 apiece.  So the start limitation is a factor, but it is not a game-ender.  A much bigger impediment is the specialization of bullpens and the fact that a lot of starting pitchers don't get the plurality of decisions they used to; they just don't go as deep in games as they did 30 years ago and because of that, more variables in the form of relief pitchers get thrown into the mix.  More variables equals more chances for failure, leaving the starting pitcher sitting on the bench watching someone else collect his win.

So are there any pitchers around who have a decent shot at 300? 

After guys like Curt Schilling, John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez and Andy Pettite, there is a huge drop-off from the likely candidates.  In fact, Roy Oswalt is probably the next guy who has a chance to make it.  He's 30 years old but has only 129 wins.  Mark Buerhle, Javier Vazquez and Barry Zito are the only 30-ish starters with at least 120 wins. Then comes CC Sabathia at age 27 with 117 wins.  As great as Johan Santana has been, he's 29 and has 109 wins.  If he won 18 games every season for 10 seasons, he would still be 11 wins short of 300.  Jon Garland at age 28 has 106 wins but he doesn't stroke me as the kind of pitcher who will last another 10 years.  Carlos Zambrano is 27 with 96 wins.  Josh Beckett could be where Oswalt is in 2 years; he has 89 wins.  Jake Peavy has 86 wins and is just 27. 

Honestly, those are about the only guys that have pitched long enough to be considered but are still young enough to accumulate enough years to reach it.  But for them to accomplish it, each will have to win better than 15 games a season for the next 10 or 12 years to get even be close.  In order to get there they will need to be on good teams for that entire time.  Jake Peavy pitched very well last season, yet only won 10 games because his team was hapless.  It appears that will be the case again this year so his prospects are dimming even before he gets a chance to make serious headway.  Very few organizations have the wherewithal to be competitive every year for a decade, so any of these pitchers who are not on such a team will have to accurately predict the free agent market and the development of teams producing players from their farm systems.  Even professional analysts have enough trouble doing that from year to year so that might require as much luck as foresight.

Randy Johnson is a physical freak to be able to do what he has done; Tom Glavine is the more likely template of the next 300 game winner.  He limped to his 300th win in 2007 but it probably would not have happened had he not been on a pretty good Mets team.  Had he signed with the Pirates, for example, he would probably still be short of the milestone.  But using Glavine's example, he won 20 games in a season five times.  Of the pitcehrs I mentioned as candidates to make it to 300, only Roy Oswalt has had as many as two seasons in which he won 20 games.   Most of them - Sabathia, Peavy, Zambrano, Vazquez, Buerhle, Garland - have not yet won 20 in a season even once.  And with the exception of Santana, Beckett and Zambrano all of them have had at least one season where they pitched at least 175 innings yet won 11 or fewer games.  Still, winning 20-games in a season multiple times is not a prerequisite: Greg Maddux only won 20 twice. 

That said, by age 27 Tom Glavine had accumulated 95 wins.  The top winner by age 27 since 1980 was Doc Gooden, followed by Fernando Valenzuela.  So maybe having a lot of wins by age 27 is over-rated.  Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux were within one win of each other at that age with 116 and 115 respectively.  Sabathia is already ahead of their pace.  Bret Saberhagen, Pedro Martinez and Mike Witt round out the top 9 by age 27, with a tie for tenth between Mark Beurhle and Mark Mulder.  On the flip side, such luminaries as Brian Meadows, Daniel Cabrera, Charles Nagy, Jose Lima, Carl Pavano, Tony Armas and Chris Nabholz had more wins by age 27 than Randy Johnson did.  Even eventual closers Trevor Hoffman and John Franco had more wins by then.  Granted, the Unit is a physical freak of nature who was throwing the ball 100 mph back then, even though he had no idea where it was going.  But if that's the template, then there's still hope for Daniel Cabrera. 

The difference is that by age 30, Maddux and Clemens both had more than 160 wins and Glavine had 139.  That does not bode well for Roy Oswalt to get there with only 129.  Randy Johnson had 81 so there's still plenty of room for growth for the uber-hard throwers like Cabrera.  But if he's going to make a run, he better get going this year becasue the 48 wins he has at age 28 is still a long way away from catching up with the Unit. 

The odds are that Sabathia has the best chance right now, and pitching for the Yankees can only help his chances as long as he holds up.  Zambrano (assuming he's the age he claims), Peavy and Beckett are a bit longer odds but still have a decent chance of getting there.   After them I'd have to go with Ervin Santana and Scott Kamzir.