Hi, baseball fans. With opening day around the corner, you can almost smell the freshly mown grass and the scent of grilled hotdogs wafting through the air. REAL fans are actually attending spring training games, and MLB clubs will be welcoming fans (limited) to the ballpark once the season starts. If there’s anything that gives us a sense of normality, it is the grand ol’ game of baseball. It just feels right, like that favorite worn-out T-shirt or the stuffed animal you carried around for the first eight years of your life. Mine was a bunny.
I recently came across an article about workhorse pitchers. You know, those guys who used to routinely start every fourth day in a time when 300 innings was a good benchmark for a pitcher’s toughness and masculinity? Numerous guys would throw upwards of 300 innings a season. Right! They’ve gone the way of the dodo bird, the Edsel, and the pet rock. Nonetheless, it got me thinking (as usual) about how much the game has changed in a relatively short time. Think about it.
In the last 30 years, we’ve seen the advent of interleague play (gasp!), wild card teams (yowza!), a steroid scandal (eek!), women coaches, trainers, and broadcasters (good!), a 60-game season in the middle of a pandemic (whole other story), and a trial run of the designated hitter in the National League (see “whole other story,” and DH-Coming-To-An-NL-City-Near-You-Soon).
Back to my point about what we used to refer to as a workhorse pitcher – when 300 innings was good. Nowadays, if a pitcher reaches 200 innings, they say he has the endurance and willpower of Louis Zamperini (excellent book, by the way). I’m talking about a time when a manager wouldn’t relieve a starter unless his arm literally became detached from his body or said pitcher had to enroll in the witness protection program in the seventh inning.
It wasn’t that long ago (we’re counting in dog years) that a top starting pitcher would average at least eight innings a start, and 300 innings was a medal of honor. Tony LaRussa was the manager many people credit or criticize, introducing the defined specialist reliever role, where you had a set closer, a specific setup man, and a couple of guys who would set up the setup man. Hey, you can’t argue too much with his body of work.
(AP Photo/File)
In reality, you can trace the beginning of the specialist role back to Sparky Anderson and his Big Red Machine of the 1970s. There was a reason Sparky had the nickname, Captain Hook.
In 1975, the Reds won their first of back-to-back World Series titles. Cincinnati pitcher, Gary Nolan, led the entire staff in innings with just 210 2/3 frames, a solid number by current standards that would warrant a parade in Times Square. Still, Nolan’s innings total fell nearly 120 short of the MLB leader, Catfish Hunter. That season, it was almost 70 innings short of cracking the top-10 in baseball. By comparison, those 210 2/3 innings would have ranked fifth in the majors in 2019, the last time we had an entire season of games.
Sparky did that by design. He knew that he had a deep bullpen and believed that by essentially reducing the game to a six-inning contest (while the starting pitcher was in the game), he had a greater chance to win by bringing in fresh arms to finish off the last few innings. It was hardly a revolutionary theory. The same tactic was employed nearly two centuries earlier under different circumstances by Napoleon Bonaparte. No, they didn’t play baseball back in his time. The French military leader always had fresh soldiers in reserve when going to battle, which gave him a significant advantage over his adversary. His theory usually worked. History tells us he probably overused his bullpen leading into the Waterloo series.
The ’75 Reds had four relievers who averaged more than 1 1/2 innings per outing. Compare that to today’s standards where closers and setup men throw one inning per outing, often less than that. Until they changed the rule last year, forcing pitchers to face a minimum of three batters, baseball was littered with specialists, mainly left-handers, who would be brought in to face one batter. You can’t argue with a team that won 108 games and a championship, as Cincinnati did in 1975. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Sparky had one of the most prolific offenses in the game’s history, one that could routinely bludgeon an opponent at will.
If you flash forward to Cincinnati’s 1976 championship club, you’ll find no Reds pitcher in the top 10 in innings among National League hurlers. Gary Nolan (again) led the staff with 239 innings and was one of only two pitchers on the staff to log 200 or more frames that season. Both Rawley Eastwick and Pedro Borbon finished with more than 100 innings in relief. The Dodgers, who finished second to the Reds in the NL West in 1976, had four starters log at least 200 innings.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than 40 years since any major league pitcher hit the 300-inning mark when Steve Carlton ate up 304 innings in 1980 for the Phillies. A decade has passed since Justin Verlander became the last pitcher to log at least 250 innings in a single season.
The game has changed and will continue to evolve, as most things do in life. Some changes are hard to accept, particularly for those tried-and-true baseball purists. But change isn’t always bad. Trends also tend to go in cycles. Remember when corduroy pants came back in fashion many years ago? Will we ever see another season that produces a 300-inning starting pitcher? Highly improbable. However, baseball is essentially the same game played more than a century ago. It was and will continue to be America’s Pastime, despite the saber-rattling between the player’s association and major league owners. Even though the NFL long ago surpassed MLB in the television rating race. It’s a game deeply woven in our country’s fabric, much like apple pie and the American flag or the odor of cigarette smoke in that used car you bought back in 1985.
When you get a chance, pass me one of those hotdogs, please? Also, if you enjoyed this article, please click on the comment link below, from which you can leave your thoughts, like the post, or share it. Thanks for reading!