Gammons: Baseball’s system for developing pitchers is broken, and it’s hurting the game
By Peter Gammons Sep 24, 2018
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“There’s no right or wrong, but I’m sure there’s good or bad.”
— Pearl Jam
There are the Rays, with their “openers,” and the fact that they had the same record as the Indians on Monday morning. There are Walker Buehler and Jack Flaherty, who, close to the postseason, were referred to by a baseball insider as “potentially the two best starting pitchers in the National League playoffs.”
But what we have is September pennant race baseball with 12 to 15 pitchers in games, and pitcher-hitter matchups that often resemble Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky. Many other nights, we see the soft underbellies of the International and Pacific Coast Leagues determining the Hunt for Red October.
“These September games are killing the game,” one National League manager said recently. Then the Athletics and Angels used 15 pitchers. The Reds and Brewers used 12, in a 3-2 game. The obsolete 40-man roster expansion for the month is one problem, but also, the opener concept helped get the Rays to the same record as the Indians, and the Athletics within days of a wild card play-in.
“Don’t think the fact that so many potential playoff teams are having bullpen problems in the final two weeks doesn’t have something to do with usage,” says one NL GM. Cubs, Braves, Phillies, Rockies, Red Sox, Yankees, Cardinals…
Theo Epstein bemoans the decline in the marquee starting pitcher matchup. Last Tuesday, my DVR was set for Kershaw-Freeland at 10 p.m., and I would check out the rest of the action on QuickPitch on Wednesday morning. It was a little different than walking to Fenway on a September Saturday morning at 7:30 for a matchup of 20-game winners, Ron Guidry and Dennis Eckersley, knowing that if Guidry—the runaway Cy Young—won, the Yankees would have gone from 13 ½ games back to now just one game back, and all that stood between the Yankees and first place was Bobby Sprowl.
Granted, Rays and A’s managers Kevin Cash and Bob Melvin, respectively, had no choice but to do what they’ve done because of the injury plague on their starting rotations. That plague allowed Blake Snell to pitch his way into the Cy Young conversation, and Mike Fiers and Edwin Jackson to pitch so well that Oakland was 19-4 in their starts. Good for them. Hardly Catfish Hunter vs. Tom Seaver in the 1973 World Series, but great work by a couple of guys who battled their way out of fungibility.
Epstein believes something should be done to limit “bullpenning.” He suggests a limit of 11 active pitchers; that also might help boost quality bench alternatives for critical extra-innings matchups. He has suggested that relievers should have to face a minimum of three batters, which would cut back on the LOL (left-on-left) Randy Choat-isms.
“Why can’t we get back to the place where relievers pitch two or three innings?” asks Epstein. In Earl Weaver’s day, he used those roles to transition young pitchers like Mike Flanagan, Dennis Martinez and Scott McGregor from minor leaguers to eventually being able to start in a division in which the Yankees, Orioles, Red Sox and Brewers were all powerhouses. That coincided with the end of the four-man rotation era. “About one out of every five starts you had your good stuff,” Flanagan said, “and you had to pitch with what you had. You had to be creative. You had to understand how hitters moved in the box, and their swing paths.”
I covered a game in Memorial Stadium in which Jim Palmer hit every speed on the radar gun from 68 to 92 mph, and won. After the game, pitching coach Ray Miller joyfully handed me the pitching chart. A couple of years later I charted a 3-1 changeup to Don Baylor that was the deciding pitch in Seaver’s 300th win.
By then, pitching had already begun its transition to
stuff. And we all loved it. We loved radar guns, and their impact on games (the Red Sox would flash an occasional
88 on the board to upset a young, flamethrowing Bartolo Colon, and in 2007, when Curt Schilling was winning on IQ rather than the gas he’d had in his Arizona heyday, they would flash a few
90s when he hit 85).
A respected protege of Dr. James Andrews, who asked to remain anonymous, says, “The game now is, get the kids up to the majors, throw as hard as they can for an inning or two, and after two years if they’re not already hurt, they let them move on and never have to pay arbitration wages.” One general manager likens this process to “cheap sweatshop labor.” And with the development system built not on actual pitching games but radar gun readings and programs developed to increase velocity for velocity’s sake, the strain on the arms and shoulders of 16-to-21-year-old kids who are not yet fully developed physically heightens the reality of surgical risk.
“There’s no question about that,” says Dr. Glenn Fleisig of the American Sports Medicine Institute. Just turn to Michael Kopech or Tyler Kolek, two young top prospects who both required Tommy John surgery. In fact, Kolek was the second player chosen in the 2014 draft. First was Brady Aiken. Then Carlos Rodon. All had surgery — and early. Aaron Nola and Kyle Freeland were the fourth and fifth pitchers chosen, not gasmasters, and they both may be in the top three for the 2018 Cy Young Award. “There is no evidence,” says Fleisig, “that there is a direct correlation between velocity and career performance, but kids are convinced of it.”
All of which raises the question: Where are all the homegrown starting pitchers? Jim Benedict, who has been one of the game’s foremost pitching developers from Montreal to Pittsburgh, Miami to the Cubs, thinks it begins with the money. “With the money kids get to sign in the draft, ownership wants production for that money,” says Benedict. “They want these kids rushed up the ladder. The idea is simply advancement, up each rung of the ladder. Then the idea is to load up in the bullpen, so they get the advancement on narrow windows of success, and on velocity, on stuff. Get to the majors with a two-pitch mix and get three or four outs and throw as hard as they can.”
Years ago, young pitchers were left for a season on one level. They learned how their delivery held up over a season. They realized that they were out on an island, and had to fight and pitch for survival. They learned third and fourth pitches, and how the changeup makes their fastball better, and is the easiest on the arm.
There was something about Mike Boddikker that Weaver didn’t buy, so it wasn’t until he’d thrown nearly 800 minor league innings that he got his first legitimate shot in 1983, at age 25. He went 16-8, 2.77, shut out the White Sox in Game Two of the ALCS, then beat Philadelphia in the World Series and the Orioles had their last championship ring.
“Think of all the adjustments Boddikker had to make each season,” says Benedict. He remembers how in A ball, if a pitcher hit a batter, then recovered and made the pitches to get a double play ball, the manager would give the pitcher a $25 reward.
Royals General Manager Dayton Moore was one of the pioneers of something close to the opener concept. “We were able to afford to load up our bullpen and close down games,” says Moore. “Since we won (in 2015), the cost of relievers has risen, but we’re trying to develop starters. We’re trying to let them throw more innings, reasonably, in the minor leagues. (Pitching coach) Cal Eldred has done a marvelous job encouraging and pushing our young starters in the big leagues to throw some innings, and help with the weapons to get there.” How Bud Black pushed Colorado’s starters from the opening of spring training has paid dividends in developing innings in a park where innings are difficult to pile up, and even more difficult to recover from.
Look, in the spring Tampa Bay lost three young pitchers to surgery who they planned to have in their rotation. “We didn’t plan out what we’ve done,” says Cash. “It’s survival.” Still, says Moore, “all the pitching changes the rhythm of the game, and baseball has a natural rhythm. It changes the way teams play defense. If the defense ends up the field too long, they are affected when they go to offense. It’s not all that different from football.”
In some ways, the opener concept is reminiscent of Gene Mauch and Jim Leyland bunting in the first innings of games to try to get a lead. After all, whichever team scores first wins a majority of its games — as of August 1 this season, 59 percent. So if Ryan Stanek shuts down the opposition for two innings and the Rays scratch out a run, the odds are that they will win. Ibid Oakland.
Cash and GM Eric Neander don’t claim to know where this is eventually going. They hope Brent Honeywell and Brendan McKay are in the rotation with Snell in the next year and a half. Could they use a couple of days a week of the opener to develop young pitchers in the AL East, a variation on the Weaver theory? “Absolutely,” says Neander. “But we’re not smart enough to get ahead of ourselves.”
Does baseball
need a generation of reliable starting pitchers like Buehler and Flaherty? Absolutely. There are a lot of nights now when we watch games and feel as if we’re stopped at a railway crossing watching a 175-car freight train rumbling past, and we want to scream,
I cannot watch the march of the wooden relief pitcher soldiers.
Baseball is entertainment, and true outcomes without doubles and web gems and balls drilled up the alley sometimes feel more like test patterns on an iPhone than an actual sport. Managers, catchers and coaches walking to the mound and pitchers walking in from the bullpen are what we see when we emerge from the D train at Yankee Stadium.
Last week, an executive advancing the Cubs texted high praise for Kyle Hendricks’ 8.2. 3 1 1 1 8 line while “throwing 86 to 89.” He threw 53 fastballs and changeups, with 16 whiffs. That same night Jon Gray started for the Rockies in Dodger Stadium, sat 94-96, gave up six runs in two innings and got one swing-and-miss.
It was reminiscent of the day in September 2016 when Dave Dombrowski asked John Farrell how J.A. Happ, throwing 89-90, could beat the Red Sox. Happ was 20-4 that season, and for his career is 48-29 in Yankee Stadium, Fenway, the Rogers Center and Camden Yards, and may open the playoffs for the Yankees. When he first went into the Phillies rotation in 2009, his fastball averaged 89.7 mph.
He was never Brady Aiken or A.J. Puk or Danny Hultzen or Matt Purke. He was always J.A. Happ, a third round guy who threw 89-90. Knew who he is, who he is not, never was a sweatshop candidate and never forgot how incredibly difficult it is that 11 ½ years after making his major league debut he is, by performance and reliability, one of the most important figures in returning the World Series to New York.
betts war is 10.8 he leads mlb, martinez is 6.4 which is 15th(-1.4 dwar 
), cain and yelich both have 7.0 war which is tied for most in the nl for position players
baez played elite defense for 20+ games at 3b,2b and ss
