on the 2-inning starter idea
The Freakonomics blog raised an interesting idea from a reader the other day: should the role of a starting pitcher be reconsidered altogether and traded in for an “opening pitcher” instead? The thinking, basically, is that having a knuckleballer or other slow-speed pitcher throw the first couple of innings each game would enable your best pitchers to throw a less-stressful 3rd-8th or even rest-of-the-game stretch. The idea is based partly on the premise that starting pitchers in their current role only pitch until they fail. If a starting pitcher is highly unlikely to only pitch 6 or 7 innings in a game anyway, why not give them a finite timeframe in which to perform?
I urged my friend Wally– much more knowledgeable on the topic of baseball than I– to write a response to the idea, and he did so. My thoughts aren’t so much an opinion as they are a fleshing out of the idea for my own sake.
When I try to think about how this might look, I can’t help thinking that a manager wouldn’t be willing to remove an opening pitcher after just two innings if he was pitching particularly well. As any Red Sox fan can attest, there are games– and they may be few and far between, but there are games– when Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball is practically untouchable. In situations where that’s the case, why remove him from the game after two innings or a predefined low pitch count, only to introduce a lesser-known variable– another pitcher’s “on-ness” on this given day– into the situation?
A likely result, then, of a team implementing an opening pitcher strategy would be an inevitable regression to the current starting pitching strategy. Once a pitcher has started pitching, a manager’s decision making becomes inherently more informed: before the game began, you were placing a bet on this guy’s performance based on his recent outings or history against a certain lineup, but after the game begins, you immediately have much more information. Does that knuckler look good today? Are guys connecting with it, even if they’re flying out? Is Wake’s beet-red neck sweating too profusely? And if your guy looks good, then you know you’re more likely to have continued success with him– after all, he’s pitching well now– than you are to have success with someone else.
Right?
Well, yes, but only to a point. And there’s the rub. Wakefield’s knuckler will start to hang sooner or later in most cases. If you cut him off early, you are preserving the non-outs you otherwise would have had to give up to find out precisely when that time will be. That seems to be the crux of the argument: that by reducing your odds of seeing an opener fail by limiting him to a couple of innings, you are effectively doing the same thing for the person pitching the middle innings. It’s just a smarter distribution of risk.
So I guess the question really is this: at what point do the odds of your opening pitcher continuing to pitch well become worse than the odds of a “starting” pitcher doing as well?
That, I think, is a question too complicated to be addressed by a strategy that’s defined by holding an opening pitcher to an arbitrary number of innings or pitches. That inflection point would probably come at a very different time for different pitchers (or, more accurately, for different pairings of pitchers) on different days. The opening pitcher idea seems valid, but much more difficult to implement smartly than by using predefined time periods.
