The Battle Of Marathons: Why Can't MLB Get To The Point?

Major League baseball has entered its Wagner phase. Yes, every performance is now a four-hour opera. The just-completed league championship series were mercifully brief (Washington in four; Houston in six). Which is just as well, because the games that were played stretched into eternity.

Why? Because modern baseball has forsaken small ball. Wade Boggs, Tony Gwynn, Rod Carew… the maestros of hittin’ them where they ain’t is so Tuesday.  Everything is launch angles, lift co-efficient and letting it fly for the fences. Between an allegedly juiced ball and the economics of the game that reward home-run sluggers over doubles hitters, everybody is aiming for the fence. The 2019 season featured remarkable home-run figures by teams.

The antidote to the Minnesota Twins’ Bash Boys has been micro-managing pitching. Your contemporary manager is running out relievers in every inning to stop big rallies. Which produces more stalling than playing, as relief pitchers trot into the game to face a handful of hitters at most.

(Leading to my eternal suggestion for saving time. Eliminate the warmup pitches for each relief pitcher. He’s had a mound to throw off of in the bullpen, that’s enough. Substitute NHL goalies don’t get warmup shots. A second-string QB doesn’t get to whip few passes when he takes over. An NBA replacement doesn’t get to test out the rim. So why drag out these games ever longer with this nonsense?)

It’s a trend that has been in the making for much of the decade. As I wrote in October of 2018, “The radical pitching strategies movement that began a couple of years ago have reached full bloom in the fall of 2018. Inspired by the crazy scientists of the Tampa Bay Rays, managers have re-thought what were once inviolable  rules surrounding pitching.

Namely: 1) You have five starters who pitch on a pre-determined schedule. 2) They go as long as they can into the game. 3) You use setup pitchers to bridge the gap between starters and. 4) Your closer. Who finishes out a game in which you lead in the ninth inning. 

But the first chinks in the armour of this philosophy appeared a couple of years ago when managers began inserting their closer earlier than the ninth inning. The determination was made that the key moment in a game often happens earlier in a game than  ninth inning. If that’s the case why not have your best situational pitcher—the closer— come in to stop any momentum from the opposition?

And, if that worked, why not employ a series of stopper-type pitchers into your lineup?

Thus we saw Cleveland inserting dominating lefty Andrew Miller in the seventh inning when the Indians were facing a crisis. But they also employed Cody Allen, another closer type, for any other five-alarm fires in the later innings. While it didn’t bring Cleveland a World Series title, the notion caught on that maybe it was time to re-think bullpen use.

But this year, the Rays decided to mess with success a little more. The always undercapitalized squad looked at the starting rotation their budget could afford and said, how can we stretch our resources further? The answer was: starter by committee.

So, on the fourth or fifth turn in the rotation, with no alternatives available in their own system, the Rays began starting pitchers who were traditionally relief specialists. Their instructions were to go an inning or two at the start of the game. A parade of other relievers would follow.

This had the result of forcing hitters to face a variety of styles and handedness in the pitchers they faced. No more could they get comfortable with the patterns of a starter, waiting till their third at-bat to take advantage of what they’d learned.

Tampa manager Kevin Cash also used the committee ploy to refuse to name a starter until the last moment required by MLB rules. And, not to be underestimated, it gave the Rays some relief budget-wise, paying run-of-the-mill relievers to do the work of higher-paid starters. The Oakland A’s and others soon followed suit.

Confused? The (2018) playoffs give us one more variation on the theme. The Milwaukee Brewers, who had stacked their bullpen, began pulling their starters, well-paid or otherwise, very early in the games. Sometimes the starter would go an inning and a bit before a dangerous rally from the opposition would result in the appearance of a relief pitcher. Once, the Brewers starter Wade Miley pitched to just one hitter.

For those reared on the notion of the stalwart starter gritting it out for seven, eight, even nine innings this was anathema. While not as dramatic as the Brewers’ strategy, other teams also began yanking starters as venerable as C.C. Sabathia or Clayton Kershaw after one or two times through the order.   

So you can see how fantasy draft players or pool players are dumbfounded. How to choose a lineup when the manager will scramble your selections almost instantly? Whom to select when the manager doesn’t release his starter till the last minute? Bettors, too, were confused about how to handicap games where one team might employ as many as seven or eight pitchers?

A final— and most regrettable— byproduct of all this shuffling is that they turned the three-hour game into a rarity. With a steady parade of pitchers to the hill, games have stretched into the wee small hours. Networks were forced to scramble when a previously scheduled start was overlapped by a marathon contest still going from earlier in the day.”

If anything the trends seen in 2018 have accelerated. Expect to see marathons as the Nationals and the Astros match wits and empty bullpens. Maybe the winner of the Series will be the team that can stay awake the longest. It’s what MLB deserves.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of Cap In Hand which is available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca