I’m sure that Cardinal fans — in St. Louis (including Mr. Borowski), as well as in Washington — enjoyed the unexpected (well, when you’re 35 games over .500, no win is ever really unexpected, is it?) win via starter-by-committee. It’s not the first time TLR’s tried it, and here’s hoping it won’t be the last.

The starter-by-committee approach may actually be the next evolution in pitching-rotation strategy. And, as Nate pointed out on the flight back from DC, it would result in the unintended but welcome consequence of the end of pitching wins as we know it.

As teams struggle to find non-injury-prone “front-of-the-rotation” pitchers, overpaying for them in the process, NL teams who choose to develop and condition pitchers who can pitch 2-3 innings every two or three days will be able to:

1. Insert up to three extra hitters into the lineup by pinch-hitting or double-switching for the pitcher when his spot comes up.
2. Optimize the utility of mid-tier starters who lose their effectiveness after one or two times through the order.
3. Gain a platoon advantage sooner than they would if they waited til later in the game to replace the starter.
4. Pitch top-tier starters more frequently than once every five days.
5. Use a 10-man pitching staff, freeing up one or two additional bench spots.

Using the Cardinals’ current staff as an example, I pared them down to 10, removing Suppan and Marquis, who had the worst ERA on the roster (and the only two with an ERA above 4).

So, a stretch of 12 games might look like this:

This is a obviously a rough framework, since it assumes a few things, like no extra-inning games and that each pitcher would go the expected number of innings for each game. But the way it breaks down, the team would have one of its main three current-day starters — Carpenter, Mulder and Morris — pitching at least a few innings each game and a lefty in each game (assuming the team has three southpaws of its 10 pitchers). So you’re probably wondering how many innings pitched this amounts to over 162 games:

This probably sends a jolt of fear and concern into your spine. You can’t see Flores or Izzy — or any of those relievers — pitching near that many innings. Neither can I, at least not today’s version of these guys. But almost every reliever has been a starter in his career, and with different conditioning, it’s certainly possible. And I don’t want anyone to get hung up on the names — think of them as placeholders or representatives for the pitching spots. Instead of Ray King, it could be Mark Redman or Jamie Moyer. Instead of Morris, it may be Vicente Padilla (just throwing out names, not rumors); you get the idea. Plus, undoubtedly, not everyone is going to throw this many innings, considering the various roster changes that occur throughout the year.

Anyway, one of the disadvantages of this approach would be that you lose a little bit of the “matchup” flexibility that managers like to employ (see Ray King v. Carlos Delgado last night — well, bad example). There are probably others. Without doing any modeling, which requires software and brains than I don’t have, it seems like this approach could really benefit a team. Of course, it’s so radical that it may require someone like Charlie Finley or Bill Veeck at the top to get it started, but then again, maybe not. TLR may even find it intriguing, heading into the home stretch of his HOF career.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 at 10:18 am and is filed under editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.