It’s no secret that the importance of starting pitching has been in decline for some time. There was a point where throwing two hundred innings in a season was a reasonable mark to aim for in a team’s rotation. But those pitchers are now a severely endangered species. Barely a decade ago, in 2014, thirty-four players reached that mark. This season? Only three: Garrett Crochet, Cristopher Sánchez and Logan Webb. Much discussed has been the fact that starters are not going as deep into games. The average this year was only 5.2 innings per start, compared to 6.0 in 2014. Managers are quicker to turn the ball over to bullpens which are increasingly stacked.
However, another factor is less well-known. Pitchers are making fewer starts in a year too. I stumbled across this when discussing the recent signing of Michael Soroka by the Diamondbacks. Since his debut in 2018, he has made more than 16 starts just once. While that’s an extreme example, the days of a pitcher who took the ball every fifth day throughout the entire season, also appear to be numbered. Again looking at the 2014 season, there were 47 pitchers that year who made the requisite 32+ starts to be classed as an “everyday starter”. But by 2025, that number had been cut by more than half, to just 22.
Notably, the D-backs had three of them in their Opening Day rotation: Merrill Kelly, Zac Gallen and Brandon Pfaadt. While the latter two were not consistently good, they were at least consistently on the mound. Less than a handful of other teams had more than one guy reach that mark. The majority of the league, sixteen teams, did not have a single everyday starter. Put another way, the average team this year used 12.3 different starters, compared to 9.6 in 2014. The importance of an individual starting pitcher may be in decline. However, teams nowadays need more of them: it’s a case of quantity over quality.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is a topic which has been one of discussion: pitcher injuries. Between 2015 and 2022, the odds of a starting pitcher spending some time on the injured list during a given season almost doubled, going from 23.0% to 45.5%. This is a result of pitchers throwing harder, and in ways that are at odds with the way the human body was intended to work. “Overhead throwing is one of the most unnatural motions we have,” says Dr. Chad Starkey, director of athletic training at Ohio University. Add in the quest for increasing spin-rate, and something has to give. Usually, it’s the pitcher’s elbow, as the Tommy John epidemic proves.
However, beyond that, we also see teams more inclined to give starting pitchers additional time off. This may be an attempt to counter the negative effects of throwing harder and with more torque. Though if so, the paragraph above suggests, it’s not exactly proving effective. This year, more than two-thirds of starts in the majors (68%) came on more than four days rest, up from 51% in 2016. Part of that is due to the extended regular season, with extra off days. This year, the Diamondbacks had 24 days off, which is a twenty percent increase over the 2016 schedule. Teams seem more inclined to use those, rather than keeping starters on a strict five-day rotation.
However, they also seem more willing to skip pitchers entirely. The number of starts made on six days or more rest – which would exclude those made as the result of a single off day – is also up 20% between 2014 and this year. Though that trend seems to have peaked the year after COVID: there were 1,315 such starts in 2021, compared to 1,054 this season. Teams were clearly being ultra-careful with pitchers, as the sport returned to a full, 162-game schedule. But it doesn’t take much, either in extra days off or skipped starts, for a pitcher to be eliminated from the “everyday starter” club.
Maybe it’s just a case of us needing to recalibrate expectations, in the same way that a “quality start” now is really not the same as it was, when the statistic was invented by writer John Lowe in 1985. Pitching 200 innings is now an aberration, rather than an expectation; hitting .300 is batting champion caliber, not All-Star level. Perhaps we now need to think of a pitcher who makes 25+ starts in a year as being “everyday starter” quality, because factors like extra off days and injured list assignments now have to be considered part of the game, and beyond the player’s control. Certainly, if we get 25 starts from Soroka, I think we’ll be more than happy with that.