No part of a major league general manager’s job has changed more, or is now more important, than creating your major league pitching plan. Team’s pitching blueprints have changed. Plans have become extremely fluid, contingencies are built into those plans and everyone is trying to find the best way to keep pitchers healthy, while winning at the same time. GMs have to add new information from medical experts and the statistical analysts in their front office to what they know from experience and what their pitching coaches can tell them. The bottom line is that coming up with a total staff pitching program has become the single most important job for all 30 general managers in 2017.
You can start by looking at the size of pitching staffs. Five years ago, most teams had 11-man staffs to start the season, with a few going down to 10. Today no teams opened the year with a 10-man staff, but on Opening Day six National League teams (Reds, Marlins, Rockies, Dodgers, Brewers and Padres) carried 13 with eight-man bullpens, and not a single National League team carried less than seven initially.
It’s a fundamental change to how big league rosters are designed, and it’s another indication how organizations are changing the way they manage both their starters and relievers. You can also see the change in how teams handle rotation construction. GMs used to build their starting rotations with the knowledge that they needed a five-man rotation at the major league level, and they’d prepare for one or two injuries and make sure that they were seven deep. Now GMs try to have 10 or more starters ready to take the ball throughout the season. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the NL West while using 15 different starters. The Los Angeles Angels and Cincinnati Reds used 15 as well, but the Atlanta Braves led the majors with 16.
As a reflection of last year’s experience, the Dodgers have done the best of any club in building up their starting pitch depth. Between the majors and the minors, they’re 11 deep. Led by Clayton Kershaw, the rest of the Dodgers’ rotation includes veterans Rich Hill, Kenta Maeda, Brandon McCarthy, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Scott Kazmir and Alex Wood, last year’s rookie tandem of Julio Urias and Ross Stripling, plus prospects Yadier Alvarez and Brock Stewart. So while Hill has a blister and has joined Kazmir on the DL, and Urias is at extended spring because of pitch limits to keep him available for October, they still have Wood and Stripling to bring back into the rotation from the bullpen while Alvarez and Stewart are in the minor leagues waiting for a phone call. Having that kind of luxury in rotation depth is just one of the reasons the Dodgers are favorites to repeat as NL West champions this year.
Dodgers president Andrew Friedman is frank about his mission on that score. "Starting pitching has become the most overvalued in the industry because, outside of the aces, they are pitching less innings, with less starts as more depth is needed," Friedman said. "We have a tremendous amount of depth on the prospect side and at the major league end by design. Quantity is just as important as quality in today's baseball."
Meanwhile, the Mets had the best quality of any starting rotation heading into spring training thanks to their three aces -- Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey. And initially it looked like the back of their rotation was solid too, with Steven Matz, Robert Gsellman, Zack Wheeler and Seth Lugo all considered potential 12-15 game winners with ERA’s under 4.00. However, both Matz and Lugo are already on the DL with elbow issues -- Lugo had a PRP injection and Matz is dealing with more complicated issues. So the best rotation in baseball has already been cut down from seven deep to five, eliminating their margin for error and leading GM Sandy Alderson to enter negotiations with free agent Doug Fister while also making calls to other GMs for possible trades to rebuild his club’s depth.
Alderson sees the silver lining from last year's challenges, noting, "We are fortunate that because of injuries last year we discovered some starting pitching depth in Gsellman and Lugo that better prepares us for this season. [Wheeler] hasn't pitched in two years so a realistic target is 125 or so innings, so our question is do you use them early in the season? Or preserve them for later in the season? So we might have to use a spot starter from time to time and perhaps a sixth starter for maybe two weeks to manage everyone's innings, since we have so many starters with [workload] limit issues."
The management of starters’ workloads has also become much different. Outside of the elite star pitchers, most starters are now being taken out of games much earlier than ever before, oftentimes after their second time around the lineup. The analytics say bringing in a fresh arm in the fifth or sixth inning gives teams a much better chance at run prevention, and that’s showing up in the average length of starts. Twenty years ago, starters faced 26 batters per turn, almost three full times through an opponent’s batting order. Ten years ago that dropped down to 25 and last year it dropped to 24 as starts keep getting shorter and shorter and managers go for the hook earlier and earlier.
The medical field also recommends not more than 120 pitches in any start, but many clubs like fewer than that. The average number of pitches per start has dropped from 96 pitches per start 20 years ago to 93 last year.
There is also simply too much data out there that says the third time through the order is when most starters get hit and give up the most runs. Twenty years ago, the spread in OPS between a first at-bat vs. a third was almost 60 points; last year that spread had expanded to almost 70 points. Therefore, general managers are building deeper bullpens, not just in quantity to get innings but also quality. Relievers collectively handle more innings than ever before, but they need to be good if teams are going to effectively "win" those games in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings with shutdown relief.
Another big change is that relievers are going maximum effort all the time because most face no more than three hitters. But this approach to bullpen usage brings more health risk. Dr. James Andrews, the renowned orthopedic doctor, always preached that pitchers should only go max effort in certain situations where it’s called for but pitch at a comfort zone of around 95 percent to give them a better chance to stay healthy. Accepting that risk for bullpen breakdowns means -- you guessed it -- a demand for GMs to acquire and develop more depth for their bullpens.
When your team gets hit in multiple injuries at once, simultaneously affecting your rotation and your bullpen, a GM is really put through his paces. Take Dave Dombrowski’s tough task early this season in Boston: the Red Sox thought they were in great shape when they signed David Price and traded for Drew Pomeranz and Tyler Thornburg. If all three could stay healthy, the Sox would be the easy favorites to win the American League East. However, both Price and Pomeranz are dealing with lingering elbow problems that have already stretched the Red Sox’s depth in the rotation, while Thornburg is getting treatment for both shoulder and back issues instead of providing shutdown relief in the eighth inning, freeing up other relievers to help cover the middle innings. Before the first pitch had been thrown, the Red Sox were already forced to tap into their depth across the entire staff.
Situations like that are part of the reason why the medical field has had the most influence on changing how clubs monitor pitchers’ days of rest, pitch limits and innings limits, all of which go into creating an overall workload plan from start to start, month to month and year to year. As a result, pitchers now also have much different programs for their strength and conditioning, flexibility, nutrition and even sleep.
The range of medical procedures to consider are also evolving as doctors and surgeons make new discoveries, with different stem cell procedures and injections that they hope can heal ligaments in the shoulder, elbow and other parts of the body with the idea of preventing injuries as well as avoiding some surgeries. So GMs need to keep up with these developments as well, to help with their long-term planning for who they can count on, in which years, for as long as a pitcher is under club control.
For example, the Angels’ Garrett Richards was diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in June, but instead of having Tommy John surgery like almost every other pitcher has done with the same injury over the past decade, he tried a new procedure. Dr. Steve Yoon at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic -- the same clinic where "Tommy John surgery" was originally invented by Dr. Frank Jobe -- extracted bone marrow from Richards’ pelvis, concentrated it and injected that mixture back into the UCL in his elbow, aiming to repair the injured ligament. Bone marrow, along with fat tissue, contains mesenchymal stem cells that can regenerate into the range of tissue types that keep a ligament intact. On the other hand, Andrew Heaney, Richards’ teammate, had the same procedure and it didn’t work; he eventually had Tommy John surgery. This procedure is different than the platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections that are also being used for tendons and ligaments that also promote healing and is being used regularly for partial UCL tears like the one Yankees’ Masashiro Tanaka had.
There is no way I would have anticipated my need to know this kind of information when I was a GM, but now it goes with the job. Angels GM Billy Eppler has taken a chance that could pay off -- or not. If Richards had Tommy John surgery a year ago June, he would have missed this season. If the procedure doesn’t work and he has to have Tommy John surgery, he’ll be looking at a minimum of 15-month recovery before he’s back on a major league mound. Everyone is watching to see if this procedure works on Richards before other teams and pitchers follow suit. Now that Richards is on the DL, other organizations will no doubt remain cautious.
Major league GMs are dealing with pitchers injuries while they try to prevent others with different medical techniques, instituting limits, building bigger pitching staffs while using them all differently. It’s a fluid situation for all 30 teams and it has become the most important part of a GM’s job.