So often, when you reference the big numbers of a pitcher from baseball's past, you are dealing with results that have no modern relevance. They certainly have little use as a signpost for what some present-day hurler might do. Things have changed too much.
There are some obvious examples of that which come up in a records-never-to-be-broken debate, like Cy Young's 511 wins or 749 complete games, figures compiled during baseball's mythical-sounding past. You don't even have to go back that far. The post-World War II record for innings pitched in a season was set less than 50 years ago: Wilbur Wood threw 376⅔ innings in 1972, edging out the 376 mark set the season before by Mickey Lolich.
What makes those kind of numbers seem so fantastical now is how impossible it feels that we'll ever see anything like them again. And that's not necessarily because a pitcher couldn't do it. It's more because through endless iterations of team-building strategies over the years -- a process that has sped up exponentially over the past couple of decades because of technological innovation -- organizations have realized it's not smart to have pitchers even try for numbers like that. It's not smart for exacting maximum value from the pitcher, and it's not smart for winning games.
Enter Trevor Bauer: "Allowing me to pitch every fourth game is priority No. 1. Unfortunately I can't accept less money for that because it affects future players and markets as a whole."
That tweet, from Bauer to a fan, is more than two years old. It wasn't the earliest incidence of him proclaiming his desire to become an every-fourth-day pitcher and it wasn't the last. The idea on the surface of it seems like a lark. After all, such workhorses are long extinct in the big leagues and to revive them would entail the wealth-infused madness of a real-life John Hammond, of "Jurassic Park" fame. Right?
What's clear is that for Bauer, the idea is not remotely a lark. During a recent video posted in his YouTube channel, Bauer talked about his priorities when it comes to choosing his next team. The video runs for more than 14 minutes and much of it consisted of a deep, thought-provoking discussion of why he is so invested in the every-fourth-day notion.
"I want a team that is open to have an honest discussion with me about pitching every fourth day," Bauer said, opening that section of his monologue.
Bauer isn't just a baseball Don Quixote tilting at the private boxes where the executives reside. He is winter's most sought-after free-agent pitcher and the reigning NL Cy Young winner. Leverage is on his side, and if he is ever going to get a team to take his ideas seriously, this is the time to do it. In fact, let's play the part of a team right now and take that discussion seriously.
First of all, let's acknowledge that the days of the four-man rotation -- at least the kind some baseball fans of a certain age remember from the 1970s -- aren't coming back. It's not impossible to imagine some innovative club trying some kind of four-man rotation that involves strict pitch-limit parameters, but even if that were to happen, we're not talking about a 21st century version of the 1971 Orioles.
We're not even talking about Bauer becoming Mickey Lolich, either, because even if he were given the chance to start 40 or more games, he's still not going to be allowed to complete 29 games and throw 376 innings, like Lolich did in '71. He would be the analytics-fused, 2021 version of Lolich -- the iteration of an old workhorse who is the product of a new direction of innovation, one in which no current front office has dared to set out. Yet.
Can he do it?
We have to start by taking his word for it. Should we?
Here's more from Bauer in his free agency video: "I feel that I would be a better pitcher pitching every fourth day than every fifth day. Why do I feel that? Well, I collect data on myself every day and I can see the trends, how my body is trending. How do I recover after a start? How do I recover after a bullpen? How about a lift? How about after a conditioning session? What about the offseason? When am I at my peak? All these different things. I think, based on that data, the data tells me that I would be as good or better pitching every fourth day."
We aren't privy to the data Bauer collects on himself, nor should we be. If you are skeptical about whether he really has such information, you should check out yet another video about him, this one a mini-documentary about his daily routines. He begins the day with tracking his heartbeat. He takes a blood sample to gauge what's happening internally. He tracks every calorie that goes into his body. This is all before his offseason throwing sessions, where he works on pitch design and optimization, processes that are also tracked with streams of data. If Bauer says he has data that suggests he'd be better pitching every fourth day, it's not really a question about whether the data exists. It's more about finding a team that understands the data as well as he does.
Bauer has spoken of how open the Reds, his former team, were to such discussions and that's no surprise. The Reds' pitching coach, Derek Johnson, is perhaps the game's best, and there are few coaches in the industry who have internalized and weaponized the use of data and imaging better than Johnson. Reportedly Johnson was on board with using Bauer every fourth day if he were to return to the team. As Johnson-type innovators spread through the game, the idea that Bauer could find another such match (or return to the Reds, if the owners there will open their purse strings) isn't far-fetched.
Bauer has already earned enough trust from his managers to be allowed to work into high pitch counts more frequently than any other recent pitcher. Over the last four years, Bauer has exceeded 120 pitches in an outing eight times. That's twice as many as second-place Max Scherzer. Only four other starters have gone over 120 even two times during that span.
On the other hand, Bauer has been allowed to throw on three days' rest in just three career starts. That's no kind of sample from which to draw a conclusion. However, if you are willing to accept anecdote as a proof of concept, then Bauer's most recent outing on three-days' rest is a ringing endorsement of the idea. On Sept. 23 of last season, Bauer beat the Brewers on three days' rest, throwing 104 pitches over eight dominant innings, allowing one run and striking out 12.
How would you build a Super-Bauer rotation?
Even if he were able to start every fourth day and stay healthy and productive, wouldn't the disruption to the routines of the other starters in the rotation negate the advantage of conducting the experiment? This, too, is an issue to which Bauer has given much consideration and says that his conclusions are part of his pitch to teams.
"Ultimately, for whatever team I'm on, that's what's important, that's what's good for the team -- is everyone performing at a higher level," Bauer said in his video. "So I've thought through a lot of these different scenarios."
He went on to lightly touch on some of these scenarios. But let's do him one better and set up a season pitching schedule for a team that uses him in a strict, every-fourth-day role. We'll use the 2020 Reds as this team, and for the schedule, we'll use the original, pre-pandemic version of last season's slate.
I anointed Bauer as the No. 1 starter, something that wasn't a no-brainer when the season began, as Sonny Gray and Luis Castillo are both awfully good as well. But I tabbed Bauer No. 1, followed by Castillo, Gray and Tyler Mahle. For the fifth slot, I used a combination of Anthony DeSclafani, Wade Miley and Tejay Antone.
To set up the pitching schedule which, admittedly, is kind of a Utopian fantasy of what manager David Bell would have loved to do, I started by slotting in Bauer on Opening Day and every fourth day thereafter. Well, almost. The first thing that is apparent is that sometimes, every fourth day falls on an off day. So whether he likes it or not, sometimes Bauer ends up pitching on four days' rest.
We then slotted in Castillo second, putting him into each subsequent first available slot as long as he'd had at least four days off. If that day coincided with a Bauer start, then Castillo was bumped to the next available slot. I repeated the same procedure for Gray, then Mahle, then for the pitchers who shared the fifth slot.
Here are the number of starts each pitcher ended up with in this structure, with a breakdown of how many rest days they would have worked on in those starts:
Just for some context, consider the distribution of rest days for Castillo, Gray and Mahle in their last full season. Castillo made 32 starts in 2019. He made 14 of those on four days' rest, 12 on five days and six on six or more days. Gray made 31 starts that season. He made 12 on four days, 11 on five days and eight on six or more days. Mahle made 25 starts in 2019. He made seven of four days, 10 on five days and seven on six or more days.
The Utopian pitching schedule I created to accommodate Bauer doesn't appear to mess with the other top-four starters much at all. It's true that they end up with more starts on four days' rest, rather than five, than they really did, but maybe that's a blessing. That would be for Bell to decide. Even if it's not what you want, that's when rotation depth comes into play.
This structure only leaves 23 starts for a No. 5 and on an erratic schedule. On many staffs, that's kind of the nature of being a No. 5 starter anyway. However, Bell could use any of those starters to give an extra day off to Castillo, Gray or Mahle at any point. That group of No. 5s could also stay regular by being used in middle relief to keep a cap on the pitch counts of the others.
The other thing to notice is that because of the nature of the schedule, Bauer isn't pitching every fourth day as often as you'd think. He gets 34 such starts, but the other nine are on four days' rest and there was even a start with five days' rest. If at any point this isn't working for Bauer from a wear-and-tear standpoint, he would be the first to know, as he seems to have systematized and quantified every aspect of being a starting pitcher in the big leagues.
In this structure, Bauer ends up with 44 starts, which would be the most for a big league pitcher since Phil Niekro in 1979 and the most by a non-knuckleballer since Lolich in 1971. While the chief assumption of this exercise is that Bauer is right in his claim that he can pitch every fourth day, that claim in itself is twofold. It suggests that not only can he hold up physically in doing so, but that he can prosper -- and help the team. If Bauer is right, the possibilities are endless.
The bottom line is that if a manager has the luxury of penciling in the same starter for 44 starts, his task of managing the rest of the pitching staff becomes much easier. His options for getting more out of his other best hurlers, while massaging their workloads (and individualizing them) only expand.
What would a 44-start season look like today?
You can simply prorate some recent sampling of Bauer numbers for 44 games to see what his totals might look like, but what's the fun in that? Instead, I set up our Super-Bauer rotation for the 2020 Reds in Action! PC Baseball and ran a simulated season to get a sense of how the narrative might be shaped if Bauer were allowed to pioneer such an initiative.
The baseline numbers for the simulation were a combination of actual 2020 results and everyone's preseason projected numbers for the season, which helps to mitigate some of the oddities from a 60-game campaign in which teams only faced a small subset of the other clubs in the majors. Bauer's baseline was for a 3.20 ERA, 1.046 WHIP and 10.9 strikeouts per nine innings. But his durability ratings were Loliched so that he could make 44 starts. His average target pitch count was set at 110.
Bauer's season began with a win over the Cardinals on March 26, throwing eight innings because of an efficient pitch count. He got three days off and was back at it on March 30, a win over Toronto in which he went 5⅓ innings.
While there is little doubt that Bauer's experiment would have been closely followed in the sports media, for the first few weeks of the season, things would not have appeared to be that unusual. That's because of the number of off days built into the early-season schedule. Bauer would have made his 10th start on May 5, and while that would have put him at the top of the league, it would have only been two more than Castillo, his No. 2.
Gradually, though, Bauer's numbers would start to look like something out of a museum. By the end of May, he was at 16 starts and 115 innings. By the end of June, Bauer was 12-5 over 23 starts and, at 154 innings, was already approaching the threshold for qualifying for the season ERA crown. His ERA, by the way, was a sterling 2.41.
As the season progressed and Bauer showed up every fourth day after every fourth day, it's easy to imagine his campaign becoming a national sensation. He reached the 200-inning mark on Aug. 2, when he won his 16th game. He struck out his 300th batter on Aug. 23, which was his 36th start of the season. The last pitchers to start 36 games in a season were Greg Maddux and Roy Halladay in 2003. On the last day of August, Bauer won his 20th game. The win count could have been much higher if he had gotten lucky in terms of his no-decisions.
Incidentally, the sim Reds ran away with the NL Central, though it's not something you can attribute to Bauer so much as the randomness that goes with a simulation sample of one. Castillo and Gray both went 17-8 with similar ERAs (3.07 and 3.08), while Mahle went 11-5 during his 29 outings. Castillo threw 201 innings and Gray landed at 187. No other Reds pitcher qualified for the ERA crown.
Clearly, Bauer would have been the story of the season. He won his 25th game in his final start by beating the Pirates on Sept. 24. He finished 25-7 with a 2.41 ERA, 356 strikeouts and 282 innings pitched over 44 starts. Bauer made 34 quality starts. Thirty-four starts of any kind is enough for the big league lead in most seasons these days. The simulator chose Bauer as the NL Cy Young winner.
Which teams might be interested?
The only thing that will convince a team to start Bauer every fourth day is the belief it will help win more games. And even that might not be enough, because if he lands a multiyear, megacontract at some point in the next few weeks, the risk of conducting such an experiment might prove to be too high. Which is why I am still rooting for some club to make a huge, one-year offer to Bauer that will give him the leeway to set back the pitcher-usage calendar, while limiting the exposure of the team for being so bold.
Who might that team be? Generally speaking, it would be a club with a distinct hierarchy in its rotation, with two or three established veterans at the front of it, but which also has a depth of young starters whose workloads they want to micromanage, or veterans on innings limits who are coming off of injury. That team would also have to be innovative and bold, and it would have to be in the realm of contention, which is another item on Bauer's want list.
Leaving money out of the equation, which Bauer isn't going to do, the Reds remain a great fit, with Bauer atop a big three followed by some order of Gray and Castillo, leaving Bell to mix and match for the last two rotation slots among Mahle, Miley, Antone and Michael Lorenzen. On the non-Reds front, the Rays would be another ideal fit if they could afford Bauer, which they can't. Bauer could team with Tyler Glasnow to anchor the rotation, helping to ease Kevin Cash's challenge of integrating young, protected arms like Brent Honeywell and Brendan McKay. And the meeting of the minds between Bauer and the Rays' front office would be something to behold.
There are a couple of teams that are both intriguing fits and aren't necessarily priced out of Bauer's market.
First, there are the Angels. L.A. has a new front office, led by former Braves assistant GM Perry Minasian, and it would have to sell Bauer on its analytic fit. But if there is one manager who you could see jump into an every-fourth-day experiment with both feet, it's Joe Maddon. Also, goodness knows the Angels need a starting pitching infusion, and what better way to get one than sign a Los Angeles-area native who would start more than a quarter of their games? With Bauer in the super-starter role, suddenly Andrew Heaney and Dylan Bundy look like passable twos and threes, and the project of slotting Shohei Ohtani in once a week might be a lot more doable. (Though the first question Maddon would have to answer: If a Bauer day falls on Ohtani's Sunday, who pitches?)
The other is the Twins, who need to make a splash after the offseason splurge of AL Central rival Chicago. Under Wes Johnson, Minnesota has become a place with a thriving think-tank-like setting and the club has a nice overall culture of collaboration fostered from the Derek Falvey-Thad Levine front office to the dugout, where Rocco Baldelli has become one of the game's best and most progressive skippers. The Twins' rotation with a Super Bauer atop it would slot Jose Berrios in as a star-level No. 2 and Kenta Maeda as an elite No. 3. Minnesota is looking to replace free-agent starters Rich Hill and Jake Odorizzi, and what better way to do so than to throw a big short-term offer at Bauer?
If I were granted one wish this offseason, it would be that Bauer finds a team that will let him pitch every fourth day. The pragmatic reason to root for this innovation is that it would show that reducing the workload of every pitcher isn't necessarily an irresistible trend. If there is one Bauer then there could be others, and while they'd be scarce, their value and notoriety would be immense.
A more romantic reason to hope for this is the potential return of truly epic pitching seasons, the kind of which we now speak of as if they were tales written by Homer. You certainly still see special performances by pitchers like Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom, but I'm talking about Denny McLain in 1968, Ron Guidry in 1978, Dwight Gooden in 1985 and Roger Clemens in 1986 -- seasons that combine the efficiency and dominance of a 2021 superstar starter with the huge counting stats of starters of yore. You know, the kind of season it feels like we'll never see again.
Never might not be that long if some team is willing to let Bauer do what he says he can do. And if he pulls it off, who knows? Maybe teams will see that and wonder who else might be capable of filling this new megastarter role, one that seemed to have vanished from big league baseball. If some team will let him, that's what Trevor Bauer could become in 2021, and what a story it would be. Baseball could use such a story right now. Bauer just needs one team that will listen.
"I want a team that's open to actually having that discussion with me," Bauer said in his video. "Not just shut it down and laugh."