UTK Special 12/30/23

The Pitching Problem

Lucas Giolito signed a complex deal with the Boston Red Sox. The details are out there, but functionally, it’s a one year deal with a pair of options, all around $19m. It’s not a bad payday, but it’s below this year’s qualifying offer and well below where it looked like Giolito was going to be at the All Star break. I heard someone call it a fancy pillow deal and it’s not wrong.

It’s one more pitcher off the market and not to make everything about the Dodgers, Giolito’s hometown status made me think he could be a good, relatively cheap option for them to fill out their rotation. Over the last few weeks, the Dodgers have re-made theirs, but it’s still not enough. But many of you smart readers have said much the same thing to me in emails: “No team has enough.”

Correct. There’s a few exceptions, starting with the Blue Jays. I told Mike Wilner on his podcast that the health of their rotation and belief in it comes down to whether you think have four starters make 30+ starts was luck or a plan. I lean more to the latter with that team, but all pitchers are healthy until they aren’t.

But as I was thinking more about this, it was something Wilner said that stuck with me: four. Four starters and in an age where teams are talking about six man rotations, the four makes so much more sense. The first argument for it is the shortage of pitchers. There are very, very few teams that have five good starters, let alone six. Spreading the starts out over five and six men mean less starts - really, less key inning opportunities - for the aces.

I’ll pick a team at random … Detroit. The Tigers current depth chart on Rotowire has nine pitchers. You can make an argument that all nine are reasonable options for the rotation, but there’s no good argument to say that the top guys aren’t better than the bottom guys. The first is going to be better than the sixth, even if I can’t quite tell you now who either is. Let’s use Rotowire’s current ratings and say that the top five will be Tarik Skubal, Kenta Maeda, Jack Flaherty, Reese Olson, and Casey Mize.

Wow, that’s a lot of uncertainty and I’m hating that I randomly picked the Tigers. Sub Matt Manning in for Mize - who could be healthy, finally - and it’s also reasonable. 7, 8, and 9 are fringy guys who make starts when one of those guys are out, just like every other team. Especially with an injury question mark like Mize, his innings are going to have to be limited, so why not have him go four innings every fourth day? There’s depth for whoever is the fifth/swingman to fill in as both the long reliever and occasional starter. Harris and Hinch are smart enough to figure out a rotation plan, if they so choose, to use four starters.

Yes, you read it right - four for four. I’ll say five innings is the ideal - not pitches, but times through the order. The third time penalty is well documented and for players like Mize, taking a bit off that isn’t a bad thing and doesn’t overload the bullpen, which can be reloaded from Toledo more easily, especially with a couple starters in hand. Handing Skubal the ball 38 to 40 times a season is the best case, not a fringe idea. Managing his workload should be the standard, not an outlier.

I could go through this with almost every team. The Blue Jays stand out with their health. Could giving Gausman, Basset, Kikuchi, and Berrios the ball more (but pitching about the same workload) help? Well, if I told you it essentially eliminated Alek Manoah’s 19 starts, would that convince you? Manoah can be the long man, coming in with leads and low leverage situations. Maybe he turns things around, maybe he doesn’t.

When the “Moneyball Revolution” started, there were smart teams and dumb teams, or at least teams that were slow to pick up on things. There’s still teams that have advantages in areas, but the game has largely been optimized to the point that the rules had to be changed because the optimization didn’t solve for excitement.

The advantage now is in shaking up the optimization, either by fixing problems like pitcher health with sports science, or by changing the parameters enough to create different outcomes. A properly done four man rotation is still one of those advantages, perhaps now more than ever.

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Another year of UTK closes and I head into my 23rd season of writing this column. My favorite player growing up was Ryne Sandberg, who wore 23, and I never thought I’d meet the guy, something this column allowed me to do. I hope all of you had a great year and heading in ‘24 it’s going to be something. We’re all going to need the distraction of baseball and I think that the one thing we’ll see this year is more stability. There’s no big rule changes, even if it means another year without robe-umps. We have favorites and also-rans, more great stars than you can shake a stick at, and an influx of talent that the World Baseball Classic has wrought. Happy New Year to all of you and thank you for reading.