UTK Special 6/23/20
The Great Experiment Has Begun
I’ve told this story before, but I’ll do it again for those of you that are new. Back in … well, it must have been 2010 … I had a talk with Doug Melvin, then the General Manager of the Milwaukee Brewers. He had a solid staff coming into the season, but they weren’t great. It was a bunch of 3/4 starters like Randy Wolf, Doug Davis, Chris Narveson, and Chris Capuano. Good, not great.
Through a long conversation over dinner, I thought I had Doug convinced to go to a four man rotation and using an opener. That opener was no weak sauce pitcher either; it was future Hall of Famer Trevor Hoffman. I didn’t have him convinced, partly because Hoffman was racking up saves towards his HoF resume and I get it.
In retrospect, I’m not sure any of it would have worked. A tandem of Gallardo and Capuano, Parra and Davis, etc, might not have been much better, while Hoffman faded quickly, ceding his closer role to John Axford early in the season. In using an opener at the University of Indianapolis this year, there are more complications to it than I thought, though I think the system is not only viable, but ideal for the modern game (and this season in particular.)
Total sidebar: I think a short season lends itself to more creative pitcher usage. I need to see how rest would work, might I might use a 9 man, every day pitching staff, using a ‘rotation’ of six starters (five each day for an inning with a rest day every sixth day) and a back end of four relievers for an inning each. A twelve-man staff could easily handle this, though again, I need to see how the 2020 schedule will handle off-days and travel.
A team is going to have a grand experiment this year, or at least the chance at it, to try and find an optimal short-frame pitching usage model that translates to an environment where a win is worth even more, in terms of championship probability. A one or two game swing is going to be massive, so some of the things we don’t see - medical staff ability, manager ability - are going to count for more. They’re “intangible” but real.
There’s another, perhaps bigger, experiment happening out there, but this one will go unseen, for a while. With no minor league season, we’re going to test another theory of mine: What would happen if you did a Tommy John rehab on someone who didn’t have Tommy John? Give them a year of rest, a manageable workload, and an ability to focus on their pitching without the competitive demands.
Well, like it or not, that’s pretty much what everyone is doing now, if they’re not a major leaguer. Pitching instruction, development, and … maintenance? … is now essentially being outsourced. Teams are obviously going to be involved, but we’ll see a greater influence from the Drivelines, APECs, and Kinetic Pros of the world.
We’re going to see some say that this is going to be about work ethic, but that’s a lazy shorthand for a lack of a true scientific methodology. There are going to be pitchers that work hard and fail, or that are naturally gifted and succeed. Hard work, grit, and resilience are real, but they’re not determinative until talent is in a certain range.
The real problem is that for the most part, we’re not going to see these results until next year. Sure, we’ll see the occasional social media pop up. Some guy will go from 90 to 95, someone from 95 to 100. Someone will develop a knee-buckling slider in a strip mall. But in baseball, we get that every year. Just watch the draft. What will be key is seeing broad, sustainable progress and if you can tell me how to objectively measure that, please tell me.
We’re in a grand experiment. Pitching is changing right now and we’re failing to develop what comes next because we can’t even agree to pay those athletes to do it in a consistent manner. Why does anyone expect success? There’s an assymetric advantage right there, ripe for the picking.