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Yesterday, ESPN’s Jesse Rogers reported that one of the rule changes MLB is considering is mandating that starting pitchers go at least six innings, with some exceptions. Having garnered considerable praise for its rule changes prior to the 2023 season, the league seems eager for another hit of that positive media attention by placating a vocal subset of media who want the game to look like it did in 1983.
As reported by Rogers, the rule would mandate that starting pitchers throw six frames unless they reached 100 pitches, allowed four runs, or suffered an injury. To prevent deceit, pitchers leaving the game under the last clause would have to go to the IL for some time.
What are we talking about here? Well, in 1998, the first year in which we had 30 teams, there were 408 starts -- about 8% of games -- in which a pitcher didn’t hit any of those figures. Last season, that figure was 1514, about 30% of starts. These are all games in which a starting pitcher is lifted while pitching reasonably well and not running up his pitch count. This rule, which would eliminate openers and tandem starts, would force starting pitchers in those 1100-odd games to stay in until one of those marks was hit.
The inspiration for this is the idea that starting pitchers are the stars of a baseball game, which is a very 1960s-1980s prism through which to see the sport. It is porting a football mindset -- where the quarterback really is the center of everything -- to baseball. The only pitchers who ever drove attendance were Fernando Valenzuela and Nolan Ryan. The idea that fans were heading to the park in droves to watch Dan Petry take on Paul Splittorff is invented.
This thinking privileges a specific era of the game, and one that broke dozens of great talents in the service of this idea. You know why Jack Morris led baseball in wins in the 1980s? Because a whole lot of better pitchers, Hall of Fame talents, were ruined by a sport that asked young starting pitchers to throw 275 innings a year.
Rogers quotes a number of executives who cite the pitcher version of the double-bank-shot idea we saw with hitters and the shift rule: If you mandate six-inning starts, pitchers will have to pitch differently. In doing so they may get hurt less, behave less like witches, and make the hitter/pitcher battle a bit more fair for hitters. There is some truth to this -- pitchers balance endurance with effort and this would force them to shift that balance. From the piece:
"You would have to push command over stuff," Arizona Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen said. "Pushing [pitching to] contact would be the biggest thing to prepare guys to throw six innings on a consistent basis.”
It would be an attempt to reverse 30 years of trading off volume for effectiveness by front offices, player development, and pitchers. As Rogers notes, this could not possibly happen overnight. It took 30 years to get here, and the entire ladder from amateur ball through the World Series is predicated on max-effort pitching. It would take 30 years to reverse that, even if you could. I simply don’t see a world where scouts are prioritizing lower-velocity high-school prospects, or where college coaches paid to win games tell their hurlers to dial it back a bit.
This rule, like so many others MLB has proposed or threatened, is designed to win a press conference and placate a vocal subset of fans and writers. It addresses a knock-on effect of pitcher development -- starters get pulled from games earlier than they used to -- with an awkward kludge whose indirect effects are speculative at best. The pickoff limits created a lot of free stolen bases. The shift ban let hitters double down on dead-pull hitting. My guess is a six-inning mandate would warp the flow of a baseball game, turning the middle innings into a race to four runs as tiring pitchers were forced to face lineups a third time for...reasons. Remember, the third-time-around penalty wasn’t invented at a SABR conference in 1991. It existed for Sandy Koufax and Fergie Jenkins, and isn’t going away any time soon.
This rule is just going to make the sixth inning a slog many nights. Even then, most pitchers who get through the sixth are still going to be pulled because the best way to win the baseball game will be to bring in a fresh pitcher. The number of pitchers’ duels, the number of complete games, the number of shutouts, the number of no-hitters...absolutely none of this will change with this rule. Congratulations, you’ve forced Griffin Canning and Marcus Stroman to pitch through a lineup a third time an additional 20 times a year. Surely, the NFL won’t lead SportsCenter in July any more.
As with the shift ban, and countless off-field changes, this rule would force everyone to play the same way, which is the last thing baseball needs right now. You may not like shifts or openers, but their use did open up some real differences among teams about how to win baseball games. The Rays won 96 games in 2019 using openers about a quarter of the time. The A’s won 97 games and used openers three times. Two years ago, the Blue Jays won 92 games while shifting more than any team in the sport. The Guardians won 92 games with the second-lowest rate of shifts.
We need rule changes that encourage innovation and imagination. There’s a homogeneity to baseball right now that is choking the sport. Mandating every team use its starting pitchers the exact same way pushes the game in the wrong direction.
What’s most frustrating about this is the path forward has been obvious for a decade. Changes to starting pitcher usage aren’t about starters, they’re about relievers. Bullpens are twice as large now as they were when Koufax and Jenkins were pitching, and 60% larger than they were when Petry and Splittorff were captivating America. Those pens aren’t filled with lesser pitchers any more, either, but with velo and spin monsters developed to throw 15 pitches at max effort three times a week.
If you want MLB teams to rely more on their starting pitchers, you have to limit the relief options available both to managers and GMs. The league capped pitching staffs at 13 a few years back, a meaningless restriction, and hasn’t addressed roster movement. I write this Friday morning, and over the first four days of this baseball week. 218 relief pitchers have been used. The Reds used eight different relief pitchers in a three-game sweep of the Cardinals. The Red Sox used ten relievers in four games.
That’s what you have to fix. That’s what you write rules for. Cap pitching staffs at 12 beginning in 2025, and then at 11 starting in 2027, and you start to change the equation for managers. Limit roster moves, or pitchers used in a week, or do something else that breaks the daily shuttles, and you start to change the equation for front offices. This is how you change the use of starting pitchers, not by forcing them to pitch when they’re the worst option, but by making it so that on more days, they’re the best option.
