 | "Through everything baseball has ever been, a pastime, a scandal, a tradition, it has always remained one thing: Baseball is a sport of constant innovation..." |
Through everything baseball has ever been, a pastime, a scandal, a tradition, it has always remained one thing: Baseball is a sport of constant innovation, and the Indians may have set forth a movement that’s been in the works for 40 years.
In 2002, when the Oakland Athletics managed to win 103 games (after losing their biggest stars by becoming ‘bean counters,)’ teams made the switch to become more statistically oriented. When the Giants had their run of even year dominance defined by talented young pitching, teams began drafting and trading for young talented pitching. And in 2015 when the Royals won by acquiring powerful arms to put in the back end of their bullpen, teams acquired power arms to finish off games.
The Indians have taken what the Royals did one step further, and may have set in motion something that the statistical minds of baseball have been advocating for years: Bullpenning.
The entire idea of a bullpen is relatively new and took off with a guy named Goose Gossage. He was, and still is, one of the most intimidating pitchers to ever play the game. He stood on the mound, six foot three, 217, toes pointed down towards the plate as he stared at you getting set in the box. A word to describe an at bat against Gossage would be uncomfortable.
Ever since then, the way pitching in a baseball game is managed has been fairly uniform, with a few minor changes, for the past 40-50 years. Every team has five starting pitchers on their team, each starter pitches at the start of a game every fifth day. The starter (or starting pitcher) tends to go around 5-7 innings. After that the manager takes the pitcher out of the game, he will bring in a relief pitcher (or member of the bullpen) to pitch one inning, and then how ever many more he needs to finish the game at this current rate.
The Indians completely broke this mold, and not intentionally. Towards the end of the year, two of the five Indians pitchers went down with season ending injuries, forcing Terry Francona (depicted at left), their manager, to get creative with his bullpen, bringing them into games early and having them pitch extended stints.
Full bullpenning is this, but put to the extreme. There are many different models of how this could work, but this is the most standard, which is mapped out as followed; instead of a starting staff being manned by five individual players, it is manned by three, three pitcher groups. The first pitcher in the group will go the first three innings, then the second will go the second three, and the third will go the final three. Then the next game the second three man staff will go, and in the third game the third three man staff will go, and then it turns back over to the first. This would put every pitcher at around 162 innings, a very common mark already among starters.
One issue with this particular model, is that current bullpen pitchers only pitch around 50 innings a year, the good ones pitch only 70. Making the jump from 70 to 162 is not an easy thing to do, mentally or physically. But generally this model would be successful, and it is of course the managers call how they want to manage a pitching staff.
With the amount of runs being scored right now at an all time low, and the amount of good pitching in baseball at an all time high, many may ask why make the change? Well it is simply because the less runs you allow, the higher chance you have to win.
Many may also question the method. Given that the hitters are facing the same pitcher, how many times he sees that pitcher shouldn’t matter. But it does, not only because the pitcher gets tired as the goes on but the hitter starts to get used to how the ball looks coming out of the pitcher's hands.
The stat I will use to demonstrate this change is called “weighted on base average” or wOBA. wOBA attempts to measure what percentage of a run a player creates every time he steps to the plate. I’m using this because it is the most accurate representation of how many runs a team will score in a year. The higher the wOBA the better the team's offense will be. The most recent data I could find was from the 1999-2002 seasons, but this data will do well enough to show how much better pitchers are the first time through the order.
The average wOBA against starters those years was .353, a much higher number than any today but that is an article for another time. The average team with a .353 wOBA against would have allowed probably around 900 runs including bullpen runs. A team that only has a .345 wOBA against the starters would only allow 874 runs.
Now I know this difference seems insignificant, and if you do some projection math the win difference only results out to one or two wins, but this would not only help catapult teams who are close to a playoff berth gain one, but help teams who have trouble finishing off games. With this method, you know what you get. This could also help alleviate the workload for young pitchers and decrease fatigue based injury.
In a game where scoring is at it’s lowest teams have attempted to win in all of the wrong ways. An offensive oriented team has not won a world series since 2009 Yankees did it. Pitching is becoming the way to win and this is becoming the way to pitch.
In 2002, when the Oakland Athletics managed to win 103 games (after losing their biggest stars by becoming ‘bean counters,)’ teams made the switch to become more statistically oriented. When the Giants had their run of even year dominance defined by talented young pitching, teams began drafting and trading for young talented pitching. And in 2015 when the Royals won by acquiring powerful arms to put in the back end of their bullpen, teams acquired power arms to finish off games.
The Indians have taken what the Royals did one step further, and may have set in motion something that the statistical minds of baseball have been advocating for years: Bullpenning.
The entire idea of a bullpen is relatively new and took off with a guy named Goose Gossage. He was, and still is, one of the most intimidating pitchers to ever play the game. He stood on the mound, six foot three, 217, toes pointed down towards the plate as he stared at you getting set in the box. A word to describe an at bat against Gossage would be uncomfortable.
Ever since then, the way pitching in a baseball game is managed has been fairly uniform, with a few minor changes, for the past 40-50 years. Every team has five starting pitchers on their team, each starter pitches at the start of a game every fifth day. The starter (or starting pitcher) tends to go around 5-7 innings. After that the manager takes the pitcher out of the game, he will bring in a relief pitcher (or member of the bullpen) to pitch one inning, and then how ever many more he needs to finish the game at this current rate.
The Indians completely broke this mold, and not intentionally. Towards the end of the year, two of the five Indians pitchers went down with season ending injuries, forcing Terry Francona (depicted at left), their manager, to get creative with his bullpen, bringing them into games early and having them pitch extended stints.
Full bullpenning is this, but put to the extreme. There are many different models of how this could work, but this is the most standard, which is mapped out as followed; instead of a starting staff being manned by five individual players, it is manned by three, three pitcher groups. The first pitcher in the group will go the first three innings, then the second will go the second three, and the third will go the final three. Then the next game the second three man staff will go, and in the third game the third three man staff will go, and then it turns back over to the first. This would put every pitcher at around 162 innings, a very common mark already among starters.
One issue with this particular model, is that current bullpen pitchers only pitch around 50 innings a year, the good ones pitch only 70. Making the jump from 70 to 162 is not an easy thing to do, mentally or physically. But generally this model would be successful, and it is of course the managers call how they want to manage a pitching staff.
With the amount of runs being scored right now at an all time low, and the amount of good pitching in baseball at an all time high, many may ask why make the change? Well it is simply because the less runs you allow, the higher chance you have to win.
Many may also question the method. Given that the hitters are facing the same pitcher, how many times he sees that pitcher shouldn’t matter. But it does, not only because the pitcher gets tired as the goes on but the hitter starts to get used to how the ball looks coming out of the pitcher's hands.
The stat I will use to demonstrate this change is called “weighted on base average” or wOBA. wOBA attempts to measure what percentage of a run a player creates every time he steps to the plate. I’m using this because it is the most accurate representation of how many runs a team will score in a year. The higher the wOBA the better the team's offense will be. The most recent data I could find was from the 1999-2002 seasons, but this data will do well enough to show how much better pitchers are the first time through the order.
The average wOBA against starters those years was .353, a much higher number than any today but that is an article for another time. The average team with a .353 wOBA against would have allowed probably around 900 runs including bullpen runs. A team that only has a .345 wOBA against the starters would only allow 874 runs.
Now I know this difference seems insignificant, and if you do some projection math the win difference only results out to one or two wins, but this would not only help catapult teams who are close to a playoff berth gain one, but help teams who have trouble finishing off games. With this method, you know what you get. This could also help alleviate the workload for young pitchers and decrease fatigue based injury.
In a game where scoring is at it’s lowest teams have attempted to win in all of the wrong ways. An offensive oriented team has not won a world series since 2009 Yankees did it. Pitching is becoming the way to win and this is becoming the way to pitch.