Baseball

Middle relief is the secret to success

Some day soon, more teams will figure out the value of setup specialists

J. Meric / Getty Images file

Hideki Okajima gives the Red Sox a strong presence in the middle innings as a setup man for Jonathan Papelbon.

We like to talk about how the major leagues have been experiencing a pitching drought for decades. In truth, there’s more pitching than ever out there. It’s just that not much of it is effective against modern hitting.

I didn’t check every team in baseball, but last year both the Yankees and the Phillies went through 28 pitchers each during a single season. The Red Sox and Cubs, on the other hand, needed “just” 20 pitchers to get through 162 games.

Compare that to the early days of the game. In 1905, the New York Giants went through the season with six pitchers, with two of them – the aptly-named “Iron Man” Mcginnity and Christy Mathewson - combining for 75 starts and 89 appearances. They also combined for 58 complete games. And only five of those pitchers worked regularly; the seventh man on the staff, Claude Elliott, appeared in just 10 games.

Back then, a starting pitcher who didn’t throw 300 innings couldn’t show his face in public for fear of being called a pantywaist. But the last time anyone hit 300 innings was back in 1980, when Steve Carlton did it. As I said, it’s been three years since anyone threw as many as 250 innings. Moreover, rare is the team today that has even three pitchers who throw as many as 200 innings.

Some 20 years ago, teams carried 10 pitchers into the season. Today, they carry 12 or more. And they go through another dozen during the season. Some of those guys are late-season call-ups, but most are just guys called up to fill in for injuries or to attempt to replace people who can’t get the job done.

The bottom line here is that 30 teams are using a combined total of more than 600 pitchers a year. Some of them are traded during the season and work for multiple teams, but that’s a lot of pitchers. And most of them are all trying to get their teams through the sixth, seventh and eighth innings; they’re middle relievers.

Given the numbers, you’d think teams would start developing guys who can fill that role and lend some more certainty to the end game. And they are. The Red Sox are rightfully delighted with Okajima as the bridge to Papelbon. Given that they won the AL East last year and the World Series, it would seem they’re on to something.

Mike Celizic writes regularly for NBCSports.com and is a freelance writer based in New York.

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