Just How Rare Are Quality Starting Pitchers? A Thirty-Five Year Look at Baseball’s Dying Breed
Major League Baseball has seen the game of baseball change drastically over a century. Some changes were physical: the dead ball era of the early 1900s and the Steroid Era at the end of the 20th century. Other changes were analytical: expanding strategies, Sabermetrics, “Moneyball”, etc. In the 21st century, organizations have leaned more into relievers and relievers to have stronger, more consistent end-game performance. This trend has major ripple effects through the Majors into the Minors and college. With a roster needing more pitchers, how are these players being used? How are these pitchers being paid? Are there even enough pitchers to maintain a talented, healthy-enough-to-throw pitching program? This article looks at the trends as they have evolved in the past forty years and highlights some emerging patterns that have come out of the Major Leagues.
Roster sizes have been fixed since the 1980s, however the number of pitching transactions on and off the roster have substantially increased. The 1984 Detroit Tigers had a 40-man roster including fourteen pitchers. The league average was 16.7 pitchers making it onto the 40-man roster at some point during the season. In 1990, it was 19.7 pitchers on the 40-man, and in 2000, it was 22.4. The graph below displays the growth of reliever usage since 1984. The number of starters on a Major League roster seems to track the thinking of the league: hold on to your main group of starters but get them more help to save arms and save games. However, with major elbow and shoulder injuries on the rise, it’s unsurprising to see the largest five-year increase in starters-on-roster happen between 2014 and 2019.
The increase in reliever utilization leads to other questions: how are the starters and relievers being used? Historical Innings Pitched and Games data for this analysis has been pulled from baseball-reference.com. Let us start with the number of players in the league in 1984. In 1984, 393 pitchers recorded a major league inning. Of that 393, 252 players started one or more games and the other 141 were relievers. Taking a look at 1984’s pitchers, the graph below shows their games played compared to the number of innings pitched.
You can see the two divisions of players: your typical starter was throwing twenty to forty games and throwing on average 6.2 innings whereas the relievers were throwing twenty to eighty games averaging 1.5 innings per game. There are a good handful of guys in the “Starting Games but not pitching a ton of innings” area in the middle of the “V”, but visually one can see the starters being clustered around 30-40 games played and 150 or more innings thrown. Guys starting thirty games or more had an average IP/G of 6.56 innings per game played. Twenty-six pitchers had an average IP/G of 7 or greater. Doyle Alexander started 35 games and pitched 267 innings for an IP/G of 7.629.
Different trends start to emerge when looking at 2004. In 2004, there were now a total of thirty Major League teams and a total of 632 pitchers who threw an inning in the Majors. If the relation had stayed the same but accounted for four additional teams, there would have been 454 pitchers throwing in the Majors. Keep in mind that the numbers of games played has not changed – besides 2020 it has been a 162-game regular season since the start of the 1962 season. Accounting for new teams, the numbers of total pitchers utilized across the league grew approximately 40% between 1984 and 2004.
The scatterplots show how this trend emerges as well. In 2004 the league consisted of 304 starters and 328 relievers. The Starter / Reliever ratio dropped from 1.787 in 1984 to 0.927 in 2004. Other drops include the percent of the league throwing in over twenty games and more than fifty innings. It has dropped from 59.8% of all pitchers down to 42.9% of all pitchers. While in 1984 there were plenty of players in the middle of the “V”, there are only a few dozen pitchers who found themselves in the no-mans-land of around 25-50 games played and around 3.5 innings pitched per game. The game seemingly transitioned into starters throwing less games and on average an inning or two less. For starters who started at least one game, the average IP/G was 4.52 innings, whereas when focusing on starters who started a dozen or more games, the average IP/G increased to 5.62 innings per game. For the 2004 relievers, the average IP/G was 1.09 innings for all relievers and 1.06 innings for relievers who had played twelve or more games. The most telling statistic from 2004 about player usage was the fact that 36.1% of the league was under twenty games played and under fifty innings played. 26.1% of the pitchers in the league had under twelve games and under thirty innings pitched. Eighty-eight pitchers (13.9% of the pitchers in the league) threw less than nine innings over the entire season.
By 2019, there were no major team or schedule changes made to the MLB. It was seemingly the end of the Steroid Era after 2006’s major crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs. How did this era look for the evolution of the game? In 2019, 831 pitchers threw an MLB inning with a league Starter to Reliever ratio of 0.795. According to Spotrac data from 2019, 36.2% of the pitchers landed on the DL list for some injury. Of those injuries, a league total of 14.2% of pitchers were put on the 60-day DL list.
In 2019, the usage of the starter decreased on average even further. The average innings pitched per game for all starters was 3.65 innings and for those playing in twelve or more games, the IP/G average was 4.97 innings per game. Starting pitchers also saw more usage as relief pitchers – in 2004 the average Games – Games Started among Starters was 5.8 more games played than started. In 2019, the Games – Games Started had risen to 11.45 more games played than games started on average. Out of 831 pitchers, 246 pitchers threw less than twelve games and under thirty innings. 173 pitchers (20.8%) threw less than nine innings the entire season. Compared to the scaled usage of a 454 pitcher-in-the-league equivalent in 1984, the number of pitchers utilized in the majors is up 83% since 1984.
Overall, one can see on the three scatterplots overlayed that the numbers for total games played and total innings thrown have shrunk. The general positive trend for relievers thickened as more relievers were added to the game, however starter usage because less clustered around the general trendline of throwing thirty-some games and throwing around six innings a game. While the trend of some league pitchers throwing a lot of games and fewer innings may have rebounded from 1984, the number of relievers and relievers in the league looks nothing like 1984. With an 80% increase in pitchers playing in the majors, the cost of fielding a team of starters, relievers, and closers is growing. Pitching staffs aren’t just increasing in size – more players are being injured resulting in more and more salary space being burnt on players on the DL. Spotrac DL data shows that $330 million in pitcher salaries was lost to the DL in 2015. That number didn’t see a major jump until 2018, reaching $371.9 million lost. In 2019 the amount had ballooned up to $477.3 million. As of late-July 2021 it’s already at $267.7 million lost.
The minimum salary for an MLB player in 2021 is $570,500 USD. Not all pitching contracts are the same, however. In 1985, a pitching staff was around 17 players on the 40-man roster, and the highest pitching contract in 1985 was Rich Gossage’s $1.713 million. Gossage made 28.55 times more than 1985’s minimum salary of $60,000. Strasburg made $38.3 million in 2019, coming in at 69 times more than the league’s minimum salary of $555,000 at the time. In 2019, pitching staffs are up to an average of 29 players. While minor league guys may get pulled up with a minimum contract, the median salary for a starting pitcher was $2.25 million, whereas the mean salary was $5.45 million. Seventy-five percent of starting pitchers make less than $7.4 million. At these prices, one can see why you would want to get the most usage out of your starting pitchers and keep their arms alive. The question for 2021 and beyond is going to be will there be enough talent that small-to-mid market teams can keep healthy – and afford.
Summary
Pitcher utilization is changing and in the past decade, injuries are trending upward as average innings pitched and innings pitched per game declines. Some of this seems to be the result of strategy but the worrying concern for the future is the health and possibility replacement of starting pitchers. How low will the average starting pitcher’s innings per game drop? Are the pipelines of the minors, colleges, and high schools going to produce enough healthy, capable talent to perform in the major leagues, or is there going to be a reckoning for how youth sports and intercollegiate competition is conducted? Let’s hope we can find the remedies before we have to start finding alternatives.
In the future, DVS Baseball will analyze the impact of the dying breed of starting pitchers on team salaries at the small, mid, and major markets. If you want to read more analysis like this in the future, be sure to subscribe to the DVS Baseball newsletter below and follow us on our social feeds.