Starters Work Less Today, but No Less Hard

One of the worst consequences of the Yankees' recent pitching woes has been that they've created an opening for the nostalgist set to decry the weakness of the modern athlete and laud the virtues of antiquity. You're familiar with the argument, which comes in many guises. The most current blames the ineffectiveness and heavy workload of the Yankee bullpen less on the injuries to starting pitching and more on the unwillingness or inability of the remaining starters to pitch deep into games. In the old days, the argument goes, pitchers like Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson finished what they started, because they were stronger and tougher than the coddled sissies of today.

This is essentially ridiculous, and really isn't to be taken all that seriously. Pitchers threw more innings in the old days because the game was different. Greg Maddux, whose strength and toughness can be held up against those of anyone this side of Iron Joe McGinnity, has pointed out that when he broke into baseball, pitchers didn't hit opposite field home runs, while they do now, and that's pretty indicative of the differences between today's game and that of the past. Small changes in the rules and structures of the game lead to great changes.

The bigger gloves and better equipment of today, for instance, make fielding easier, which allows managers to start strong hitters at key defensive positions they couldn't have handled in the past, and thus lengthens lineups so that you end up with the likes of Jorge Posada and Robinson Cano batting in the eight hole. The main difference between today's best pitchers and the aces of yore isn't that the former work less, but that they work more intensely. Koufax, pitching in big parks against lineups stacked with long stretches of players who had no power, could take an inning or two of three off every start, saving his best stuff for big spots. Andy Pettitte can't do that nearly as often, and that's a big part of the reason why he doesn't pitch as much as he might have back in the day.

From a more removed perspective, the very fact that ace pitchers routinely threw 300 innings a year 40 years ago is in fact evidence that the game has become more difficult since then. If it hadn't, the bigger, stronger pitchers of today would be able to pitch more innings than their forebears. It's something like the argument against Wilt Chamberlain's primacy among basketball players: The very fact that he was able to average 50 points a game is proof not only of his greatness, but also of the fact that he was playing against a lot of guys who couldn't make a Division I team today. Today's best centers can't match the feat not because they're lesser athletes, but because the game is just different.

Another counterargument to the claim that today's pitchers are less manly than those of the past, and one of which I'm fond, relies on common sense. Certainly it might be nice in some abstract sense if Pettitte or Chien-Ming Wang could complete half their starts — but then, why should they? Why would a manager routinely stay with a tired pitcher who's just thrown six, seven, or eight innings when some warmed-up flamethrower is waiting in the bullpen? Surely a fatigued ace shows the effects of his fatigue.

While this is so, facts can be inconvenient. Hoping to back common sense with some hard evidence, I checked up on four of the legendary aces of yesteryear, expecting to find that they were routinely less effective in the latter third of games than they were in the earlier two-thirds. Actually, this wasn't so. Tom Seaver and Don Drysdale were both by far more effective in the final three innings of games, while Bob Gibson was more effective than he was in the first three innings, though less so than he was in the middle three. Sandy Koufax, as it turns, was about 15% more effective in the final three innings; his teammate Drysdale was 17% better. My hopes of anecdotally disproving anecdotal claims of the toughness of old school pitchers were dashed — this group of aces, the same ones everyone trumpets as legendary iron men, actually did get tougher as the games went on.

There was, of course, a big, obvious flaw in my reasoning — starters will of course always have better ERAs in the late innings of games because of a selection effect. If they're scuffling, they get removed; they only make it to the late innings if they're pitching well. Still, does this not validate the idea that yesterday's aces were as tough as everyone remembers?

Perhaps, but there's another way to look at this. Roger Clemens, for instance, has pitched into the late innings far less than someone like Koufax, but he's also been far more effective when he has — in his career he's allowed 29% fewer runs in the last three innings of games than in the first six. Pedro Martinez has allowed 21% fewer runs. Maddux has allowed 25% fewer. This is a very small group of pitchers we're talking about, far too few to allow any conclusions to be drawn, but the greater effectiveness of these modern aces in the late innings when contrasted to the aces of the past might suggest the managers today are simply doing a better job of discerning when a top pitcher should get the hook and when he should be left in.

Basically, then, because the Yankees follow modern orthodoxy on when to take pitchers out of games, if they did have a bunch of exceptionally durable horses, it wouldn't do the bullpen any good except insofar as those pitchers would be pitching deeper into starts in the games in which they pitched well. If that sounds like a tautology — "The Yankees would be better off with better pitchers because it's better to have better pitchers"— that's because it is. There's a lot to criticize about the team's rotation, and Joe Torre's handling of the bullpen. But chalking the team's woes, such as they are at this point, up to the softness of the rotation is just a grumpy way of saying it's a good thing to have good pitchers. And who didn't know that?

tmarchman@nysun.com