Game 48, Mariners at Athletics – Tacomafication
Yusei Kikuchi vs. Frankie Montas, 6:40pm
The M’s tumble continues, the line-ups remain underwhelming and underpowered, and now they’ve got to start a series with another of the AL’s better teams. This isn’t going to get easier, though it’s heartening to know Dylan Moore at least is about ready to come off of the IL, and Ty France is officially back tonight.
The M’s offensive struggles are getting all kinds of attention, which is never a good sign. The increase in league-wide K rate and the dramatic reduction in league batting average is seen most in the increasingly-common no-hitters, but it’s also a problem for watchability. It’s harder to promote the game when an entire team – OUR team – is hitting below .200, and just looks lost against good pitching. Velocity and strikeouts continue their inexorable climb, leading to calls to make changes – from subtle to dramatic – to slow or reverse these trends, which are approaching 20 years old.
Today, Craig Goldstein and Patrick Dubuque have a great article at Baseball Prospectus arguing for restrictor plate for pitching – this was the device that limited the speed of stock race cars to avoid some of the big accidents that hit NASCAR in the 1980s. Like all changes, it had unintended consequences, which is something we’ve been talking a lot about this year with MLB’s perhaps not completely thought through alterations of the baseball.
Craig and Patrick propose two changes: first, a cap of 12 pitchers on each team’s roster – no more carrying 15 relievers. Second, pitch clocks that are enforced, preventing max-effort relievers from taking a minute between pitches to ensure their max effort really is maximum. They believe this would prioritize the development of starters who could work longer into games, reduce the velocity that seemingly every reliever throws at, and generally bring some balance back to the game – helpfully avoiding a bunch of late-game pitching changes as a side benefit to the pace-of-play worriers.
It’s an interesting argument, and one I’ve been thinking about all day. But I think it has a problem with the way that it structures its incentives; I think it’s going to make every big league club operate like the M’s in 2021, or, in other words, it would lead to Tacomafication. Trader Jerry not only likes to make a ton of trades at the big league level, he’s extraordinarily active on the waiver wire. To provide depth for an influx of new relievers/pitchers at the big league level, the M’s have to have *more* depth in AAA for the M’s to choose from. This culminated in the M’s using a jaw-dropping 57 pitchers in the 2017 season. Well, the 2021 season is not yet a month old, and the Tacoma Rainiers have now used…27 pitchers. They show no signs of slowing down.
With injuries, Covid scares, ineffectiveness, and the need to limit innings on starters following last year’s short season, demand for relievers is up. As Craig and Patrick write, teams are loathe to let reliever pitch in back-to-back games, which helps explain why pitchers are taking up a bigger share of the roster and why the added roster spot has generally gone to a pitcher. The Rainiers essentially act as the off-day program for the back of the M’s bullpen. We’ll see Aaron Fletcher and Wyatt Mills come up whenever there are injuries, and then they go back down after they pitch. All of this means that *Tacoma* then has pitchers who’ve pitched the previous day (for a different team), necessitating the increasingly-regular calls to Everett and/or Modesto. Or, failing that, the waves of minor league free agents and waiver claims that have given Tacoma Brooks Pounders, Ryan Dull, Taylor Guerrieri, etc.
But that’s just Jerry ADHDipoto in a pandemic year. What does this have to do with BP proposal? Well, I think the easy way for teams who were probably getting the shakes just reading the proposal to have the benefit of 16 relievers while rostering 12, is to churn the back of the ‘pen like never before. Or, like Tacoma. Teams will yo-yo the back of the bullpen, a process that may have gotten easier with the restructuring of the minor leagues keeping affiliates closer to their big league team. I think it actually *will* return some semblance of the baseball we knew from the prehistoric days of 2012 or so, in that the best 3-4 relievers won’t get yo-yo’d, and they may need to pitch in back to back games. But teams are going to want to play match-ups, to space out innings for their top set-up guy, and generally use more arms than the new rule would seem to allow.
So, what’s wrong with that? Things change, the back of the 26-man and 40-man have rarely been safe, developmental slots, and much more often the site of Jacob Nottingham-style precarity. If the proposal makes MLB more watchable even at the expense/inconvenience of AAA/AA, isn’t that worth it? In theory, maybe – it depends on how much you care about your local AAA club, perhaps. But here’s my judgment after three weeks of watching this in practice: it SUUUUUCKS. To act as Seattle’s remote bullpen, the Rainiers are essentially prevented from having any semblance of a rotation. Logan Gilbert pitched 5 innings in AAA, and was called up. Only one member of the Rainiers is qualified for the ERA title, and it’s still May. And that pitcher (Hector Santiago) wasn’t on the roster on opening day, which was also in May. The Rainiers have lots of relievers because they have to: they are running bullpen days for most games, essentially whenever Santiago and Darren McCaughan (who started the year in Arkansas) pitch. This is crazy, and it’s no way to develop anyone.
The M’s seem to know this. It’s not just that the games get weird or unattractive. It’s that you push the part of the game you’re ostensibly trying to fix down a level, and make it way worse. For fans, this isn’t great, but the annoying thing is that it might actually work for the M’s. If you’re dedicated to this brutalist baseball, you can segregate your approach. The M’s have a bunch of starters who’ve gotten off to fast starts in Arkansas, but with the exception of McCaughan, they’re leaving them there. Arkansas is for starting pitchers to develop and play normal baseball (5,6,7 IP starts). Tacoma is for 2 IP outings at most, for waiting on the nightly call-ups, and introducing yourself to the day’s crop of low-A call-ups and waiver claims.
This can work fine as a crutch, and I fear that teams would use it as such. I still don’t think this actually works to develop things like big league starters, and I don’t think it really helps get pitchers from the roster-churn spots up into the Kendall Graveman tier of effective, non-churning elite. It doesn’t end the merry-go-round of anonymous, 95-throwing relievers who, thanks to the magic of option years, yo-yo up and down all year – it ossifies it, it locks it in.
Some teams can get around this by spending in free agency, and others can either get great relievers in trade, or by relying on their own development group. That must be nice. But I’ve seen the 2021 Tacoma Rainiers, and fear that they’re a model we may see repeated if roster limits are imposed. Does that mean we shouldn’t try it? I dunno; it’s possible you could enforce similar or complementary limits down the line. I get worried about injuries further down the chain, so perhaps you relax them a bit as you get lower on the MiLB ladder. I worry that none of this will necessarily bring back base hits, which seems to be the thing people want, rather than HRs and mis-hit flies. But, ultimately, we won’t know until it happens.
Whhiiiich, it probably won’t. I think neither side on the CBA negotiation would see a lot of upside in the restrictions, unless you could convince ownership that it’d help pace of play and TV viewership. But MLB tv viewership seems remarkably inelastic with respect to things like time-of-game or percentage of the roster devoted to the back of the bullpen. It moves when a team is awful, and they know that, but I think owners view the modern bullpen strategy as a way to get more-or-less decent/average production for a fraction of the cost, and that’s why they’ll stick with it.
Thoughts? Concerns? Counter-arguments?
1: Kelenic, LF
2: Haniger, RF
3: Seager, 3B
4: Lewis, CF
5: Crawford, SS
6: France, 1B
7: Godoy, C
8: Nottingham, DH
9: Walton, 2B
SP: Kikuchi
Today’s roster churn/moves: the M’s claimed 3B Travis Blankenhorn off of waivers. He’d been with the Dodgers system, and has been optioned to Tacoma. Sam Haggerty moves on to the IL with an injured shoulder. Former Met/Oriole Logan Verrett is now with the M’s? He’d pitched in Korea in 2018, and signed a minor league deal with Oakland the following year, but I don’t think he pitched in 2020.
Taylor Trammell was named the AAA-West player of the week, which seemed like an obvious choice.
AAA Tacoma has the minor league stage to themselves tonight with all other leagues off. They kicked off at 6:05, with the Rainiers facing Round Rock yet again at Cheney. Starting for Tacoma is the aforementioned new claim of the day, Logan Verrett.
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7 Responses to “Game 48, Mariners at Athletics – Tacomafication”
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Thoughts? Concerns? Counter-arguments?
It seems more likely we would see rosters expanded to 27 than pitching restrictions like those imposed.
Why is Montero even on this roster? He has done nothing to help this team.
uh oh. Montero pitching and winning run at the plate…..
and now tying run at 3rd, winning run on first.
phew
“I think owners view the modern bullpen strategy as a way to get more-or-less decent/average production for a fraction of the cost”
Good points all around, especially that one. There’s an analogy with a trend that’s happened in higher education over the last 30 or 40 years: college professors used to be hired into tenure-track positions, meaning that if they performed well enough they would be granted tenure which basically gave them lifetime employment.
But tenured or tenure track professors are now a minority of college professors. Instead most are hired into adjunct positions — typically these are one-year contracts, at most maybe three years.
For the college, these adjunct instructors offer big cost advantages, their salaries are typically much lower and they can be hired or fired at will.
But what gets lost is the classic notion of how to have a good workplace: find good people, hire them, and keep them. Instead professors are more like fast food employees, replaceable commodities that are constantly turning over.
That provides short run cost advantages, but as Marc says at the cost of developing an actual pitching staff — or a high quality college department.
I cringe ever time I see Montero take the mound in anything other than a blowout situation. Even after this miraculously non-disastrous appearance, his cumulative win probability added (WPA) for the season is -0.95, he’s lost almost an entire game for the Ms.
That puts him in the running for a Bobby Ayala-esque season. In 1998, as of May 26 Ayala’s cumulative WPA was about -1.1.