Green: MLB should update pitching stats to match new philosophies
Detroit – It was just the sixth inning with two outs on the board. Anibal Sanchez had thrown 114 pitches by then, and Brad Ausmus journeyed from the Tigers’ dugout to fetch his weary starting pitcher.
Sanchez would salute the applauding fans on his trip to the showers. En route, his teammates would welcome him back into the dugout with congratulatory high-fives and handshakes.
The plaudits were for a job well done.
The Tigers would persevere and win this game, last Thursday, a needed victory for a team floating around .500. And Sanchez would be honored as the winning pitcher for the third time this April.
He was awarded the W for 5.2 innings of relatively decent pitching. It was not even worthy of a QS – a quality start in another statistic designed to define of a pitcher’s work in a fragment of a ballgame.
This is what baseball has become in the 21st Century.
The complete game starter is a throwback to Bob Gibson or Bob Feller or Schoolboy Rowe, Lefty Grove, Dizzy Dean or Walter Johnson. Or Mickey Lolich or Jack Morris.
Or Dennis Dale McLain!
The 20-game winner is considered a glorious giant in today’s baseball. Such pitchers are vanishing – due to the changes in pitching philosophies.
The concepts nowadays are designed to coddle starting pitchers – the five-starter rotation instead of four; the emphasis on dominant bullpens; the precious pitch count; the six-inning stonewall.
Disappearing milestone
There were but two 20-game winners in the Major Leagues last season – Jake Arrieta and Dallas Keuchel.
Arrieta and Clayton Kershaw qualify as pitchers at the top of their craft. Max Scherzer won 21 games it in his departure season in Detroit and still might be included a pitching giant in Washington.
Justin Verlander, for all his accomplishments with the Tigers, is a prize example of baseball in the current decade contrasted to the way it used to be when starting pitchers were the bulwarks of their teams. Verlander won 24 for the Tigers four years ago – and has not been close since.
He has been denied victories due to the scoring rules that have not switched with the revamped pitching philosophies.
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It was July 27 in 1968 – a wondrous summer in Detroit that only AARP members might remember. That night was precious. Denny won his 20th game. A complete game, three-hit shutout of the Orioles.
It was the only season of the last 84 that a pitcher reached 20 victories as early as July.
Before the season was over. Denny would win his 30th and 31st and the Tigers would win the pennant. And then in October, Lolich would win three starts as the Tigers conquered the Cardinals in seven games in the World Series.
All three of Lolich’s victories would be complete-game performances. No bullpen required.
Believe it or not, McLain, in 41 starts, had 28 complete games in his 31-victory season of 1968. The next year, as a 24-game winner, in 42 starts he pitched 23 complete games.
And, in his next four seasons in the big leagues, McLain would manage to pitch 14 complete games in just 72 starts for the Tigers, Senators, Athletics and Braves.
His arm went dead. The most successful pitcher of his era had turned into a journeying journeyman. Before it all ended.
And new, young managerial wizards started to make changes in the pitching philosophies that had been successful for such renowned manager as Joe McCarthy, Connie Mack, Leo Durocher and Casey Stengel. And the system that worked a century ago for John McGraw and Hughie Jennings.
About that time, in 1970, a young, premature graying manager in Cincinnati revolutionized the entire theory.
George “Sparky” Anderson loved the scene. He loved the attention of marching toward the mound, TV cameras focused, and tapping his arm. Right or left, depending upon the situation. Runners were on base, and it might be with an out in the sixth or the bottom of the seven.
The starters would grimace with disgust. Veteran baseball writers upstairs would ready their critiques.
But Sparky’s system worked. He managed the Reds to pennants in 1970, 1972, 1975 and 1976. In ’75 and ’76, the Reds won the World Series with Sparky hooking and maneuvering.
Imitation is rampant in sports. Tony La Russa, Dick Williams and later Jim Leyland and Bobby Cox and Joe Torre made the quick hook work.
Sparky won the Tigers’ last world championship in that precise manner.
Only Jack Morris, stubborn by nature, got away with going nine and outdueling Sparky’s hook. Jack pitched complete games because Sparky knew he could.
One day, Jack confessed to me how he stubbornly convinced Sparky to leave him in games in situations any other starter – Dan Petry, Milt Wilcox – would be vulnerable.
“Sparky told me to do it that way,” Morris said.
In that 1984 season, when the Tigers dominated Major League Baseball, Sparky was touting Willie Hernandez – the role model for all today’s premier, glorified closers – for the Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Awards.
His suggestion was faithfully obeyed.
Quick hooks for everyone
And now every manager in baseball brings a quick hook along when he is hired.
Ausmus arrived as Tigers manager with bright ideas, but with the quick-hook philosophy. The same as Bruce Bochy in San Francisco and before that San Diego; Ned Yost in Kansas City; Clint Hurdle in Pittsburgh and Mike Matheny in St. Louis. And all the others – foremost now the Marlins’ Don Mattingly and the Dodgers’ Dave Roberts, both of whom this season hooked pitchers in the eighth innings of potential no-hitters.
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The pitch count counts.
It is why Verlander would be lucky to be a 20-game winner again.
The pitching philosophy has been modernized. And our baseball scoring rules are stagnant – and this is not a retreat toward Sabermetrics by this hater of new-fold analytic stats.
Pitching victories must be updated to mesh with today’s philosophy. Starters are penalized by the mandatory requirement of pitching five innings to be eligible to be declared a winning pitcher.
On Opening Day this season, Verlander was hooked after six innings – with a pitch count of 98 – with a two-run lead. The bullpen squandered the lead, deprived Verlander of his eligibility to be declared winning pitcher – and the Tigers won the game in the 11th.
The scoring rule insisted that pitcher of record at the time be proclaimed winning pitcher. Drew VerHagen was rewarded with the victory, on the basis of one inning of relief pitching in which he threw all of 18 pitches.
Under the cobwebbed current scoring rule, VerHagen could have thrown one solitary pitch, gotten a batter out – and been declared the WP.
MLB employs official scorers and then forbids the usage of common sense.
Verlander deserved to be the winning pitcher that day as he was ahead when hooked. The bullpen lost his lead.
The scorer’s job is to make judgments and decisions.
I presume!
Jerry Green is a retired Detroit News sports reporter.