What's happened to pitching?

no one can last

In 1969, the top 5 major league pitchers in ERA were Marichal, Carlton, Gibson, Bosman, and Seaver. Bosman was no superstar. But the other four are all in the Hall of Fame, all accumulated more than 3500 innings pitched, and all were pretty consistently great, year after year.

In 2022, the top 5 major league pitchers in ERA were Verlander, Urias, Cease, Manoah, and Alcantara. Verlander is much older than the other four, and he is pretty much in the same class as the great ones of 1969. But the other four? In 2023, as of early September, their ERAs are all over 4, with Cease closer to 5 and Manoah closer to 6 and sent down to the minor leagues.

As far as career innings are concerned, there does not appear to be a single pitcher under the age of 35 who is likely to approach 2500 innings, much less 3500. Pitchers are having their work loads limited, but they are still getting injured and/or losing their ability to get batters out at frighteningly high rates.

Concerning pitching injuries, the WSJ reports,

Dr. Keith Meister, the Rangers’ team physician, said the MRIs of some of his recent patients “look like a friggin’ mini-bomb going off on the medial side of the elbow.” And he’s not the only expert to take notice. 

“I’m seeing injuries now that I haven’t seen to this degree,” said Dr. Neal ElAttrache, a prominent orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles who has operated on many major-league players. “There’s definitely something different happening now to the shoulder and elbow, and before any other changes are made to try to fix something, people in baseball need to better understand exactly what we’re seeing right now.”

It seems that pitching at a major league level has gotten a lot more difficult in the last decade or so. Why do pitchers have to murder their arms trying to get batters out these days?

My guess is that the trend has been for ballparks to get smaller and for the ball to get more resilient. The ballparks that they built in the late 1960s were big, boring, round stadiums that took a lot of home runs out of the league. This helped the pitchers of that era. It arguably helped them too much.

I remember that when you dropped a baseball from the height of your waist onto concrete, it would barely bounce a couple of inches. Today’s baseball will bounce at least a foot.

The resilient baseball means that in order to avoid allowing a lot of hits and home runs, a pitcher has to be able to “miss bats,” as the popular phrase goes. A fly ball is likely to leave the ballpark. A hard grounder is likely to get through, especially with the shift outlawed.

I keep saying that we need a less lively ball. Also, because pitchers have gotten bigger, the ball should be a bit larger, so they cannot throw it as hard or put as much spin on it. The result will be more balls in play, but with less resiliency there will be more fly balls that can be caught and more ground balls that can be fielded.

Three-outcome baseball (strikeout, walk, or home run) makes the sport less interesting and forces pitchers to do dangerous things to their arms. Baseball needs more balls in play and fewer pitchers under the surgeon’s knife.