MLB pitcher usage keeps evolving rapidly on post-season stage

Chicago Cubs starting pitcher Jon Lester delivers. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)

More and more, it’s starting to look like last year’s seemingly extreme pitcher usage was the beginning of a bigger shift.

Last October, baseball observers took note as managers called on elite relievers such as Andrew Miller to pitch early and often. To some extent that departure from tradition was a necessity given the injuries on Cleveland’s staff. Either way, Terry Francona was willing to buck convention and it worked.

One year later, it’s no longer surprising when Miller enters in the fourth inning, as he did Wednesday night. It’s now expected. In the span of 12 months, these assignments have gone from cutting edge to commonplace.

Along the way, we’ve seen starting pitchers pitch less and less. Of course that’s a league-wide trend, even in the regular season.

Just 58 starting pitchers qualified for the ERA title this past season, less than two per team. That’s a drop-off compared to 2016, when 74 pitchers qualified. Look back to 1998, the first year MLB had 30 teams, and there were 96 qualified starters, more than three per team.

There are many causes for this trend, expanded bullpens and sabermetric advances among them. Regardless, there’s no denying the way the sport is going. Starting pitchers just don’t pitch as much anymore, even in the regular season.

And, if the wild-card games and Division Series offer any indication, that trend becomes more pronounced in the post-season.

Entering play Friday, starting pitchers are averaging just 4.1 innings per start this October. Relievers, in other words, have recorded more outs than starters—515 total outs from the bullpen compared to 496 from starters.

To some extent those numbers are misleading. We’ve already seen starters as accomplished as Chris Sale, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Rick Porcello, Jose Quintana, David Price, Robbie Ray and Jon Lester pitch in relief, so some of the innings that were once pitched by starters are still absorbed by starters. Now they’re just coming out of the bullpen.

At a certain point it’s a question of semantics. Realistically, our current labels don’t work as neatly as they used to, at least in October. As Red Sox VP of pitching development Brian Bannister put it to Yahoo’s Jeff Passan, “I almost wonder if we’re getting to a point where roles aren’t defined. I’m not a starter. I’m not a reliever. In the post-season, I get outs.”

To this point in the post-season, we’ve seen the distinction between those traditional roles erode, but now that the LCS is about to begin we could start to see pitcher usage become a little more traditional again. It certainly wasn’t plan-A for so many ace starters to get knocked out early in LDS games. Plus, a best-of-seven series doesn’t have quite the same urgency as a best-of-five, at least early on.

But would anyone be surprised if, in Game 3 or 4 of the ALCS, the Astros only asked Brad Peacock or Charlie Morton to pitch a few innings before turning the game over to the rest of the pitching staff? From what we’ve seen to this point in October, teams appear to be well on their way to establishing a new convention for post-season pitcher usage.

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