The main challenge every team is going to face this season is managing pitcher workloads. While the Pirates made sure their pitchers kept throwing during the shutdown last year, those were sim games, side sessions and bullpens. It simply can’t compare to competitive innings. And no returning Pirate got more than a couple dozen of those at most last year.
This year, they’re compensating by carrying nine relievers, giving themselves extra arms to cover innings. There’s safety in numbers, and they needed them early. Through 10 starts, the deepest any Pirate starter has gone is just 5 1/3 innings.
Would it be a bad thing if that was the norm for this year?
It flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Ideally, a team would get at least six innings from their starter each night, but that sometimes means throwing over 100 pitches. While that’s a nice, round number, league-wide trends show that pitchers tend to start to drop off around 75-85 pitches. That’s about the most pitches as the Pirates have limited their starters to so far this year.
What if they just didn’t build beyond there? Not for a competitive disadvantage, but to manage innings throughout the year. The Pirates don’t have formal inning limits set, but nobody is going, say, 200 this year. Rather than having several pitchers hit their limit in early September, pace them a bit more to go the whole year.
Plus, a nine-man bullpen is going to need to stay loose. There are a couple multi-inning relievers on staff: Clay Holmes, Duane Underwood Jr., Luis Oviedo, Chris Stratton and several others at the alternate site. If they don’t pitch in games, they’re going to have to get their reps in side sessions. That’s just extra workload for pitchers.
The Pirates are going to let their starters go deeper into games as the season progresses, but perhaps the April approach is the right one for this year.
YOUR TURN: Even if it’s just for 2021, are shorter starts the way to go?