After pitching his third consecutive complete game shutout, Cliff Lee has become the darling of the baseball-loving world. We are all impressed with Lee’s amazing stretch of dominance, but what really makes it so special is that he is dominant AND durable. Nothing screams “old school” like a pitcher going the distance to finish what they started. It’s cool. It’s tough. It’s manly!
Enjoy it while it lasts.
Part of the reason Lee’s complete game streak is so awe-inspiring is because we no live in an era of baseball where pitchers are handled with kid gloves and displays of endurance are becoming increasingly rare. And it is about to get much worse.
Earlier this week, the Kansas City Royals announced that they would be converting to a six-man rotation. Yes, you read that right. The team with the worst rotation in the American League is going to try and solve their problems by having their starters pitch terribly every sixth day rather than every fifth. You have to give Ned Yost points for creativity, that’s for sure. Since he can’t help but use the personnel he has at his disposal, trying a different strategy for handling his rotation is the only thing he can do and adding another man to the rotation certainly can’t make matters much worse.
The problem for the rest of us is that if Yost’s experiment does work, even a tiny bit, it could be the beginning of a trend that could spread rapidly. In fact, Yost’s novel idea isn’t even that novel. Ozzie Guillen was ready to take this bold step first. Guillen was ready to shift to a six-man rotation when Jake Peavy was activated from the disabled list since he had the good problem of having too much good starting pitching. John Danks had to go and get hurt and foil that plan before Ozzie ever got to put it into action, but the fact remains that Ozzie thought it was a good idea and he could very likely revisit it once Danks gets healthy.
Let’s consider that spectrum real quick. The Royals rotation stinks out loud, while the White Sox have a very good rotation. Both think a six-man rotation is a good idea. When two people with completely opposite problems to solve arrive at the same solution, you know the idea has some real legs.
If you really think about it, moving to a six-man rotation is really a natural evolution of the way pitching staffs have been handled for the last several years. Pitch counts are now so closely monitored by both coaching staffs and fan bases that mild panic spreads across cities whenever a starting pitcher’s pitch count exceeds 120. “Are you trying to make his arm fall off?!?!” the fans shriek. Ask any fan of any team that Dusty Baker has ever managed and the first thing they will say about the accomplished manager isn’t how fondly they remember the post-season runs he took the team on, but rather how many pitchers he was believed to have ruined because of “excessive pitch counts.”
You also have teams uniformly treating their young pitchers like delicate flowers during their first year or two in the bigs. The second a rookie starter shows even a glimmer of long-term promise, he is immediately saddled with an innings limit so that he doesn’t “over do it.” And that way of thinking isn’t limited to starters either, even young relievers are babied early on, lest we forget the “Joba Rules.”
If you tried to pull that kind of crap forty years ago, guys like Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale would spit in your face, called you a certain part of the female anatomy and zipped a fastball at your dome. Nowadays, it is considered just good plain sense. After all, teams have significant investments in a lot of these players and by protecting the pitchers’ health, the team thus protects their investments.
As icky as the thought of all teams adopting a six-man rotation makes me feel, I have to admit, there is a good amount of logic in it. The most obvious benefit is that having someone else in the rotation means more time to recuperate between starts, which will hopefully lead to fewer injuries and more effective pitching. The basic principle being that a little more rest is never a bad thing. In the long-term, this would also mean each pitcher making approximately five fewer starts over the course of a season. Not only will that keep pitchers fresh throughout the season, but it should also serve to extend their careers. Longer careers and fewer trips to the DL is something everyone can be on board with, both players and front offices alike.
One happy little side effect of a potential six-man rotation might also be financial. In theory, if all starting pitchers are going to see their playing time reduced by 1/6th across the board, they should have their salary cut at a commensurate rate. Now, I saw “in theory” because as much sense as that might make to you and I, agents are undoubtedly going to fight like crazy to make sure that doesn’t happen. On the flip side, teams could use a six-man rotation as a recruiting pitch in free agency until it becomes universally adopted. If the money is the same, pitchers would always be smarter to pitch for the team with the six-man rotation rather than the team with the five-man rotation. Sure, it isn’t the “tough guy” thing to do, but it does extend the player’s long-term earning potential.
The biggest complication when it comes to implementation of six-man rotations is actually finding enough qualified pitchers to fill out all of those newly created rotation slots. Teams have a hard enough time filling out rotations as it is, asking them to find one more almost seems unfair. Heck, the Yankees have more money than God and they have had to pull multiple players off the scrap heap to fill out their five-man rotation. There is also the small matter of finding a 25-man roster spot for the extra pitcher. Teams will have to either carry one less reliever or one less bench player to accomodate this shift (unless Bud Selig is actually smart for a change and bumps the roster maximum up to 26). One way to handle this would be to have starters pitch in relief in between starts, likely on their normal throwing session day, but that seems to fly in the face of the prime directive of protecting pitcher health.
Really though, those complications are minor in the grand scheme of things. If a majority of teams decide they want to go the six-man route, they will. They even have a working model to emulate since six-man rotations are the standard in Japanese leagues. What the league needs now is a team to lead the charge, which brings us back to the Royals.
It might seem like teams with deep pockets have an advantage with a six-man rotation since they can stockpile the most talent, but it is the low-budget teams relying heavily on youth that have the most incentive to make the conversion. A team like the Royals can utilize an expanded rotation to audition more young talent over the course of the season and do so with a built-in mechanism that keeps inning limits at a reasonable level without teams ever having to make the unpopular decision to shutdown a promising young player late in the year.
Now that multiple teams have openly embraced the idea of a six-man rotation, it really is just a matter of time before the whole league makes the conversion. How long that will take will depend on how much success the Royals and/or White Sox have with it. But make no mistake, six-man rotations are coming and they are here to stay.
