Paul Articulates – Not good enough

We are nine games into the season, so it is always expected that the response to complaining about some weakness on your favorite baseball team is going to be, “It is still early”.  It is still early, and that is a perfectly reasonable response for a season that has 94.5% of its games remaining.  So go ahead and say it, because I am going to complain.

Last week, I wrote a piece called, “Eat some innings, Jose!”  The premise of that post was that the Mets starting pitchers needed to go deeper into games than five innings because that would keep the bullpen reasonably rested.  The 2023 campaign was a disaster in part because the bullpen was worn out by June.

Well guess what?  Nine games into the season, our starters have reached the sixth innings three times: Manaea went 6.0 in game four, Butto went 6.0 in game six before being sent down, and Quintana went 5 and 2/3 in game seven.  The average length over nine games is five innings.  To me, that is not enough.  Nine Mets relievers have already thrown 36 and 1/3 innings.  There are not many guys in the bullpen that are geared for multiple innings (a shortcoming), and one of them Michael Tonkin has already been released.

Arm injury is a major issue in MLB right now.  Many teams are seeing pitchers hit the IL already, and the Mets are in that group.  Kodai Senga wore out his arm before game 1 and will be on the IL for at least the rest of this month.    This team cannot afford to wear out the bullpen this early in the season if there is any meaningful baseball to be played after the all-star break.

Some would say that this practice of removing the starter after five innings is perfectly natural, as the analytics say not to let them face the opponent’s lineup a third time around.  Others would say that the starter’s arm must be preserved to get more out of them later in the season.  I’m not buying either argument.  I think that arm injuries are driven more by mechanics than by quantity of throws, and if the Mets’ state-of-the-art biomechanics technology in the pitching lab have not saved arms, then one less 15 pitch inning is not going to help.  

There is a big difference between throwing every five days and throwing every day.  With solid mechanics and a proper routine, starting pitchers should have good, strong arms ready to go on the fifth day.  But if you ask a reliever to warm up and throw almost every day, fatigue will set in.  With fatigue you could create injury, but more likely you create ineffective pitches – less velocity, less movement, and/or less control.  Those are the things that lose ballgames.  When you have to throw 4-5 pitchers every night, the probability that one of them is ineffective is pretty high if there is a lot of fatigue.

I am not saying that the sky is falling yet.  I am not going to project a 3-6 record into a 54-108 record because it really is “still too early”.  But I am raising the risk level of a rough season if we average five or less innings per starter for the next couple of months.  Mendoza and Hefner are going to have to push these starters a little harder to mitigate that risk.  If they need to bring Butto back up to get six plus innings from him every start, to it – the team will be better off.