Let's talk pitching
There have been numerous articles written about how the 2025 Mets season was done in by the failure of starting pitchers to provide 'quality' starts, to be or to stay healthy -- problems hard enough for a team to overcome under the best of circumstances -- exacerbated by a relief staff, worn down by overuse, beset by injuries, and capable only of uneven performance, unable to pick up the slack.
There are good reasons for investigating past failings, even if not for dwelling on them.
By their very nature, some failings call for backward looking responses. We cannot go forward as a society, either morally or psychologically, without doing what we can to address serious criminal wrongdoing. We punish individuals for crimes they have committed because we believe that they have acted in ways that demand that we do so, not because doing deters wrongdoing, which would rely on an empirical claim for which we have far less than convincing evidence. Were our system of punishment to have a desirable impact on the level of crime, that would be a collateral benefit of it, not the reason for it. In contrast, we are prohibited from punishing those who have committed no crime, for they have done nothing deserving of state imposed and publicly funded harsh treatment that punishment inflicts, something we would presumably consider doing if our primary goal was to reduce the incidence of crimes in the future.
Other past failings are worthy of investigation with both backward and forward looking goals in mind. If my cows trample bushels of corn you have planted on property adjacent to mine, or if the health of occupants living in your house is adversely affected by pollution oozing from my adjacent feedlot, we may investigate the events involved in order to determine who should bear their respective costs. In effect, we are deciding whether the crop damage and ill health are the costs of ranching or farming, in the one case or living close to a nuisance or building and operating a nuisance in the other. To answer those questions, we may want to know whether the rancher or the farmer was there first, and whether the factory or the housing project was there first. Of course the cows caused the damage as did the pollution, but did the farmer 'come to place himself and thereby put his cows at risk', and did the homeowner do the same?
But we can also investigate to see what the best solution going forward may be if our goal is to improve health or to secure an optimal mix of meat and corn available in the market place or if we want to impact their respective prices, or if we felt an urgent need to subsidize either industry.
There may be much of moral and psychological value in investigating past failings with the goal of fashioning responsibility for them, in expressing appropriate feelings of resentment and indignation for them, but there is something especially liberating about investigating past failings for the very different purpose of fashioning novel solutions designed to avoid or reduce the incidence and costs of ongoing activities..
Here's an example. It may be that the best way to reduce the number of automobile accidents going forward, or to reduce the damage that results when they happen, would be to fix the roads and highways, or to impose the costs of accidents on car manufacturers thereby incentivizing them to create cars that drive themselves or are built like Sherman Tanks. Or we can reduce accidents by lowering speed limits dramatically. There are so many options we can consider when we turn our gaze backward with the goal of looking for solutions to problems that we are facing in the future.
By now, you may find yourself wondering, what, if anything, has any of this got to do with baseball?
The answer is, quite a bit, actually. For when it comes to the behavior of baseball organizations deciding how to respond to past failures, e.g. the Mets' 2025 season, the question is what should they be looking for and what approach should they be taking. For while it is perfectly reasonable for fans and commentators to assign responsibility and lay blame for a season down the tubes, investigating the past is primarily helpful to an organization only if doing so points to a better way of going forward.
Responding to a pitching collapse requires investigating different ways of thinking about what went wrong that can have the greatest impact on reducing the risk of it happening again and reducing the consequences it is likely to have, if and when it does.
That's the approach I've taken here. In searching for a more fundamental and foundational source of last year's failure, I began not with the immediate causal factors outlined in every article on the Mets' failure, but to the set of background conditions that activated those causes, which once activated, could not be halted or their consequences effectively mitigated.
In doing so I've come to believe that the collapse of the Mets' pitching staff was ultimately the result of a collective lack of imagination. Surprising conclusion? Certainly. Plausible? That's for you to decide, but hear me out, please.
The limits of the existing pitching paradigm
Where one ends up is path dependent, which is to say that where one ends up depends on where one begins. This borders on the banal, but many banalities can prove insightful. Baseball began with a particular understanding of a pitching staff that relied on drawing a distinction between starting and relief pitchers. Starting pitchers were those assigned to start games. They were expected to stay in the game until they needed relief, which is what the relievers were expected to provide. Relievers were then to stay in the game until they needed relief, which another reliever would be expected to provide. This definition created the framework of the pitching paradigm that has existed in baseball for over a century. Its consequences are not merely semantic, but practical -- hugely so.
When the distinction was first introduced there would be no reason why the same pitcher who started one game could not be reasonably asked to provide relief in another at some point thereafter, and vice versa. No reason, in other words, to sort pitchers into exclusive roles.
Over time, as one would expect, some pitchers showed an ability to pitch effectively longer into games than others. At that point it became natural to sort pitchers along two dimensions: those who could effectively pitch over many of the innings of a regulation game and those who could do so for fewer innings. The former were designated starters, the latter relievers.
At some point, it would become apparent that those who could pitch for longer stretches in any one game would need more time between game appearances to maintain their effectiveness, whereas pitchers who were asked to pitch fewer innings in relief would be able to do so more frequently. Practical experience would lead to further refinements, regarding how many innings, how often and which individual pitchers fit into which category. Practical experience not only refined the distinction's parameters, but had practical implications by introducing strategic decision making in creating and using the staff during a game and over a stretch of games.
Inevitably, the idea of a comparative advantage took hold and the still relatively loose distinction between those who start and those who provide relief as needed became more refined. As it did, pitchers were developed to perform in distinctive roles, and their training and development evolved accordingly.
Because decisions about who should pitch when in a game or over a period of games now took on strategic importance, the reasons for pulling starters in favor of relievers also reflected strategic considerations. Relievers were inserted not just when the starter became exhausted or displayed worrisome ineffectiveness, but also when it made sense to pinch hit for the pitcher or to bring in a reliever to face a particular part of the opposing teams' line-up.
The idea of specialization entered baseball much as it did in the workforce more generally, and in due course, the line between starters and relievers required further parsing. Soon there were long relievers, middle relievers and so on. Ultimately, an entirely new category of relievers --'closers' -- was created, not just to define a role, but to help define categories of relative importance among relievers that needed to be reflected in pay scales.
Health data entered the picture, and starting rotations expanded in number as the number of innings starters were expected to last declined. Data eventually revealed that starters in general fared best the first two times through an opposing team's order and then their performance dropped off considerably. To optimize performance, starters developed a larger arsenal of pitches, while relievers, who were being asked to pitch fewer innings were asked to provide an especially effective, but smaller, array of pitches. Before long, most teams developed a pitching staff comprised of five regular starters who on average lasted around six innings who were then followed by a series of one-inning or one type of batter (usually a lefty) specialist, a closer and a number of pitchers who provided redundancy if the first tier of one inning and one batter specialists had been called upon too often over a given period of time.
And lest we forget: compensation has always been tied to performance, but performance needed metrics and names tied to roles. And so entered into the baseball lexicon, terms like 'quality start,' 'hold', 'save' and 'blown save' in addition to 'wins' and 'losses'.
This is a partial list of the changes that occurred and the events that likely caused them. There are likely more changes that I have missed and the causes of all of them may well be more nuanced than I have suggested. I am not offering an historical account. I am providing what is sometimes called 'a false history' which is narrative more than an effort to provide an accurate historical record.
The point of the narrative is to show the force of the initial distinction between starters and relievers in shaping everything that has followed. All the changes that have occurred have done so without once rethinking the value of conceptualizing a pitching staff in terms of starters and relievers. Many refinements have occurred to the distinction, but the power the distinction itself has displayed on everything from initial sorting assessments, strategic development strategies, projection into roles on the staff and expected performance, strategies surrounding use of the bullpen, compensation differentials, and much more are what they are in part because we think of a pitching staff in terms of starters and relievers. That paradigm has ruled for over a hundred years. Nothing really has changed in how we think about constructing a pitching staff -- except at the margins. We are 'prisoners' of our original take on how to think about the role of pitchers in a ball game and over the course of a season.
Even now, innovative changes in pitching roles are anything but examples of thinking outside the box
Ask yourself: what are the two biggest pitching innovations in the past decade or two? I may be wrong, but my answer would be: The Bullpen Game and The Opener. I admit both are different from the norm, but that hardly makes either innovative. The bullpen game is nothing other than an episodic response to a momentary shortage of quality starting pitching. It is a tactical response, not a strategic development.
I don't know what to say about games in which a reliever starts and the normal starter or some other starting pitcher relieves him of his duties at some point one to three innings later. Giving it a name of its own, 'The Opener,' does little to enhance its luster or genius.
These 'innovations' are simply variations on a theme, completely understandable within the existing paradigm. The Mets' pitching collapse was not the first such collapse in baseball nor will it be the last. Within that paradigm it is not surprising that observers of the Mets' failure last year have called for more and better pitchers. How we think of potential solutions depends entirely on the paradigm, the framework of thought, with which we operate.
What's needed most of all is a different way of thinking about pitchers: a paradigm shift. I offer one (of potentially) many shifts in my next post on Thursday.
Stay tuned.
