Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> A Call for a Three-Man Rotation

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OK, I'm hear to talk to the coaches this week. The rest of you, well, actually, the rest of you gather 'round, too; the coaches don't listen to me (and why should they?), so you're gonna have to do a little lobbying for this to work.

All right, Coach, suppose I told you that I could take your staff ace and change his season line from this:

GS  IP   ERA

13  110  4.00

To this:

GS  IP   ERA

18  110  3.40

In other words, you get fewer innings per start, but you get the same number of innings overall, and you get better quality pitching out of him.

Well, I think it can be done by going to a fairly strict three-man rotation. There are a bunch of assumptions that go into this thinking, and I want to go ahead and throw them out so you can try to point out the flaws if there are any:

• There's a lot we don't know about pitcher usage and its relationship to injury. A lot of you don't buy into the notion that throwing too many pitches is injurious, or at least you qualify it into non-existence by talking about looking at guys individually and then overthrowing everybody or things like that. I may be unable to convince you on that front, but I'm willing to bet the following chart will open some eyes:

  RA by Inning for Starting Pitchers Throwing at Least 8 Innings, 2003
  
   1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9
  
  3.33 2.55 3.08 2.73 2.50 2.35 2.05 2.52 6.64
  

  Now, there's a bit of a selection bias here (guys get a break if they run into trouble in the first, but get pulled if they do the same in the seventh), but the point is that letting your starter go into the ninth, no matter how well he's throwing, is playing with fire. I won't run the other tables, but the same effect exists in lesser form with the seventh and eighth innings. In short, complete or near-complete games are a losing gamble. Looking at the major leagues, where complete games have become about as common as orange pullover jerseys, at least provides confirmation that another large body of folks agree with that assessment.

• There's not much evidence out there that getting more rest than three off days (what's usually referred to as "four days' rest") between reasonable-length starts provides any health benefits. This one's hard to study, since the main examples we have come from the long-gone days of four-man rotations in the big leagues, but it fits in with most of the current thinking by physiologists who have studied it.

• There's no particular benefit to having any given pitcher start any given game in a series, so reducing the number of starts your ace gets so that he can pitch on Friday or its equivalent is a losing proposition, assuming that you don't overwork him. You can talk about the mental aspects of getting the series off to a good start or something like that, but most things like that tend to strike me as after-the-fact rationalizations; you could just as easily talk about the benefits of knowing your ace is going to be there on Sunday.

• With the exception of a few conferences, it's relatively rare for college teams to play four games in four days, which would be the only time you would need a fourth starter. I ran through the 2003 schedule (or wrote a program to do so, anyway); with the exception of teams that play in conferences with four-game conference series, around 75% of the teams never played on four consecutive days (or played four in three days), while almost none of the others did so more than twice. And it's not like the schedule's not under your control, so you can avoid that altogether if you want to.

Here's the plan, then. Take your top three starters and turn them into a true rotation -- let your ace throw on Friday, then Tuesday, then Saturday, and so on. Take those sophomores that are starting the mid-week games while they wait for a shot at the weekend and turn them into long relievers who are guaranteed to go in after about ninety pitches, usually somewhere around the sixth or seventh inning. You shouldn't have too much trouble selling them on that -- nobody aspires to be a mid-week starter, anyway, and they'll get their chance in higher-visibility conference games this way. Keep your starters on a tight leash, and enjoy the fact that they're not worn out in May from too many 120-pitch outings. If anybody starts to look a little worn, throw in a spot start for the fourth guy; you're going to need him in the conference tournament unless you get smart and get rid of the conference tournament (and you might get lucky but not lucky enough and need him on Sunday in a regional), so it won't hurt to get him two or three starts. For those of you in four-game series conferences, that's under your control, too, and most of you at the top of the conferences tell me you'd rather change it, anyway.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

Actually, this is an experiment for me to see how predictable the postseason makeup is. I want to see how accurate my picks are (using myself as the test subject as a moderately knowledgeable observer with no input into the results) at various distances from the selection. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East       Florida State        Notre Dame             Louisiana State
Atlantic 10        North Carolina St.   St. John's             Mississippi
CAA                Virginia             UC Irvine              South Carolina
Horizon            Clemson              Long Beach State       Florida
MAAC               Georgia Tech         Cal Poly               Arkansas
MAC                Florida Atlantic     Cal State Fullerton    Tennessee
MEAC               Central Florida      Southern Mississippi   Auburn
Mountain West      Texas                East Carolina          Mississippi St.
NEC                Texas A&M            Tulane                 Texas State
OVC                Nebraska             Texas Christian        Lamar
Patriot            Oklahoma             Stanford               La.-Lafayette
SWAC               Missouri             Arizona State          South Alabama
Southern Conf.     Texas Tech           Washington             Rice
Coastal Carolina   Oklahoma State       Arizona                San Jose State
Miami, Florida     Minnesota            Oregon State           Loyola Marymount
Wichita State      Ohio State           Washington State       San Diego

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> A Call for a Three-Man Rotation

About the author, Boyd Nation