Starters aren’t an endangered species… yet?
I don’t know if this is empirically true, but it certainly feels like the market for decent-or-better starting pitching has become, let’s say… engorged over the last few years. Due to the ubiquity of pitching injury, the number of durable starters is dwindling:
- In 2015, 66 starters made at least 30 starts, 28 completed at least 200 innings, and the top 150ish starters by innings had at least 80ish innings.
- In 2025, 53 starters made at least 30 starts, but only three completed at least 200 innings, and the top 150ish starters included over a dozen with fewer than 80 frames completed.
In addition to injury, teams are trying to be proactive with load management (extra rest), and loading up rotations in a way that tries to avoid regular season wear-and-tear in favor of boosts down the stretch and in the playoffs. There are also various headwinds-esque things like recognition of the times through the order penalty, the will-they-won’t-they flirtation with openers and bulk guys, and the fact that better understanding of where teams stand and their odds to succeed means you get a lot of cycling through of speculative adds in hopes of catching lightning in a bottle or just playing out the string without wearing out the arms you care about having next year.
The league likes to rattle their rhetorical saber in its scabbard at times by leaking, or postulating, or pontificating about ridiculous rules that would force teams to reinforce the idea of a “traditional” starting pitcher. All of these ideas are profoundly terrible, I think, for different reasons, but the league office appears to be wedded to a specific vision of baseball, and that vision includes the names on the matchup card both A) mattering a lot, and also, B) sticking around.
Because the ideas proposed thus far have been so awful, I’m not sure they’ll win out against everything else. But, that does lead me to think: where is “starting pitching” going, and how fast? Things are unsettled right now but most games still kinda-sorta look like regular-baseball-of-yesteryear with regard to how “starting pitching” is deployed, even if many teams should probably be more aggressive with making things look different for the sake of their own on-field success. There were times when everything seemed more aggressively progressing, and at those times I would’ve guessed that maybe the proverbial starting pitcher would be queueing up a swan song within a decade, but I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. Maybe eventually, but it doesn’t seem imminent.
So, before the upcoming CBA negotiations throw a further wrench into everything, let’s speculate about this for a bit. Have at it.
Category: General Sports
