Baseball's Best Decade (22 page)

The relief specialist – particularly the “closer” – emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

One final difference in pitching before and after the 1960s was the rise of the relief specialist. From the 1920s through the 1950s, the bullpen was the place where you generally found two kinds of pitchers: the old-timer on the downside of his career who pitched on know-how and guts more than stuff and from whom you hoped to get an occasional good outing; and the youngster using the bullpen as a stepping-stone to the starting rotation. You expected your starting pitcher to go deep into the game and even complete a majority of his starts. Relief work was mostly “mopping up” when the game was probably out of hand and you needed arms for innings. In a critical situation, you grabbed your ace or another pitcher between starts for maybe an inning or two, but not enough to disrupt your starting rotation.

The relief specialist – particularly the “closer” – emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Elroy Face winning 18 games in relief for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1959; Luis Arroyo saving 29 game while winning 15 more in relief in 1961; Dick Radatz saving 100 games from 1962 to 1965 while winning 49 more and striking out more than a batter per inning; Hoyt Wilhelm making 542 relief appearances with 152 saves during the 1960s. Hitters were forced to face relievers with stronger arms and a different sense of mission, as teams began grooming pitchers for
a career in the relief role.

All of which means major league ERA
s should have been continually trending down … but it hasn’t. Since the 1960s, when the major leagues unveiled the most sub-2.00 ERA pitchers in the modern (i.e., lively ball) era, ERAs have been trending steadily up on a decade-by-decade basis. The ERA for the 2000s was the highest in modern history. Yet major league hitters in the 2000s struck out almost twice as much as their 1930s counterparts, scored fewer runs per game, and averaged half-a-hit less per game than the batters of the 1930s (which may not sound like all that much, but that’s a difference of more than 16,000 hits over the course of a decade-long schedule).

Dick Radatz

How can ERAs be up when hits and runs per game are down? Blame it on the relief pitcher, and the relief specialist mentality. Because of the role of the relief specialist in today’s game (as well as in the game played in the 1990s), pitching staffs have to be necessarily bigger than they were 40 or more years ago … by as many as 2 to 4 pitchers at any given time. That means fewer hitters on the bench for pinch hitting or late-inning substitutions. It also means that more multi-position utility players are needed to make up for the fact that a manager has fewer non-pitcher resources at his disposal.

The designated hitter has alleviated some of that problem for American League teams, but in most cases the DH doesn’t really give the manager more flexibility in late-inning substitutions for 2 reasons: first, the DH can’t be inserted as a substitute for any player in the field without losing the DH advantage and putting a pitcher into the batting order. And second, the regular designated hitter is almost never someone who should be filling in defensively in the late innings. If the player were that well rounded, he probably wouldn’t be a DH.

The American League’s earned run averages have been consistently higher than the National League’s for every decade except the 1950s. The gap between the 2 major leagues was relatively close from the 1940s through the 1970s. Since the 1980s, the American League ERA has been growing faster than the National League’s (thank you, designated hitter). Yet all of this flies in the face that hits and runs per 9 innings are down for the 1990s and 2000s compared to the 1930s.

Let me suggest a reason … not the only reason for that discrepancy, but I believe an important one. The role of relief specialist means a team will have more pitchers on the roster and more pitchers pitching more games. The reliance on relief
micro-specialists also means that, generally, more pitchers are pitching fewer innings since the 1990s than was true in the 1930s.

Whether you are a starter or reliever, fewer innings means fewer opportunities to amend a wounded ERA. So one or two bad outings are going
to have more impact on a pitcher’s ERA because he will have fewer subsequent opportunities to string together scoreless innings and thereby whittle away at a bloated earned run average. In addition, it is exceedingly rare for a starter today to work on less than four days’ rest between starts, so he has fewer starts available than the typical 1960s starter working consistently every fourth day.

Don Drysdale
m
ade 42 starts in 1963 and 1965 … the kind of iron man performance unlikely to be repeated in the era of relief micro-specialists.

The days of the 40+ start season are long gone. A pitcher today who logs 30+ starts and 220+ innings is considered a workhorse and the management of pitching staffs has been trending that way since the 1970s, when the price of a ballplayer – particularly proven winning pitchers – escalated with the advent of free agency. Pitchers have simply become too expensive to work them the way teams used to. So today’s starting pitcher has to be exceptional on a consistent basis to wind up the season with an ERA under, say, 2.50. Two or 3 bad outings may be allowed; more than that, and he won’t have enough good outings to log double-digit losses and still have an ERA in the low 2.00s.

It’s amazing, then, to consider that in 1972, Gaylord Perry lost 16 games for the Cleveland Indians and still had an ERA of 1.92. How did he
do that? Not by pitching every fifth day with today’s pitch limit priority. Perry made 40 starts, had 29 complete games, pitched 342 innings and had 5 shutouts. (He also won 24 games and the American League Cy Young award.)

It’s hard to imagine any of today’s pitchers putting up those kinds of
numbers, or even attempting to talk the team’s management into letting them try. That’s also why it’s hard for me to argue (if I had to) that today’s pitchers, or those of a decade ago, are comparable to the pitchers of the 1960s.

Yes, the pitchers of the 1960s had an advantage in the higher mound and longer strike zone. But I believe a bigger advantage for the pitchers of half a century ago was the pervasive mentality that shutouts and wins and complete games were more important than quality innings, and relievers were something aces almost never relied on.

Hall of Fame left-hander Warren Spahn probably could not amass the performance numbers he achieved if he were pitching today. From 1957-1963, Spahn won 147 games and led the league in complete games all 7 seasons, averaging 21 victories and 21 complete games per season. He finished 60% of the games he started over that period.

The Top Winning Pitchers for Each Decade (1920s-1940s)