The demise of the playoff starter puts focus on bullpens
With the Los Angeles Dodgers ahead 3-1 in Game 3 of their division series, Yu Darvish hit Arizona Diamondbacks pinch-hitter Christian Walker with his 74th pitch of the game leading off the sixth.
That was the end of Darvish’s night. After all, he had already exceeded the average start in these playoffs by nearly an inning.
Darvish’s removal after allowing just two hits and no walks in the best playoff outing of his career represented merely the latest instance of a starting pitcher getting a quick hook in an October bereft of workhorse performances.
In this, the sixth season featuring a wild card game in the postseason format, pitchers are getting lifted sooner and performing worse than ever: Through 32 postseason starts, the average starter is lasting just 41/3 innings and pitching to a 4.91 ERA.
That’s a 26 percent drop from a similar sample just two years ago, when the median playoff start was six innings.
Postseason baseball has a long, rich history of starters taking over and virtually willing their teams to victory, and it doesn’t take looking back to the days of Bob Gibson and Mickey Lolich or even Randy Johnson, Josh Beckett and Cole Hamels to find examples.
Corey Kluber stands out as the dominant figure of the 2016 postseason, even when his Cleveland Indians fell just short of the championship, and Madison Bumgarner’s heroics for the San Francisco Giants in 2014 still resonate.
Yet even those recent performances seem from a different era, and both anecdotal and statistical evidence suggest the game is once again changing, and fast.
So far no ace-like figures have emerged in these playoffs, which have featured some quality pitchers getting rocked early as well as managers all too ready to turn to their loaded, rested bullpens.
In the first 32 starts of this postseason, only four pitchers — the New York Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka and Luis Severino, the Cubs’ Kyle Hendricks and the Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg — have completed as many as seven innings. No one has gone a single out beyond that.
“I’m certainly more aggressive going to the pen, even though we have a strong rotation,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said, reflecting what has been a common approach among his colleagues. “With eight guys in the pen and the off days … I’m very matchupsdriven and aware of that.”
The trend is not entirely new, though certainly more notable this year. The average number of innings by postseason starters through the Division Series round was six as recently as 2014, when they posted a collective 3.31 ERA. The outings have been getting shorter — and less effective — every year since.
Some of that might be explained by the increased influence of statisticsdriven front offices, which can provide chapter and verse — or line item — on how starters’ effectiveness diminishes the third time through a lineup.
With each game carrying so much significance, teams are pulling out all the stops to increase their chances of registering every precious out.
“You get into games where they’re so meaningful, have so much impact, sometimes it’s hard to (let the starter find his way),” said Indians manager Terry Francona, who relied heavily on his bullpen during last year’s World Series run partly because his rotation was beset by injuries.
“But the one thing to remember is once you go to your bullpen, you’re committed, and you’ve got to fill those innings. If you’re asking your bullpen to go seven or 71/3, it’s hard for them to go the entire way without somebody getting nicked up.”
Indeed, the strategy can come with diminishing returns. Indians reliever Andrew Miller was the talk of the 2016 playoffs, untouchable through the ALDS and ALCS as he faced 41 batters, struck out 21 of them, allowed no runs and just five hits in 151/3 innings. But the ALCS MVP was more human in the World Series, allowing three runs and 10 baserunners in 72/3 innings. He gave up a home run in the Indians’ Game 7 loss to Cubs catcher David Ross, whose next hit would be on Dancing With the Stars.
In 2017, “bullpening,” as the term goes, has been almost equally by necessity as choice, as the early rounds of the playoffs revealed the vulnerability of even some of the game’s most powerful arms.