MLB teams pondering how to protect pitchers

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — If the Arizona Diamondbacks want to win a lot of games this season they probably need right-hander Zac Gallen to throw a lot of quality innings.

If the franchise wants to be good for the next several years, it’s also imperative that the 25-year-old — who finished ninth in the NL Cy Young voting last season — stays healthy.

The challenge of balancing the present and the future is nothing new for Major League Baseball teams, who are particularly careful with star young pitchers. But the calculus might be even tougher in 2021 because pitchers are coming off a much smaller workload during the pandemicshortened 2020 season.

Gallen, who finished with a 3-2 record and a 2.75 ERA last season in 72 innings, is adamant he’s ready to ramp back up to nearly 200 innings if needed, even if it appears unlikely the D-backs would push him that hard.

“I’m going to pitch until they tell me to stop pitching,” Gallen said. “And then I’ll probably still say, ‘No, let me go back out there.’ ”

There’s little doubt teams will be very careful extending their pitchers to the usual 180 to 200 innings that a typical starter logs in a 162-game season. There’s even talk about using six-man rotations for some teams, including the Seattle Mariners, who used the strategy for much of 2020 during the 60-game schedule.

“Our primary thought behind it is to preserve the health and well-being of our pitchers,” Seattle GM Jerry Dipoto said. “In an era where teams are trying to find a competitive advantage by throwing their starters for shorter lengths of time and just running them harder, we feel like our advantage, our competitive advantage is by keeping our pitchers healthy and having our best pitchers pitch over the length of the season, rather than the potential dangers of running them into the injury.”

The Detroit Tigers have several young pitchers they’re trying to bring along slowly and new manager A.J. Hinch said the six-man rotation is a possibility.

“We’ve got a lot of guys that we’re wanting to stretch out and give a look, and obviously there’s a competition going on for five or six spots, depending on what we go with,” Hinch said.

But the strategy might not be a great decision for every team. The five-man rotation has been a durable staple for MLB teams over the past 30 to 40 years, even as sabermetrics have changed many of the game’s strategies.

The math is fairly simple. In a five-man rotation, pitchers make about 32 starts per season. Assuming an average of about six innings per start, that’s 192 innings through a 162-game schedule.

In a six-man rotation, the number of starts goes down to 27. At six innings a start, that’s 162 innings in a season, or 30 less than a pitcher in a five-man rotation.

Certainly, that means pitchers get more rest. But it also means a staff ace isn’t on the mound as much.

For teams like the Washington Nationals (Max Scherzer), New York Yankees (Gerrit Cole) or Los Angeles Dodgers (Clayton Kershaw and Trevor Bauer), that doesn’t seem ideal.

Colorado manager Bud Black is one who plans to stick with a five-man rotation if possible.

“A lot of times it’s what we can condition our players to do and right now our starting pitchers across baseball are conditioned to throw every fifth day,” Black said. “We can go on and on about pitch counts and 200 innings and all the things that go in with that, but we as an industry have created some of these standards — good or bad.”

Teams won’t necessarily have to go to a six-man rotation to preserve their arms. There are other strategies available, including fewer innings per start or skipping an occasional start when the schedule allows.

“I’m not in the logistics business so for me to try and gameplan would be above my pay grade,” Gallen said. “But there’s things I imagine you could do throughout the year. Maybe take a look at days off or whatever it is, push a start back.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Spacewalking astronauts had to take extra safety precautions Saturday after possibly getting toxic ammonia on their suits from the International Space Station’s external cooling system.

Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins had no trouble removing and venting a couple of old jumper cables to remove any ammonia still lingering in the lines. But so much ammonia spewed out of the first hose that Mission Control worried some of the frozen white flakes might have gotten on their suits.

Hopkins was surprised at the amount of ammonia unleashed into the vacuum of space. “Oh yeah, look at that go. Did you see that?“he asked flight controllers. “There’s more than I thought.”

Even though the stream of ammonia was directed away from the astronauts and the space station, Hopkins said some icy crystals may have contacted his helmet. As a result, Mission Control said it was going to “be conservative“and require inspections.

The astronauts’ first suit check found nothing amiss. “Looks clean,” Hopkins called down.

NASA did not want any ammonia getting inside the space station and contaminating the cabin atmosphere. The astronauts used long tools to vent the hoses and stayed clear of the nozzles, to reduce the risk of ammonia contact.

Once the ammonia hoses were emptied, the astronauts moved one of them to a more central location near the NASA hatch, in case it’s needed on the opposite end of the station. The ammonia jumper cables were added years ago following a cooling system leak.

As the nearly sevenhour spacewalk drew to a close, Mission Control said the astronauts had already spent enough time in the sunlight to bake off any ammonia residue from their suits. Indeed, once Glover and Hopkins were back inside, their crewmates said they could smell no ammonia but still wore gloves while handling the suits.

The hose work should have been completed during a spacewalk a week ago, but was put off along with other odd jobs when power upgrades took longer than expected.

Saturday’s other chores included: replacing an antenna for helmet cameras, rerouting ethernet cables, tightening connections on a European experiment platform, and installing a metal ring on the hatch thermal cover.

Eager to get these station improvements done before the astronauts head home this spring,

Mission Control ordered up the bonus spacewalk for Glover and Hopkins, who launched last November on SpaceX. They teamed up for back-toback spacewalks 11⁄2 months ago and were happy to chalk up another.

“It was a good day,” Glover said once back inside.

Although most of their efforts paid off, there were a few snags.

The spacewalk got started nearly an hour late, so the men could replace the communication caps beneath their helmets in order to hear properly. A few hours later, Glover’s right eye started watering. The irritation soon passed, but later affected his left eye.

Then as Glover wrapped up his work, a bolt came apart and floated away along with the washers, becoming the latest pieces of space junk.

“Sorry about that,” Glover said. “No, no, it’s not your fault,” Mission Control assured him.

It was the sixth spacewalk — and, barring an emergency, the last — for this U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew of seven. All but one was led by NASA.