The 13th Man Out

by
March 26, 2009

Last time I railed a bit on the act of carrying three dedicated catchers on a roster. Tonight, with real substantial baseball news still coming in at just a trickle as we lead up to the start of the regular season, I decided to continue the trend. This time, it’s not such a cut and dry case as I think the three catchers issue is. Tonight’s issue is the 12-man pitching staff.

I believe there are a number of circumstances where it is prudent to carry 12 pitchers. My beef is that seemingly every team does it all season long and that just screams wasted roster spot to me. One only needs to look through usage patterns to see the evidence; relievers going six or longer days between appearances, that is a surefire clue that there could be better uses for that roster slot.

Namely, it boils down to this; I think the game has evolved lately into a situation where managers are paranoid about treating each individual game as if it were totally independent. But it’s not, not on a usage level. What you do in one game does affect what your options are in the following. How many pitches does a reliever throw each time he gets warmed up? 20, 30? How many times does he make an appearance which involves less than that many pitches? My hunch would be a majority.

Why not just carry 11 pitchers and if you are facing a game after a particular heavy usage day, just swap one or two out with the best available Triple-A relievers for a short while. They’re RP, and not dominant ones even, they’re almost the baseball definition of fungible assets.

Managers seem too cavalier to me in making pitching changes to try and extract the greatest possible match ups at that particular moment. Of course, that sounds good, right? And it is good, if usage was independent from game to game, but it’s not. And endless pitching changes to eek out an extra percent or two of favorability on a single pitcher-batter battle is focusing on the micro level and missing that if you relaxed your standards in that regard, perhaps you would be able to go with an 11-man staff and thus carry another bench bat which can provide you with a greater total contribution.

This specific topic, and roster maximization in general, makes for a fantastic area of research that in time I plan to get around to analyzing with hard numbers, but for now I just wanted to present something that sticks out to me every March as Opening Day rosters get set. What are your thoughts?





 

Matthew Carruth is a software engineer who has been fascinated with baseball statistics since age five. When not dissecting baseball, he is watching hockey or playing soccer.

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Preston
15 years ago

Of course, the question that goes hand-in-hand with this is how often teams need an extra bat off the bench – keeping in mind that they’re already probably keeping at least their top two or three options on the major league squad, so whoever you bring up is probably at best going to be your third best pinch hitter. In addition, you’re limited in terms of who you’re going to call up – you don’t want to pull up young prospects who you’re trying to get regular playing time in AA or AAA just for the occasional pinch hitting duty; instead, you’re looking at the more veteran AAA players – ones you don’t mind jerking back and forth between the big league club and AAA. You’re also limited in terms of who you can send down – it has to be someone with options left, which means this probably only works if one of the non-crucial elements of your bullpen (one of your worst 3 pitchers, say) is young and has options. That may not eliminate many teams, but it will certainly affect some.

The last element to consider is the psyche of those involved. I tend to think that stuff like defining roles for players is overrated, but some players simply might not deal with a situation like this as well as others. If you’re shuffling the same players too regularly, there may even be a concern of tiring them out from frequent travel back and forth between teams in addition to travel with the major or minor league club. The baseball season is a tiring experience – that’s why greenies were so prevalent – and this is just adding to that.

Overall, I think it’s an interesting idea, but it’s something that, practically speaking, is limited to a small number of teams with the appropriate personnel situation. Along the same lines, I hope you’ll look at the roster issue from the position player side as well – I’d be interested to see how frequent it is for bench players to go 6 or 7 games without being used.

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Fresh Hops
15 years ago
Reply to  Preston

I think you’re overlooking platoons and defensive substitutions.

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