Unwritten

by Danny Knobler

  Snitker had been in professional baseball for more than 40 years and between the minor leagues and the majors he had managed more than 3,000 games. But he was nervous in the ninth inning that day, just as he had been a year earlier when Braves pitcher Mike Foltynewicz lost a no-hit bid with just three outs to go.

  Newcomb would get even closer, getting the first two outs of the ninth before Manny Machado’s single denied him the no-hitter. By then, Newcomb had thrown 134 pitches, the most by any Braves pitcher since 2000.

  “I stopped looking at the pitch count,” said Snitker, who understood what a no-hitter would mean to his 25-year-old left-hander. “But it’s like I told him after the game. When I was managing in Durham [in the 1980s], that [134 pitches] was just a normal game.”

  Not anymore. Newcomb was the only pitcher in the major leagues who threw as many as 130 pitches in a game in 2018. Compare that to 1989, when there were 198 times a pitcher threw 130 pitches in a game (and when Tommy Lasorda allowed Orel Hershiser to throw 169 in one game for the Dodgers).

  Ten years later, the number of 130-pitch games had been cut nearly in half, to 103. By 2009, it had dropped to just seven games (with no pitcher throwing more than 133).

  This is one case where the unwritten rules have changed drastically. Pitch counts have changed how managers handle their pitching in every game, but the decisions are toughest when the starter hasn’t allowed a hit. Even the newest of new-age managers understands the value of making history, that throwing a no-hitter can change a pitcher’s life. But every manager also understands that today’s pitchers aren’t conditioned to throw 120 pitches in a game.

  As Roberts said when he pulled Ross Stripling after 100 pitches in 71/3 no-hit innings in April 2016, “Under no circumstance am I going to even consider putting his future in jeopardy. For me, it was a no-brainer.”

  Accurate pitch counts have only been available for the last 30 years or so, so we don’t know how many pitches Ryan threw in most of his no-hitters (he threw 130 and 122 in his last two). We do know Giants manager Bruce Bochy allowed Tim ­Lincecum to throw 148 pitches in a 2013 no-hitter, and A.J. Hinch allowed Edwin Jackson to throw 149 in his 2010 no-hitter for the Diamondbacks.

  “He kept saying, ‘I’m fine. I’m not coming out. I’m not coming out,’” Hinch said that night. “You do want to make smart decisions, but you do have a chance at history and you don’t want to take it away from him.”

  It’s understandable for managers to worry about putting pitchers’ careers in jeopardy. Terry Collins agonized over allowing Johan Santana to throw 134 pitches in his 2012 no-hitter for the Mets. Santana, who was 33 years old at the time and had already had injury trouble, started only 10 more games in his major league career. There’s no way to know if the 134-pitch game contributed, or how much it did.

  “You can’t say it was the right decision or the wrong decision,” Santana told Sports Illustrated in 2015. “Maybe if I would have gotten knocked out in the fourth inning, everything would have been different, or nothing would have been different.”

  Collins said in that story that Mets fans tell him all the time they’re glad he allowed Santana to continue. The Mets had never had a pitcher throw a no-hitter in their history, and through 2018 Santana’s is still the only one they’ve ever had.

  History is important, and not just to fans. Keeping pitchers healthy to have long careers is important to them and to the teams that invest money in them. It’s easy to say you wouldn’t pull a pitcher before he allowed his first hit, or to say you wouldn’t let a pitcher go past a prescribed pitch limit.

  It’s not that easy, not anymore. The unwritten rule still says you don’t pull a guy throwing a no-hitter—except when you do.

  36. Starting Off with an Opener

  THE TAMPA BAY RAYS HAVE HAD JUST ONE no-hitter in their history. Matt Garza threw it, on July 26, 2010, against the Detroit Tigers.

  Nine innings, 120 pitches, no hits.

  Compare that to what Ryne Stanek did in eight of the games he started for the Rays in 2018.

  One and two-thirds innings, 21 pitches, no hits.

  Two innings, 27 pitches, no hits.

  One and two-thirds innings, 11 pitches, no hits.

  One and two-thirds innings, 32 pitches, no hits.

  One and two-thirds innings, 23 pitches, no hits.

  Two innings, 22 pitches, no hits.

  One inning, 16 pitches, no hits.

  One out, 15 pitches, no hits.

  Notice a difference?

  The Rays actually had 15 games in 2018 where manager Kevin Cash removed his pitcher before he’d allowed a hit. No manager before him—and no other manager in 2018—had done it more than five times in a season.

  In the past, it basically only happened when the pitcher got hurt or got ejected from the game, or when his pitch count was so high that the manager worried about the risk of injury. Cash and the Rays had a couple of cases like that, when he removed Nathan Eovaldi after six no-hit innings in his first start back after a second Tommy John surgery and when he pulled Blake Snell after five perfect innings in his second start after spending time on the disabled list with shoulder fatigue.

  In all the other cases, Cash made a change because the pitcher who started the game wasn’t really a starter. On those days, the Rays didn’t even call their first pitcher a starter.

  He was an opener, and there was no new piece of baseball strategy that led to more debates in 2018. By the end of the season, many teams had copied the Rays and tried it, and there was even discussion of whether it might be the best way to approach some playoff games.

  The idea, in simplest terms, came out of the truth that more runs are scored in the first inning than in any other inning. So why not use a one-inning specialist as your first pitcher?

  And once you’ve done that, why not think about having that pitcher work through the middle of the opposition batting order? You can even follow him, as the Rays sometimes did, with a pitcher expected to work the most innings of anyone you use that day, someone who in other cases would have been the starter. By using an opener before him, you could allow that other pitcher to begin his day’s work in the lower part of the order.

  The strategy was first suggested by MLB Network’s Brian Kenny in his 2016 book, Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution. The Rays didn’t follow it fully, because Kenny suggested even using an opener in games where you have a pitcher like Clayton Kershaw available to pitch as many as seven innings.

  The Rays didn’t use an opener on days where they had what Cash called a “traditional starter,” such as Blake Snell, Chris Archer, or Nathan Eovaldi before they traded them. Their original plan was to have four traditional starters and one “bullpen day” each turn through the rotation. But injuries and the trades of Archer and Eovaldi left them short of pitchers they trusted to start games.

  By the middle of May, they went from “bullpen days,” which wouldn’t include anyone expected to pitch 3–4 innings, to the opener, where a reliever would start the game and generally be asked to face as few as three or as many as nine batters, before giving way to someone who would likely take the game into the middle or late innings.

  They ended up using an opener 55 times, although Cash strongly suggested he would have preferred using the strategy a little less, if he had more traditional starters available.

  That said, the results were good. The Rays’ first-inning ERA was an American League-best 3.61 and their record in games without a traditional starter was 44–34 (including “bullpen days” and games started by an opener).

  By the end of the 2018 season, several other teams were trying the same thing, sometimes even going beyond what the Rays had done.

  The Milwaukee Brewers took the strategy to an extreme on September 24, 2018, against the St. Louis Cardinals. With a bullpen bolstered by September call-ups that gave him a 19-man pitchin
g staff and a Cardinals lineup with dangerous left-handed hitter Matt Carpenter in the leadoff spot followed by eight straight right-handed hitters, Brewers manager Craig Counsell chose to start lefty reliever Dan Jennings as what the team termed its “initial out-getter.”

  That’s “out,” as in singular, because Jennings was charged with simply getting one out. He went to the mound to begin the game, but his one and only job was to pitch to Carpenter. He threw three pitchers, got Carpenter to ground out to second base, and his day was done.

  “Somebody asked me before the game if I was going to go five tonight,” Jennings said. “I said, ‘Five pitches?’”

  It was a strategy born of circumstance—a September bullpen, a left-handed hitter who fares significantly better against right-handed pitchers atop a lineup filled with right-handed hitters, and a young “starting” pitcher who wasn’t in position to feel slighted by coming out of the bullpen one out into the first inning.

  Counsell followed Jennings with 22-year-old Freddy Peralta, who got the next 11 outs while allowing one run on three hits. One of those hits was an RBI double in the third by Carpenter, which if anything strengthened Counsell’s case for using an “initial out-getter” against the Cardinals star.

  The Brewers won the game, using nine pitchers along the way.

  The Brewers made it to the postseason in 2018 without any dominant starting pitchers but with a bullpen that ranked fifth in baseball with a 3.49 ERA. But the Jennings game was the only one in the regular season where they employed anything that could be called an opener.

  Then came the playoffs, when the Brewers took the concept of a rotation and basically discarded it.

  In Game 1 of the division series against the Colorado Rockies, Counsell used Brandon Woodruff as his first pitcher. Call him the starter, the opener, or the initial out-getter, but understand that in that game, Woodruff’s job would be to face only the first nine batters.

  It didn’t matter that he got through three innings without allowing a hit, while throwing 48 pitches. Woodruff had done his job, and Counsell’s job would be to work through the remaining six innings with his bullpen. He nearly did it, too, with the first three relievers after Woodruff combining to shut out the Rockies on just one hit.

  The Rockies tied the game in the ninth inning, but that could hardly be blamed on the strategy of pulling Woodruff after three. That strategy worked (and the Brewers won the game, anyway, in the 10th inning).

  The Brewers chose traditional starters for the next two games. Even then, they didn’t allow Jhoulys Chacin or Wade Miley to go deep—Chacin pitched five innings, Miley 42/3—but neither one was an opener. The Brewers won both of those games, too, earning a four-day break before they would begin the National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  For most teams, those four days would provide a chance to reset the starting rotation. The Brewers were again ready to try something different.

  So while the Dodgers began Game 1 with Clayton Kershaw, one of the best starting pitchers in the game, the Brewers sent Gio Gonzalez to the mound in the first inning. Gonzalez is a two-time All-Star and had a 2.13 ERA in five late-season starts after the Brewers acquired him from the Washington Nationals, but he wasn’t there to match outs with Kershaw.

  Gonzalez was there to pitch the first two innings. He was there to get the Brewers to their strong bullpen. He was there because as a left-hander who would be followed by right-handed relievers, he forced Dodgers manager Dave Roberts into early decisions in his platoon-heavy lineup.

  Gonzalez gave up a second-inning home run to Manny ­Machado, but that would be the only run the Dodgers would get until the eighth inning. He was the opener, and the strategy worked. The Brewers won the game, 6–5.

  “It’s exciting to see the revolution,” Gonzalez told reporters. “I guess that’s what it is.”

  If that is what it is, it spread rapidly in the latter part of the 2018 season. The Oakland A’s, who were hit hard by injuries but more or less stuck to a traditional rotation through the first five months of the season, used reliever Liam Hendriks as an opener eight times in September. Hendriks pitched a scoreless first inning in each of the games, but the A’s went on to win just four of them.

  “Mixed results,” manager Bob Melvin said. “Some games were good, some not.”

  Even so, when the A’s made the playoffs as the ­American League’s second wild-card team, they decided to use ­Hendriks as an opener in the Wild Card Game against the New York Yankees. The results weren’t good. Hendriks allowed a two-run home run to Aaron Judge in the first inning, and the A’s never recovered.

  There’s no way to know if they would have done better using a traditional starter. Their best starter during the season was left-hander Sean Manaea, but he had shoulder surgery in early ­September. They could have used Edwin Jackson, a veteran starter who had a 3.33 ERA in 17 games, but in a winner-take-all game where they could use a 10-man bullpen it hardly seemed ridiculous to piece it together and give the Yankee hitters different looks all night.

  It just didn’t work out.

  The opener strategy is easier to use with a Wild Card Game roster, which is only set for one game and thus can be stacked with relievers. It’s also easier to use in September, because the expanded 40-man roster means plenty of relievers are available. It’s a bigger challenge from April through August. The Rays had the most bullpen innings of any team in baseball history in 2018, and there were times during the season it was a challenge for Cash to find fresh relievers.

  There’s no question teams will continue to experiment with using an opener in future seasons. There’s also no question the use of traditional starters isn’t going away anytime soon, because at this point every team would choose a true dominating starter to begin a game over using an opener.

  The Houston Astros believe in analytics as much as any team, but they also believed in perhaps the strongest five-man rotation in the game in 2018, with Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, Dallas Keuchel, Charlie Morton, and Lance McCullers Jr. The Astros did start a few games with relievers, but those were more traditional “bullpen games” that teams have used for years, rather than an opener as part of a bigger strategy.

  37. The Wade Miley Game (or When a Probable Starter Only Faces One Batter)

  ONE ADVANTAGE OF USING AN OPENER IS YOU can force the opposing manager into uncomfortable platoon decisions.

  Think about Game 1 of the 2018 NLCS, the one the ­Brewers opened with left-hander Gio Gonzalez but only planned to use him for the first time through the order. The Dodgers, who often started David Freese at first base against left-handers but preferred Max Muncy against right-handers, put Freese in their lineup that night against Gonzalez.

  Freese flied out against Gonzalez to end the first inning. By the time his spot in the order came up again, Gonzalez was out of the game—by plan—replaced by right-hander Brandon Woodruff. Even though it was just the fourth inning and no one was on base, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts chose to pinch-hit Muncy, giving him the platoon advantage against Woodruff.

  But two innings later, when the same spot in the order came up with two out and a runner on base, Woodruff had already been replaced by Josh Hader, the best left-handed reliever in the Brewers bullpen. At that point, Roberts had little choice but to stick with Muncy, who struck out.

  Freese, one of the Dodgers’ best right-handed hitters and one of their most successful hitters in the postseason, was already out of the game.

  A similar situation developed in Game 5, when Freese again had just one plate appearance. But this time, the cause was as much deception as it was strategy. Or maybe we can just call it strategic deception.

  One day earlier, the Brewers announced to the Dodgers and to the world that left-hander Wade Miley would be their Game 5 starting pitcher. Miley would be on short rest, but the way the Brewers were handling their pitching, that did
n’t seem so unusual.

  What was unusual was what the Brewers actually had planned. While they told the world (and the Dodgers) Miley would be starting, what they didn’t say was that he would only face one batter before being replaced by Woodruff, a right-hander. Miley would actually be their starter for Game 6 (which he did eventually start).

  The plan was to bait Roberts into putting his right-handed hitters into the lineup. Woodruff would wait to begin warming up until the lineup cards had been exchanged before the game, locking those decisions into place. A right-handed batter listed on the official lineup could be pinch-hit for at any time, but he would then be out of the game and not available to use as a pinch-hitter later.

  The Dodgers, perhaps sensing something might be up or that Miley wouldn’t work deep into the game, started a different lineup than in Miley’s first NLCS start, using two of their left-handed platoon players. One of those was Cody Bellinger, who led off and was the only batter Miley faced (he walked). Still, Woodruff faced a more favorable lineup than he likely would have had he been the announced starter. He pitched 51/3 innings and allowed three runs. While he was out-pitched by Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw and the Brewers lost the game, the strategic deception may have given them the best chance to win.

  It definitely wasn’t against the rules. Baseball has no rules about announcing probable pitchers, even though the practice goes back more than 100 years. (Researchers at the Hall of Fame found a reference to probable starters in a 1901 news­paper story!) And there’s certainly no rule against removing your starter one batter into a game.

  Remember, the Brewers had done just that in a September game against the St. Louis Cardinals. The only difference that night was that they started a left-handed reliever, and it was fairly obvious right away that he was only there to face Matt Carpenter, the Cardinals’ lefty-hitting leadoff man.

  In the case of Miley and Woodruff, it was the deception part of it that bothered some people, rather than the strategy part. But not everyone.