The debate over when baseball teams did away with the four-man rotation is a hard one to settle. J.C. Bradbury, author of The Baseball Economist , located the move to a five-man staff around 1969.
Bill James, the esteemed baseball researcher and analyst, guessed something closer to 1975 . Rob Neyer, noting the last season in which a pitcher led his league in James' comprehensive Win Shares metric , might be expected to estimate 1972 as the end of the truly dominant days of the four-man starting staff.
Chris De Luca of the Chicago Sun-Times noted the last great four-man rotation, which belonged to the 1971 Baltimore Orioles .
The numbers tell us more: 1973 was the last season in which more games were started on three days' rest than on four. 1974 was the last time there were more pitchers with 36 or more starts (33) than teams in the league (24). 1982 was the last time a non-knuckleballer started 40 games (Jim Clancy of the Blue Jays).
Perhaps the most legitimate conclusion, and certainly the most revelatory, comes from Baseball Prospectus co-founder and pitching guru, Rany Jazayerli . Jazayerli points out, to no erudite fan's great surprise, that pitching rotations hardly existed before 1960.
Fans might remember the habits of former Yankees and Mets manger Casey Stengel, who alerted his pitchers to a start on any given day by placing a baseball in the shoe of the pitcher in question.
Once those rotations did pervade baseball completely, they did not survive long in their four-man iterations. Jazayerli posits that the 1972 Los Angeles Dodgers started the move toward the five-man rotation in earnest.
In doing so, however, he also illustrates a crucial point. LA made the switch, not out of necessity or for convenience, but because they could.
All five of their starters were solidly above average, and would be for the next few seasons. If any team has five guys worthy of getting their shot at 175-200 innings, they should make use of them.
But that was 1972. Thirty-seven years and six expansion teams later, baseball has diluted its talent by no less (and really, for reasons I will presently demonstrate, substantially more) than 25 percent. It is now patently more difficult to find five good starting pitchers.
There are myriad reasons for this. First, of course, the number of players active at any given point has risen from (ostensibly) 600 in 1972 to 750 in 2009.
Further, in the 1970s, owners reacted to the salary explosion effected by the advent of free agency by engaging in a collusive gentlemen's agreement wherein they kept only 24 men on the roster.
Add that to the equation (even without correcting for the fact that the 25th man on a given roster is nearly always the last bullpen arm), and the pool of pitching talent gets even more shallow.
Even more importantly, the competition over athletes who possessed the tremendous skill and ability requisite of (especially) pitchers heated up.
Football and basketball expanded right alongside Major League Baseball, and soon NBA salaries were higher, the NFL was more popular, and baseball, without the benefit of a high-profile amateur program or an established presence in urban areas, lost its place at the forefront of the athletic American youth's conscience.
Six NFL squads and nine more in the NBA have emerged since 1972. Meanwhile, the percentage of black players in MLB (though it rose in 2009 for the first time since the 1990s ) remains around half of its mid-70s peak.
Some of this dilution has been offset by expanding globalization efforts, which have seen the percentage of foreign-born players in the league rise to over 29 percent in 2009. But all in all, the talent pool is probably watered down by about 33 percent since the first five-man rotation took the league by storm.
The league's reaction to these developments has been a giant step backward: rather than ensure that they give as few innings as possible to replacement-level fifth starters and swing-men, they have moved entirely away from the four-man rotation, and its concentration of about 72 percent of a team's innings in its best five pitchers.
Some insist that changes in the game itself dictated the switch: the lower mounds and smaller strike zone after 1968; smaller ballparks built from the 1970s on; the introduction of the DH in 1973; and rising salaries that made pitchers more valuable and, therefore, made pitching them so often riskier.
It is this last issue with which I will deal, directly and indirectly, for the majority of the remainder of this piece. Let's first explain away the other factors: there is no evidence that the four-man rotation lost its popularity or its viability quickly enough to justify the arguments that overnight changes like the DH and the lower mounds caused the transition.
Moreover, the decline of the four-man staff didn't truly take hold until after 1975, which post-dates all of those developments.
Wilbur Wood of the Chicago White Sox threw 359.1 innings in 1973, down a peg from his 376.2 in 1972 but still a pretty fair argument against the DH as the great four-man rotation eliminator.
If that is true, then the primary reason starting quartets went extinct (and, aside from the sheer stubbornness of baseball executives, the primary reason they have so far failed to re-appear) is because of perceived risks of injury or ineffectiveness.
I say this with one caveat: it is possible that some GMs, so desperate to ensure that their team has depth and balance, choose the five-man staff in the interest of spreading the talent around.
This logic does not hold up to even surface-level analysis, because no matter how well the innings are distributed, the top three starters lose innings to lesser arms under this arrangement. Still, that is one possible line of thought.
However, as mentioned, the main reason the modern game holds such prejudice against the four-man rotation is that executives, managers, pitching coaches, agents and (very possibly) pitchers themselves believe that it increases incidence of injury, or lowers effectiveness either in-game or over the course of a long season.
Thus, the question we must answer here is simple: is the added risk involved, if indeed it exists, enough to justify the innings taken from top starters and given to swing-men or long relievers?
First, one thing seems apparent to me, but is generally overlooked in this argument: it shouldn't matter.
Saying the four-man rotation could cause pitchers to get injured or lose effectiveness is like saying switching diets could cause Americans to become obese: It probably isn't true, and even if it were, the situation can hardly get worse.
Americans are as fat as ever; pitchers are as fragile and vulnerable as ever. It can't hurt to try something new, especially in light of the evidence I'll now present.
in 2006's Baseball Between the Numbers, Jazayerli teamed up with Keith Woolner on a chapter entitled, "Five Starters or Four?"
In it, they showed that pitchers going on three days' rest post performance indicators as good or better than those posted by pitchers going on four days' rest.
In fact, while pitchers on four days generally strike out more hitters, guys throwing on "short" rest are better at preventing both walks and home runs, the two most highly predictive abilities pitchers can demonstrate.
That finding is consistent with the anecdotal evidence provided by a number of expert pitching sources.
Leo Mazzone, the former Braves and Orioles pitching coach whom the Hall of Fame will one day ask to lead the pioneer class of coaching inductees, advocated at least "bridging the gap" between the four- and five-man rotations.
He had his pitchers, who would lead the league in runs allowed per game for the first 11 seasons of his tenure in Atlanta, throw twice between starts.
A 1993 Sports Illustrated article by Tim Kurkjian quoted Ray Miller, another long-time pitching coach, as saying (with Miller's usual bluntness), "The four man works." The article also logs support for the four-man rotation from then-Blue Jays General manager Pat Gillick; former ace pitcher Dave Stewart; and World Series hero Jack Morris. Said Morris, "I always felt I had better control in the four-man."
Former MLB manager Bob Boone echoed Morris' assessment: "They like it better, their command gets better," he said of pitchers in four-man rotations. "No question in my mind your command gets better."
Boone ought to know. His 1995 Kansas City Royals gave the four-man rotation its last real audition, and gave up on it for good after their staff wore down in the second half.
Crucially, however, that Royals team overused its starters. Boone acknowledged riding his starters harder than he would have liked to, pointing out that his brutal bullpen left him little choice.
Teams who intend to use the four-man staff would have to learn to control their pitchers' in-game workloads, restricting them to no more than 120 pitches in any one game, and allowing each to average no more than 110.
These figures are not arbitrarily begotten; they derive from Woolner's categorization of risk levels associated with escalating pitch counts.
To lay out this possible adjustment to pitcher usage, and to better crystallize the potential gains from it, I will lay out one possible permutation of this arrangement for the Chicago Cubs in 2010. Here are the rules I will use to determine each pitcher's usage:
- No player may start more than half of his games on three days' rest or less.
- For each player, I will use his 2009 average pitches per inning figure to project an average number of 2010 innings per start.
- No pitcher may make three consecutive starts on three days of rest.
- No pitcher may exceed 110 pitches on four days, or 105 pitches on three days. Pitchers starting a second consecutive time on three days of rest will be limited to 95 pitches.
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