Friday, January 29, 2016
Saturday night special
Any rookie starting pitcher should be limited, by CBA, to a maximum of one start per week.
Now, you may think, this will mess up the entire rotation. Except, it will not. Not if you make him pitch games on Saturdays, and only Saturdays. I did this exercise back with Strasburg a few years back, and it works. The reason it works with Saturdays, and only Saturdays, is because there's never an off day on Friday or Sunday. So, you might occasionally push Kershaw or Price for an extra days rest, but that's really the maximum. And over the course of a season, no starts will be lost by the top-end guys.
This gives the rookie 26 starts. 26 starts sounds low, but it would rank as 85th highest in MLB in 2015. Basically, third highest for a team.
Indeed, you might think: oh, I need 5 starting pitchers on my team, each making 32 or 33 starts. That implies 150 SP in MLB doing that. Except, the 150th highest number of starts was 15 starts! The top 150 pitchers in starts accounted for 3944 starts, or an average of 131.5 starts per team. There's still a whole 30 other starts that you need to find outside your top 5. And considering your 5th starter is only making 15 starts, those 30 other starts are going to come from at least two other starting pitchers.
Basically, each team has to be going in thinking they are going to need seven starting pitchers making at least 15 starts. Some teams like the Mets are lucky, and they needed 5 pitchers to make 143 starts, so they only needed to find another 19. So, if you are really lucky, you need six SP. But the Yankees are the more likely scenario, as they needed 6 pitchers to make 141 starts, and they still needed to find 21 more starts.
Anyway, the Saturday night special pitcher. It helps the pitcher and it helps the team.
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