No free substitutions | Baseball Prospectus

Translated by Marco Gámez.

Baseball has a funny sense of humor, or at least Dave Roberts He has it. In Game 4 of the World Series, last Tuesday night, the Dodgers covered it with their relief staff. There was a lot of talk about it, because this is far from the first case of the Dodgers eschewing a traditional pitching usage model in favor of one that saves their best relievers for other matchups within a series. Is open play and relief pitching the end of pitching as we know it in the MLB postseason?

Obviously it is not. There was never any reason to worry about that. But the way things played out makes it so shockingly clear that you have to laugh a little. Below I show how many pitchers each team used during each game of the Fall Classic:

• Game 1: Yankees 6, Dodgers 6
• Game 2: Yankees 5, Dodgers 5
• Game 3: Dodgers 7, Yankees 8
• Game 4: Dodgers 4, Yankees 6
• Game 5: Dodgers 8, Yankees 5

It helped, of course, that Game 1 went to extra innings, and the Yankees’ strong offensive performance meant the Dodgers only had to go eight innings. Still, as things played out, the Dodgers used fewer pitchers in their relief corps game than in any of the games involving an old-fashioned starting pitcher and relief usage scheme. That not only undermines the argument that bullpen play is somehow killing that model, but it highlights the real problem that might be worth solving in the way baseball works regarding the use of launchers, one that actually has a relatively easy solution waiting for us.

The problem, in my view, is not so much the existence of relief pitch games as the fact that substitutions are costless. Yes, every substitution in baseball has a cost, because a player cannot return to the game once he is relieved, and yes, we have added a slight strategic tax on substitutes by forcing pitchers who enter the game to face three batters or work an inning before being replaced. However, no additional costs are imposed and that’s why we see the biggest games of the year become de facto relief pitch games, even when they’re not called that. There have been proposals, in recent months, to alter that state of affairs, ranging from the logically plausible, but remote, idea of ​​losing the designated hitter when you retire the starting pitcher, to the ridiculous, but almost League-approved, proposal, of forcing the starters to work six innings. However, they have all been overly complicated, a bit rigid and a bit focused on the openers. While the romantic ideal of the traditional starting pitcher may be what fans miss most, that’s not really the problem and shouldn’t be the focus of solutions. On the contrary, the idea should be to encourage expanding the volume of best players in each squad and, to do so, a simpler change is necessary.

Only five substitutions should be allowed per game.

This is not a radical or original proposal. Football, baseball’s cousin when it comes to reason and structure around substitutions, paved the way long ago. In football, basketball, and hockey, substitutes are not permanent and are necessary, because those games are anaerobic and intense by design. Players are expected to give their highest possible level of effort on every play they participate in, and rules on substitutions allow teams to take out players who are too tired to do that and then send them back once. that they are ready, once they have recovered. Although on the surface football looks more like those other sports than baseball, in reality, the world’s greatest sport and America’s traditional pastime share a certain spiritual essence. This is not a relentless action. They value the ability to control the pace. And they have always expected that teams will replace players only when they can no longer contribute to the project of winning. This is why substitutions in both sports are one-way. It is the spirit of the game.

A broad, one-dimensional rule would fix what ails baseball games in a way that a disbanding designated hitter and a mitigated multiple-inning requirement for starting pitchers would not. I wouldn’t force teams to behave in any way; it would simply limit any attempts at extreme use. And it would add friction to every pitching change. Any starting pitcher who can give you six innings instead of five gives you the flexibility to use a pinch hitter later in the game. Any reliever capable of making multiple innings does the same. Hitters and pitchers who are relatively immune to substitution by the opponent’s dominant hand become more valuable, because the opportunities for tactical maneuvers are fewer and any reduction in the need to perform them helps. Each decision on substitutes weighs on real strategies and risks, without artificially tightening the set of decisions a team can make in any given situation.

In theory, of course, this rule change would still allow a team to use six pitchers in a game, but here’s how rare it would get. If you use all five reserves in planned pitching changes, what do you do in case of an injury? Teams would strive to keep their fifth substitute in each game, and would probably try to plan with four pitchers (at most) even in high-stakes games, because that way, they would at least have a chance to take advantage of a pinch hitter before using up its last replacement. There are several options for handling a situation where a team has already made its substitutions, and then an injury occurs, but I think the best is (again) the simplest, and one borrowed from soccer: forcing the team to play with the eight players left. That could mean a position player having to pitch when there’s still a chance the game could swing toward either team. It could mean outfield covered by two men in games within two runs. It would be an exceptionally rare situation, which is good (we don’t want baseball to be a disaster all the time), but it would make that situation costly and strange.

This season, MLB teams averaged 0.82 pinch hitter plate appearances, 0.19 pinch runners, 0.73 defensive substitutions and 3.3 pitching changes per game. That’s 5.04 substitutions per game. In other words, limiting teams to five substitutes would not be an extraordinary and onerous new measure, limiting their style and radically altering baseball. It would simply corral the excesses. It would force teams to pay a little more for stars, because those stars would drive more wins, but it could also incentivize building stronger benches and increase the value of genuine versatility, because players who represent a major hitter in the lineup for a given time would be asked more often to play the entire game, and players who could slide from one position to another to give their team more options for setup changes with a single move would be more valuable. It’s the kind of change that would make baseball 10% more interesting and 10% more difficult for managers and front offices, which should be our goal. It might be even less likely than the creaky six-inning start rule, but this postseason has provided a handful of good examples of its necessity.