The starting pitcher is nearly extinct. Can MLB rule changes, mentality shifts save us from the 'five-and-dive?'

Alek Manoah refuses to compromise what he believes should be expected from a starting pitcher. And he’s determined to enjoy the spoils of that position as long as he can.

Just 24 years old, Manoah is among the Toronto Blue Jays’ most integral pieces, a horse for a club suddenly the consensus favorites to win the American League pennant in a season that opens Thursday. While right-handers Kevin Gausman and Jose Berrios are their nine-figure free agent and trade investments, it is Manoah – a menacing but perfect pitching specimen at 6-foot-6, 260 pounds – who can be the homegrown difference-maker in a four-team AL East dogfight.

It is why Toronto drafted him 11th overall out of West Virginia University in 2019, and why the reins were slowly lifted in 2021 as Manoah struck out 127 batters in an 111-inning debut – a pitcher determined to get deep into games and expect nothing less.

“I was a horse in college,” says Manoah, who threw two complete games at West Virginia and averaged nearly seven innings per start In his junior season. “When I got here that was one of the things I’d talk about – I’m built to go the distance. In the beginning it was five, six innings and the attitude would stay – I can go more, I can go more, I can go more. And then they let me run free a little bit last year.

“And I was able to prove it to them.”

Yet as Manoah describes his pitching goals and the singular glory associated with starting the game – “The whole day revolves around me. It’s my game day,” he says – he sounds increasingly like a merrymaker arriving to the mixer just as the keg runs dry.

The starting pitcher remains an endangered species in Major League Baseball, but also a paradox: Even as fewer pitchers exceed 200 innings and fewer still aren’t even allowed to face batting orders a third time, the greatest teams still employ as many as they can conventionally. Those who can shoulder the load are paid the most handsomely, which is why Max Scherzer, 37, will make $43.3 million annually over the next three seasons.

He is the rarity after a decade of degradation, cratering statistics and an increasing reliance on data and matchups has marginalized all but the greatest arms into resembling glorified relievers more than the horses they believe they are.

“It’s kind of crazy how much it’s changed,” says Boston Red Sox pitcher Michael Wacha, who at 21 was the NLCS MVP for St. Louis barely a year after they plucked him from Texas A&M in the 2012 draft. “When I first got called up, and you were a five-and-dive guy, you were almost made fun of, like you didn’t do your job as a starting pitcher.

“Nowadays, you get a freaking high five if you go five innings, two times through the lineup and then they pass it over to the bullpen.”

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Even as the role of most starters diminishes, however, there is a glimmer of hope that a series of rules changes beginning this season may gradually force teams to entrust their starters to go longer. Unless another method comes along to further marginalize them, of course.

'That model is not sustainable'

If you’ve paid attention to the game at all the past decade, reports of the starter’s demise have been anything but exaggerated. In 2011, MLB starters averaged 6.03 innings pitched; that fell to 5.07 in 2019 (the last customary season before the pandemic) and 5.02 last season. As such, 39 pitchers threw at least 200 innings in 2011; just four did last season, and 15 in 2019.

All the while, clubs began following the lead of franchises like the Tampa Bay Rays, who around 2015 began dismissing their starters after just two times through the lineup – or, almost always, before they threw a pitch in the sixth inning. The numbers defend the strategy: Last season, the opposing OPS for batters facing a starter the first time was .708. It rose to .747 the second time around and .780 a third time, while relievers facing a batter the first time enjoyed a .714 OPS against.

Yet the strategy also calls into question whether a staff can sustain that pace over a year and into a new season (more on that later) while also providing an aesthetically pleasing product for fans.

This is where the numbers get ugly.

Time of game has risen from 2 hours, 56 minutes in 2011 to 3 hours a year later, never to turn back. It topped out at 3:11 in 2021 – even as a three-batter reliever minimum was instituted – and helped prompt a series of rules changes, many beginning May 2 after a post-lockout grace period:

• Pitching staffs will be limited to 13.

• Pitchers must spend at least 15 days on the injured list, making it challenging for clubs to stuff dubiously injured arms on the IL to maximize the number of active pitchers; other players may still be activated after 10 days.

• Players can be optioned to the minor leagues just five times a year, putting a stop to the constant shuttle from big leagues to Class AAA as clubs burned through available arms only to summon another one.

• Beginning in 2023, commissioner Rob Manfred may institute a pitch clock, which is intended to speed pace of play but for now possesses unknown physical ramifications for hard-throwing relievers who may prefer a longer gap between pitches.

The modifications will make it harder to churn pitching staffs, replace frequently-used arms with fresh ones and roll out a so-called “bullpen game” – during which relievers tag-team the nine innings.

Lefty Rich Hill, who at 42 will open 2022 as the Red Sox’s fifth starter, says the changes will hopefully alter a landscape that’s always been dangerous for the game’s most fungible creatures – short relievers.

“That model is not really sustainable for 162 games,” he says of strict limits on starters. “Guys are trying to keep taking the ball, picking up the innings out of the bullpen and not trying to be somebody who’s an advocate for themselves. It is difficult.

“Obviously, the goal in each game is to win and every player wants to be a part of that. Now, no matter how many days you’ve thrown or how good you feel or where you are on the spectrum of getting injured, you will continue to take the ball, because you know you are a competitor and that’s the way guys want to be.”

‘I feel like everyone gets TJ’

The game’s overreliance on relievers has coincided with an obsession with – and ability to generate – velocity. From 2014 to 2015, the major leagues saw a significant increase – 14% to 19% - in the percentage of pitchers whose average fastball measures at least 95 mph, based on StatCast data for pitchers facing at least 50 batters; it’s now at 22%, while the average fastball is up from 92 to nearly 93 mph.

The preponderance of hard throwers – and stats that suggest it’s awfully hard to hit them – comes with a decided dearth of definitive knowledge of how best to care for arms. For now, the industry’s cure for a rash of reconstructive Tommy John surgeries – 131 since the start of 2021, according to analyst Joe Roegele – has been simply to acquire as many hard throwers as possible.

Consider the Rays. Between July 2020 and August 2021, they lost four pitchers – Colin Poche, Yonny Chirinos, Jalen Beeks and Cy Young-caliber ace Tyler Glasnow – to Tommy John surgery. In a less pliable era, the loss of roughly 33% of a pitching staff for more than a year would be devastating.

Instead, the Rays simply advanced to Game 6 of the 2020 World Series and won 100 games in 2021. In September, relievers Ryan Thompson (thoracic outlet surgery) and 2020 playoff hero Nick Anderson (Tommy John alternative procedure) also went under the knife. Yet nobody expects them any less potent in 2022.

The revolving door – along with a challenging but improving success rate for Tommy John surgeries – has introduced something of a fatalistic mentality among pitchers.

“I feel like everybody gets TJ,” says Phillies ace Zack Wheeler, who led the majors with 213 ⅓ innings pitched in 2021 and came up in a Mets system where he and future aces Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz all underwent Tommy John surgery. “We all threw 95-plus.

“Your body has a little bitty ligament in your elbow that’s supposed to control everything.”

It may take a rethinking of how clubs protect that ligament if they care to grow a deeper forest of starting pitchers.

Kids in play

Wheeler was drafted sixth overall by the San Francisco Giants in 2009 and while he didn’t realize it then, in hindsight recognizes how he and other top prospects were monitored.

“They were definitely overly cautious,” says Wheeler, who in 2011 was traded to the Mets in exchange for Carlos Beltran.

Jameson Taillon tells a typical story: Drafted between Bryce Harper and Manny Machado in 2010, he was treated with kid gloves by the Pittsburgh Pirates, averaging four innings over his 23 starts in 2011 and just more than 5 ⅓ in 26 starts in 2012.

Nonetheless, Taillon succumbed to Tommy John surgery in 2014.

“The first couple years in the minor leagues, I was really babied, to try to stay healthy,” says Taillon, who underwent a second procedure in 2019 and also made 25 starts in 2017 despite grappling with testicular cancer in 2017. He’s now a New York Yankee.

“And then of course I got hurt probably more than anyone. So there’s no answer as far as player health, in my mind.”

Taillon has seen the industry transform around him, a place that made him a unicorn in 2011 because he neared the mid-90s in fastball velocity as a teen. Now, Taillon follows draft prospects on social media and realizes that while he hasn’t changed, he’s gone from “a stuff guy with enough command to now, where I’d say I’m a command guy with enough stuff.”

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Wacha and Manoah both credit their college years with turning them into true pitchers, given the chance to battle players a third time through a lineup and be forced to develop pitches to navigate it all. Both are unanimous that challenging young pitchers early may make them more battle-tested later.

“You might take some lumps in the minor leagues, but keep challenging those guys,” says Wacha. “You have to give them the opportunity. Some will take advantage of the opportunity. Some will fold. I’m all about challenging guys and giving them that opportunity to see how they respond.”

One funny thing about the Rays: For all the talk of innovation, their backbone of a playoff era has been starting pitching. Glasnow, veteran Charlie Morton and Blake Snell all played key hands in extending Houston to five games of the 2019 ALDS and then pushing the Dodgers to six games in the ’20 World Series. A new trio of Shane McClanahan, Shane Baz and Luis Patiño are poised to stretch their playoff streak to four years in 2022.

“Having been with the Rays last year,” says Braves swingman Collin McHugh, like Wacha and Hill a recent Ray, “I think I had a little glimpse into potentially what the future could look like across baseball, which is, give guys who have elite arms a chance to extend themselves as much as the data says they can extend themselves sufficiently.

“What do the statistics bear out? We’ve kind of always been that way in baseball.”

Right now, it says power arms win games – but games only get longer, and bullpens more volatile, with so much churn.

Manoah, for one, is determined to become part of the solution.

“"As many as they need me to throw," he says of his 2022 innings goals. "If it’s 150, if it’s 200, if it’s more than that.

"Whatever it takes to get a ring."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: MLB starting pitchers are going extinct. Can rule changes fix that?