Four Men Only

There is probably no issue in baseball, aside from the designated hitter, that I am more old-school on, than the four-man rotation.  Of course, pitchers are an expensive investment, and no investor wants to see his investment abused. But the sheer volume of pitches thrown by guys who barely qualify to be on a major league roster is appalling. 

Not only that, but I believe that by babying pitchers, we make them less effective.  How a 100-pitch count came to be not only standard, but gospel is bizarre.  While some pitches really ought to be pulled around 100, the century mark is when Nolan Ryan was warming up.  If the 100-pitch count had been around in his day, he probably wouldn't have lasted very long in the bigs. 

Recognizing that, Ryan has taken it upon himself to try to bring back the four-man rotation, and has been prepping the Rangers minor league system to do just that.  However, I read a piece recently that made me wonder if perhaps there's a better way to rotate pitchers. 

David Laurila of Baseball Prospectus writes about an idea that Greg Rubin, a student at NYU's Stern Business School proposed at the MIT Sloan Sport Analytics Conference.  Rubin's idea is to rotate four pairs of pitchers; eight pitchers, each throwing four innings, then resting for three days.  Rubin outlines several advantages, such as pitchers not saving their best stuff for when they get into jams. 

I like Rubin's idea, but perhaps it should go a step further.  I see absolutely no reason why a pitcher couldn't throw four innings every other day.  Instead of putting guys on a 100-pitch count every five days (or usually more like six days, as it's a five man rotation these days, not five day), they would be on a 50-60 pitch count every other day.  This would have all the advantages of Rubin's scheme, but without having to use four pitchers who are probably not that great. 

A pitcher would be expected to throw around 320 innings a season in this plan.  Cy Young used to do that in his sleep; for Old Hoss Radbourn, that was a slow week.  

But like all of my good ideas, this will be ignored as well.  So we'll continue to do everything completely ass-backwards- working underdeveloped arms to death, while allowing developed ones to wilt.