How MLB pitcher usage has changed in the past 5 years — ‘It takes a village'

New York Times

17-03-2025

MESA, Ariz. — Call it a pitching bender. Usually, that's a good thing — a sharp breaking pitch, a long-ago ace for the Philadelphia A's. But the kind of pitching bender we've experienced since 2020? That's something else entirely.
The game is drunk with pitchers.
'Say you drink five beers every night and one night you drink six beers,' said Chicago Cubs general manager Carter Hawkins, serving up a sudsy analogy. 'You're gonna feel pretty much the same the night you drink six. But if you drink one beer every night and the next night you drink six beers, you're gonna feel really bad the next day.'
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And that, Hawkins explained, is what happened when the onrushing COVID-19 pandemic shut down Major League Baseball five years ago this month. Spring training ended abruptly, and after four months of inactivity, the league played a 60-game season.
This is the hangover. In 2021, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, teams used a record 848 pitchers (plus another 61 position players who also took the mound). The total has come down a bit each season, to 802 in 2024. But that is still more than the previous record of 775.
The league reached that mark in 2019, the final season before the pandemic. So while 2020 didn't start the fire, it stoked a blaze that hasn't been burning very long.
In 1963, the first time the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series after a 162-game schedule, they used 14 pitchers in the regular season. Twenty-five years later, in another championship season, they used 18 pitchers. For the generation that followed, that remained the norm for championship teams; the 2010 Giants, for example, used only 19 pitchers.
Last season, the Dodgers used twice as many pitchers on their way to a crown: 38, a club record. It wasn't a winning strategy meant to outsmart the field, either. Baseball's worst team, the Chicago White Sox, set their own club record with 34.
'Pitchers just haven't gone as long as they used to, which we all know,' Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. 'The other part of it is the max-effort type pitchers — which we're seeing at young ages through the big leagues — have more propensity for injuries. There's just only so much a body can take.'
Use of the injured list, which was already soaring before the pandemic, has only kept climbing for pitchers. An MLB study last December found that major-league pitchers spent about 12,000 days on the injured list with elbow and shoulder injuries last season. That's up from 8,000 in 2019 and 4,000 in 2010.
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The result? Think of a movie with extras in speaking roles, or an opera with backup singers on stage. A lot more performers get a shot these days, as brief as it may be.
'These guys are continuing to get more talented — they're throwing harder and their stuff is better every year,' said Milwaukee Brewers general manager Matt Arnold, whose team used 35 pitchers last season.
'You see that and you have to make sure you have enough healthy and ready arms to compete throughout the season. I think we had 17 different guys make a start last year, and 12 different guys got a save. So when we say it takes a village, we believe it.'
The 2025 Dodgers also deployed 17 starters, including openers, in a season of extraordinary attrition. Their innings leader, Gavin Stone, worked 140 1/3 innings, far from the 162-inning threshold to qualify for the ERA title.
Limiting workloads is part of the plan for the Dodgers, who always expect to play through October. But every front office faces the same riddle when plotting the upcoming season: Who will work all of those innings?
'It's not Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz and Avery chewing up 200 to 250 each,' said Jerry Dipoto, the Seattle Mariners' president of baseball operations, referencing the Atlanta Braves' quartet of aces from the mid-1990s.
'Now, instead of your best guys knocking off 220 or 230, your best guys are knocking off 175. And we didn't change the length of a game. It's still a nine-inning game. We still play 162 of them. You still need to make those innings go away.'
The most extreme example of this, naturally, came immediately after the shortened season. Only 39 pitchers reached 162 innings in 2021, and the World Series was a six-game slog to the finish: just one pitcher, Atlanta's Max Fried, worked as many as seven total innings.
Last season, 58 pitchers worked 162 innings, roughly the same as in 2019, when there were 61. The difference is at the high end. In 2019, 15 pitchers reached 200 innings. Last season, just four got there: Logan Gilbert, Seth Lugo, Logan Webb and Zack Wheeler.
Teams have determined that 200 innings is too many for the modern power pitcher; Lugo and Webb, tellingly, both averaged fewer than eight strikeouts per nine innings, lower than the league average. The hunt for strikeouts contributes not only to longer at-bats, but feeds the perception that pitchers are no more nuanced than the average carnival-goer blowing up a radar gun.
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'We've gone through a little bit of a period where it's grip it and rip it,' Cincinnati Reds manager Terry Francona said. 'I think it's starting to come back a little but, (but) with the taking away of some of the sticky stuff, everybody's just trying to live at the top of the zone. Every pitch was like the seventh game of the World Series, and I don't know how long you can do that.'
The grip-it-and-rip-it approach applies to hard breaking balls, too. Indeed, MLB's study found that fastball use had declined from 60 percent in 2008 to 48 percent in 2024. Sophisticated labs help pitchers shape breaking balls and chase higher spin rates, but it's a risky pursuit.
'If you're trying to get a certain velocity or spin rate, the change in mechanics is a mess,' said a biomechanist quoted anonymously in MLB's report. 'It's inconsistent and it's high stress.'
The rewards, however, can outweigh the risks. Pitching to contact might help durability, but teams have less reason to value that trait when they can easily access cheap pitchers with exceptional stuff. Farm systems and waiver wires are full of them.
'Teams are incentivized to go find pitchers that throw as hard as they can, because those guys are the ones that miss more bats,' Hawkins said. 'If you miss more bats, you get more outs. If you get more outs, you accumulate more wins. If you accumulate more wins, you get paid more. So the incentive structure is geared towards that, but it's more taxing on pitchers and therefore (you need) more rest for pitchers at different times.
'So that's what teams use the option cycle for, to make sure guys aren't going back-to-back-to-back, and that triggers churning through the bottom of your roster of pitchers. It's a way to have a fresh arm that's able to throw as hard as (possible), over and over and over again.'
By pushing for a well-stocked bullpen every night, teams sometimes don't know what they have. In 2021, the Tampa Bay Rays used a club-record 38 pitchers, including six for one game apiece. One of those was Evan Phillips, whose stint lasted one day: a three-inning save, then a visit to the manager's office.
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'I'm doing what I normally do after a game — arm care, showering up, getting changed, and before I was heading out the door, Kevin Cash called me and said, 'Hey, can I speak with you real quick?'' Phillips said.
'I kind of knew what was going on right away. I was surprised, but that's the position I was in. I had no other credibility to my name that year. I'd gotten released weeks earlier by the Orioles, so I understood. And we had the conversation about how they wanted to turn that roster spot over and get a fresh arm in there.'
Like the Rays, the team they beat in the 2020 World Series, the Dodgers were also scrambling to fill innings. They plucked Phillips off waivers and summoned him to Dodger Stadium, where the team had openers lined up for the next two games.
As the Dodgers' 35th pitcher of 2021, Phillips won his debut in relief, spent a quick 10 days on the IL with a quad strain, then returned for the long haul. He has pitched in more than 200 games for the Dodgers, playoffs included, with a 2.11 ERA and no hard feelings.
'I'm sure teams try to have long-term foresight in whatever decision they make,' Phillips said. 'But I think they get pressed by what their needs are.'
Every team could use a dedicated long reliever to stem the roster churn, but the Dodgers had one for most of last season — Ryan Yarbrough — and still went through 38 arms. With strikeout stuff in demand, most relievers train to work just one inning at a time.
'I don't know how it feels, physically, to throw 100 mph,' said Dipoto, who spent eight years as a major-league reliever. 'But I watch the guys who do it, and they'll throw a 15- or 18-pitch outing and the tank is empty. They look exhausted.
'Thirty years ago, that guy might have been throwing 93 or 94. You might have had an extreme example like Billy Wagner or Goose Gossage, but there weren't very many of those guys around. Now take this generation, where the average bullpen guy is going to be 95, 96 and every staff has guys in the upper 90s, exceeding 100 miles an hour. Asking them to sprint that hard and do it day after day — if you're (also) asking them to compile innings, I think you're asking for something that's unachievable.
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'So which one do you want to give up, the stuff or the innings? Because the impact of the stuff is huge. And that's the quandary we're in in this pitching cycle: figuring out how to marry maximizing your stuff with maximizing your innings.'
When it's stuff versus innings, stuff almost always wins. So it really does take a village — and two-way traffic has been brutal since the little season that caused big damage.
(Top photo illustration of Roberts making a World Series pitching change: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)