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San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
Today in Sports - Week Ahead, May 30
June 3 1932 — Lou Gehrig becomes the first major league player to hit four consecutive home runs in a game, giving the New York Yankees a 20-13 win over the Philadelphia A's. Gehrig's feat, however, is overshadowed by the resignation of John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants for 30 years. 1944 — Bounding Home, ridden by G.L. Smith, wins the Belmont Stakes by one-half length over Pensive, the winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness. 1959 — European Cup Final, Stuttgart: Real Madrid beats Stade de Reims, 2-0; 4th consecutive title for Los Blancos. 1961 — Sherluck, ridden by Braulio Baeza, wins the Belmont Stakes. Carry Beck, the winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, finishes seventh. 1972 — French Open Women's Tennis: American icon Billie Jean King wins her only French singles title; beats Evonne Goolagong of Australia 6-3, 6-3. 1980 — NY Mets draft Darryl Strawberry, 18, #1 overall. 1984 — Patty Sheehan wins the LPGA championship by a record 10 strokes over Beth Daniel and Pat Bradley. 1991 — Thomas Hearns becomes a world champion for the sixth time, capturing the World Boxing Association's light-heavyweight title with a 12-round unanimous decision over Virgil Hill. 1992 — Chicago's Michael Jordan scores a record 35 points, including a record six 3-pointers, in the first half as the Bulls beat Portland 122-89 in the opening game of the NBA Finals. Jordan finishes with 39 points and Chicago is only two points shy of the largest victory margin in the finals. 1995 — Pedro Martinez of Montreal pitches nine perfect innings against San Diego before giving up a leadoff double to Bip Roberts in the 10th inning of the Expos' 1-0 win. 1999 — Four days after her first LPGA Tour victory, Kelli Kuehne ties the Women's U.S. Open record with an 8-under 64 in the first round to take a one-stroke lead over Juli Inkster. 2001 — Karrie Webb wins the U.S. Women's Open in a runaway for the second year in a row. Webb shoots a 1-under 69 for an eight-stroke victory, the largest margin at a Women's Open in 21 years. 2004 — Calgary ties an NHL record with its 10th road win of the playoffs with a 3-2 overtime victory over Tampa Bay in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup finals. The New Jersey Devils also won 10 road playoff games during their championship seasons of 1995 and 2000. 2006 — Jeff Burton has the biggest come-from-behind win ever in a Busch race, overcoming a 36th-place starting position in the Dover 200 for his second victory of the season. 2006 — Russia's Nikolai Valuev retains his WBA heavyweight title in Hanover, Germany, stopping Jamaican challenger Owen Beck with a right uppercut in the third round. 2011 — Roger Federer ends Novak Djokovic's perfect season and 43-match winning streak, beating him 7-6 (5), 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 (5) in the French Open semifinals. Federer advances to the title match against five-time champion Rafael Nadal. Nadal reaches his sixth final in seven years at Roland Garros by defeating Andy Murray 6-4, 7-5, 6-4 in the other semifinal. 2012 — Tiger Woods won his 73rd PGA tour victory with a two-stoke win over Andres Romero and Rory Sabbatini in the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Course. 2017 — UEFA Champions League Final, Cardiff: Cristiano Ronaldo scores twice as defending champions Real Madrid thrash Juventus, 4-1 for 12th title; Juventus loses 5th consecutive final. 2018 — Stephen Curry, Golden State, broke Ray Allen's NBA Finals record for the most 3-pointers with nine in the Warriors 122-103 Game 2 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. _____ June 4 1870 — Ed Brown becomes the first African-American jockey to win the Belmont Stakes, with Kingfisher. 1927 — The United States wins the first Ryder Cup golf tournament by beating Britain 9½-2½. 1932 — Faireno, ridden by Tommy Malley, wins the Belmont Stakes by 1½ lengths over Osculator. Burgoo King, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, doesn't race. 1966 — Ameroid, ridden by Bill Boland, wins the Belmont Stakes by 2½ lengths over Buffle. Kauai King, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, finishes fourth. 1974 — NFL grants franchise to Seattle Seahawks. 1984 — 1960 champion Arnold Palmer fails to qualify for the US Open Golf Championship for the first time in 32 years. 1987 — Danny Harris defeats Edwin Moses in the 400 hurdles at a meet in Madrid, ending the longest winning streak in track and field. Moses, had won 122 consecutive races dating to Aug. 26, 1977. 1988 — West Germany's Steffi Graf beats 17-year-old Natalia Zvereva of the Soviet Union in 32 minutes with a 6-0, 6-0 victory to win the French Open for the second straight year. 1990 — Penn State is voted into the Big Ten. The school becomes the 11th member of the league and first addition to the Midwest-based conference since Michigan State in 1949. 1994 — Haile Gebrselassie becomes the first Ethiopian to set a world track record with a time of 12:56.96 in the men's 5,000 meters at Hengelo, Netherlands. 1998 — Harut Karapetyan of the LA Galaxy scores three goals in five minutes for the fastest hat trick in MLS history in an 8-1 rout of the Dallas Burn. The seven-goal margin sets an MLS record. 2005 — Justine Henin-Hardenne beats a rattled and fumbling Mary Pierce 6-1, 6-1 to win the French Open, capping a comeback from a blood virus with her fourth Grand Slam title and her second at Roland Garros. 2005 — Eddie Castro sets a North American record for most wins by a jockey in one day at one track, winning nine races on the 13-race card at Miami's Calder Race Course. 2008 — The Detroit Red Wings win the Stanley Cup for the fourth time in 11 seasons with a 3-2 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 6 . 2009 — Randy Johnson earns his 300th win, becoming the 24th major league pitcher to reach the milestone by leading San Francisco to a 5-1 victory over the Washington Nationals in the first game of a doubleheader. 2011 — Li Na becomes the first Chinese — man or woman — to win a Grand Slam singles title. She beats Francesca Schiavone 6-4, 7-6 (0) in the French Open final for her fifth career title and first on clay. 2016 — Garbine Muguruza wins her first Grand Slam title by beating defending champion Serena Williams 7-5, 6-4 at the French Open, denying the American her record-equaling 22nd major trophy. 2019 — San Francisco Giant Manager Bruce Bochy wins his 1,000th game as the manager of the Giants with a 9-3 victory over the New York Mets. _____ June 5 1884 — James McLaughlin becomes the first jockey to win three straight Belmont Stakes when he rides Panique to victory. He won with George Kinney (1883) and Forester (1882). McLaughlin repeats his feat in 1886-88. McLaughlin's triple is matched by jockey Laffit Pincay Jr. in 1984. 1925 — Willie McFarlane beats Bobby Jones by one stroke in the second round of a playoff to capture the U.S. Open. Macfarlane shoots a 291 at Worcester (Mass.) Country Club. 1927 — Johnny Weissmuller sets 100-yard & 200-yard free-style swim record. 1937 — War Admiral, ridden by Charles Kurtsinger, wins the Triple Crown with a three-length victory over Sceneshifter in the Belmont Stakes. 1943 — Count Fleet, ridden by Johnny Longden, wins the Triple Crown by 25 lengths in the Belmont Stakes. Count Fleet goes at off at 1-20 odds in a race with no place or show betting. 1952 — Jersey Joe Walcott scores a 15-round unanimous decision over Ezzard Charles in Philadelphia to retain the world heavyweight title. 1961 — The newly formed American Basketball League adopts the 3-point field goal. 1977 — The Portland Trail Blazers hold off the Philadelphia 76ers 109-107 to win the NBA championship in six games. Portland becomes the first team in the 31-year history of the league to win four straight after losing the first two games. 1985 — Steve Cauthen wins the Epsom Derby aboard Slip Anchor and became the only American jockey to win both the English Derby and Kentucky Derby. Cauthen had ridden Affirmed to victory in the 1978 Kentucky Derby. 1993 — Julie Krone guides Colonial Affair to victory in the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first female jockey to win a Triple Crown race. 1994 — Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Sergi Bruguera produce the best day of tennis in Spanish history. Sanchez Vicario beats Mary Pierce 6-4, 6-4 in the French Open final and Bruguera retains his title by defeating another Spaniard, Alberto Berasategui, 6-3, 7-5, 2-6, 6-1. 1999 — Steffi Graf wins her sixth French Open title and her first Grand Slam championship in almost three years, beating top-ranked Martina Hingis 4-6, 7-5, 6-2. 1999 — Charismatic loses his bid to become the 12th Triple Crown winner when he fractures his left front cannon bone and sesamoid while finishing third to Lemon Drop Kid in the Belmont Stakes. 2004 — Smarty Jones loses his Triple Crown bid and his perfect record when Birdstone runs him down near the finish of a thrilling Belmont Stakes. Birdstone, a 36-1 long shot ridden by Edgar Prado, returns $74, $14 and $8.60. 2005 — Spanish teenager Rafael Nadal beats unseeded Mariano Puerta of Argentina in four sets to win the French Open men's singles title. The No. 4-seeded Nadal becomes the youngest men's Grand Slam champion since Pete Sampras won the U.S. Open at 19 in 1990. 2011 — Rafael Nadal wins his record-equaling sixth French Open title, beating Roger Federer 7-5, 7-6 (3), 5-7, 6-1 in the final. 2016 — Novak Djokovic becomes the first man in nearly a half-century to win four consecutive major championships and finally earned elusive French Open title to complete a career Grand Slam, beating Andy Murray 3-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4. 2021 — Luis Saez rides Essential Quality to wins the 153rd Belmont Stakes.
New York Times
17-03-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
How MLB pitcher usage has changed in the past 5 years — ‘It takes a village'
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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement '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)
