Imagine one of those crime shows in which detectives have rigged a board with photos, names, mug shots, maps and sticky notes. A web of string wrapped around pushpins provides a visual connection between otherwise disparate clues.
Now try that exercise with pitching events in the past week. Stephen Strasburg retires. Johan Oviedo throws a 112-pitch complete game. Jordan Wicks makes his major league debut without ever having thrown 90 pitches in a professional game. Tony Gonsolin needs elbow surgery. Kyle Harrison becomes the youngest Giant to strike out 11 batters just two games into his big league career.
Stand back from the board, and this is what the web of string reveals: Teams keep asking for less and less work from young starting pitchers. And the strategy is not producing better results.
Pitchers 25 and younger are on pace to throw the second-fewest innings in the 60 full seasons of the expansion era (since 1961, including most of those years with fewer teams). The only full season with fewer? Last year.
Meanwhile, the number of starting pitchers on the injured list has more than doubled in the past eight years. Less work, more injuries is not a successful model.
What happened to developing young starters? Let’s connect the dots, starting with ...
Strasburg retires.
The playoff-bound Nationals famously shut down Strasburg, then 23, in September 2012 after he threw 159⅓ innings, 29% above his pro high. It was his first season back from Tommy John surgery. It was the right thing to do to protect the player—done in conjunction with medical professionals and his agent—though the smarter avenue would have been to budget his innings by giving him time off during the season.
Given his high velocity and a timing issue in his delivery, Strasburg was always going to be a health risk. Strasburg signed contracts worth $355 million covering 17 years. He returned only four qualified seasons.
For years back then I had been chronicling how teams packed on innings jumps of 30% or more for young starters, often to poor results (as some termed it, the Verducci Effect). The Strasburg Shutdown and all the attention it generated made innings limits on pitchers an even firmer industry standard.
It changed pitching as it relates to innings, just as injuries to Cubs aces Mark Prior and Kerry Wood once did with pitches. Prior, then 22, averaged 125 pitches per start in September and October 2003; Wood, then 26, averaged 118.3.
More tellingly, Prior threw with a serious red flag in his delivery that stressed his shoulder—a late raising of the ball into the loaded position after his front foot landed. Wood, on the day after the Cubs drafted him, threw 177 pitches, starting in both games of a high school playoff doubleheader. In any case, the injuries to Prior and Wood made teams beholden to pitch counts, which started showing up on scoreboards and box scores.
And that leads us to ...
Oviedo’s complete game against Kansas City.
Pirates manager Derek Shelton was prepared to pull Oviedo after eight innings and 98 pitches, but catcher Endy Rodríguez argued so emphatically for Oviedo to finish the job that Shelton relented. Oviedo, 25, pitched a 1-2-3 ninth to finish the 5–0 win.
It was the first time in more than two years a team let a pitcher 25 and under throw at least 112 pitches over nine innings. The last time it happened was by Shane Bieber of Cleveland in April 2021. A dozen years ago it happened 17 times, including four times by a lefthander named Clayton Kershaw, who turned out pretty well, which leads us to ...
Wicks’s historic Cubs debut.
Charles LeClaire/USA TODAY Sports
He became the first pitcher in Cubs history to strike out nine batters while allowing just three base runners, which happened to be the first three batters he faced.
Cubs manager David Ross pulled Wicks after five innings and just 80 pitches, even though he had retired 15 batters in a row. Why? Out of an abundance of caution, Chicago trained Wicks to be a five-inning pitcher.
Wicks pitched three years in college (Kansas State), is 6'3" and 220 pounds and turns 24 years old Friday. And yet the Cubs have never let him throw more than 89 pitches in 49 professional starts. He has thrown five innings or fewer in 20 of his 21 starts this year.
“This is what happens all the time now,” says one MLB manager. “Starters go four innings in the minors, and relief pitchers are allowed to pitch only twice a week. That’s not how the game is played up here.”
One day back in 1966, a 21-year-old, 5'10" lefty for the Class A Miami Marlins in the Baltimore system threw seven innings. His name was Paul Gilliford. The next day he threw 15 minutes of batting practice. When Miami’s game that same night reached the 15th inning, the Marlins pressed Gilliford into relief. He threw 11 shutout innings on no rest. After his usual three days of rest, Gilliford made his next start—and threw a complete game, part of a stretch of 11 straight complete games.
You have never heard of Gilliford because he made his only two major league appearances the next year and was out of baseball by age 24. For all the nostalgia about outliers who threw 250 innings or more in the majors back then, how many young pitchers were lost to a baseball world without any workload governors?
But you don’t have to go back to the 1960s to see how far major league organizations have dialed back workloads out of fear of injury. There has been a huge shift in just the past decade.
Wicks (21st in 2021) and Sonny Gray (18th in ’11 by Oakland) were first-round pitchers drafted out of college just 10 years apart. Look how differently they were treated in their first two full pro seasons.
| IP | Inn/GS | 90-pitch Games | |
|---|---|---|---|
Wicks |
195.3 |
4.34 |
0 |
Gray |
334.1 |
5.67 |
30 |
Gray turned out O.K. Since 2014, Gray has started more major league games than every pitcher except Max Scherzer, Zack Greinke, Kyle Gibson and Gerrit Cole. Those days of letting pitchers pitch are over, even though pitchers break down more than ever, as we were reminded when ...
Gonsolin blew out his elbow.
Gonsolin was a two-way player at St. Mary’s throwing 88–92 mph when the Dodgers drafted him in the ninth round in 2016. They immediately put him on a TrackMan device and told him to start throwing power four-seamers at the top of the zone. By the next year, he was touching 100 mph.
The Dodgers treated him carefully, which is to say they treated him like every other organization in baseball treats every young starter. They put strict limits on his workload for fear too much work might lead to injury. Gonsolin has pitched in 185 professional games. Only once has Los Angeles allowed him to throw 100 pitches (a game high of 109 this year).
And still he blew out.
The same story happened with Dustin May, a third-round pick by the Dodgers also in 2016 who touches 100 mph. May has never thrown 100 pitches in 130 pro games. He also blew out— twice, requiring Tommy John surgery in ’21 and another elbow surgery this summer.
Between them, Gonsolin and May have pitched in 315 professional games. They have more elbow surgeries (three) than 100-pitch games (one). And that leads us to how nervous Giants manager Gabe Kapler was when ...
Harrison threw 91 pitches in his spectacular second start.
Kapler brought Harrison back out for the seventh inning with 79 pitches, even though Harrison had not pitched beyond five innings all season.
The lefthander, 22, was drafted out of high school in 2020. In 71 professional starts, Harrison has thrown 100 pitches only twice—never more than 102. His innings totals: 98.2; 113; 77.1. He had the good fortune of missing a month this year with a hamstring strain—a nonthrowing injury that leaves him in good physical condition to pitch in meaningful big league games in the sixth month.
That makes Harrison the rare young pitcher down the stretch without workload worries. The Orioles, for instance, are adopting a six-man rotation in part to protect Grayson Rodriguez, 23.
Here are the best 25 and under (25U) starting pitchers with contenders and—assuming 25 innings thrown in September—their projected innings total and the workload increase they are facing. Anything above 30% (represented by the underline) bears close watch. Keep in mind some teams will taper young starters’ September work to reduce the innings increase.
| Age | Proj. IP | Increase From Previous High | |
|---|---|---|---|
Eury Pérez, Marlins |
20 |
135.2 |
+73.9% |
Grayson Rodriguez, Orioles |
23 |
159.1 |
+54.7% |
Graham Ashcraft, Reds |
25 |
165.2 |
+49.2% |
Andrew Abbott, Reds |
24 |
167.2 |
+42.0% |
Bryce Elder, Braves |
24 |
180.1 |
+31.0% |
Gavin Williams, Guardians |
24 |
150.1 |
30.5% |
Jordan Wicks, Cubs |
24 |
121 |
+27.8% |
Hunter Brown, Astros |
25 |
158 |
+25.1% |
Tanner Bibee, Guardians |
24 |
165 |
+24.4% |
Logan Allen, Guardians |
24 |
152.2 |
+15.1% |
Bobby Miller, Dodgers |
24 |
127 |
+13.1% |
Kyle Harrison, Giants |
22 |
113 |
+10.1% |
Bryce Miller, Mariners |
25 |
146.1 |
+9.5% |
Brayan Bello, Red Sox |
24 |
162 |
+5.7% |
The game Oviedo threw was downright shocking. Between Bieber’s game in April 2021 and Oviedo’s gem, 25U pitchers had started 3,238 consecutive games without throwing nine innings and 112 pitches.
When Prior pitched, the outer limit of pitch counts—if they existed at all—was 130. When Strasburg came around it was 120. Now it is 110 and heading fast toward 100—even with pitchers getting more rest.
Here is a chart with the seasons in which teams let a 25U pitcher throw 110 pitches. You can see how the decline accelerated in 2015.
You might think this lowering of workload would result in keeping pitchers healthier. That’s certainly a main driving point to the philosophy. It’s not working. The number of starters on the IL and the money it is costing teams have doubled since 2015, when The Great Load Management Experiment began.
Starting Pitchers on IL (Per Spotrac)
| No. | Cost | |
|---|---|---|
2023 |
173* |
$405M* |
2022 |
169 |
$323M |
2021 |
179 |
$317M |
2019 |
116 |
$304M |
2018 |
118 |
$213M |
2017 |
106 |
$200M |
2016 |
95 |
$225M |
2015 |
73 |
$198M |
Until 2020, every season since 1901 included at least 11 qualified pitchers 25 and under. Teams developed young starters by letting them pitch. But the past four seasons have seen only seven, three, six and eight young starters throw at least one inning for every team game (162 in a full season). It’s not that they can’t do it. It’s because they are being trained to pitch less.
Consider Rodriguez, the Orioles’ righthander, who ranks in the top 90th percentile in velocity and the top 95th percentile in extension. With one month still to go, Rodriguez has started 26 games this season (including the minors), which already is three more than in his previous pro high. He has thrown 134⅓ innings, already 31⅓ innings more than ever before. But he just finished his best month (2–1, 2.64 ERA in five starts) in which he threw 67% strikes.
When reporters asked Orioles manager Brandon Hyde about how far any young pitcher could be pushed in terms of innings increase, he smartly answered, “That’s the case-by-case, super delicate question that nobody has the answer for. Predictors, medical, anybody. There’s not a certain number that you know what’s going to happen.”
He is right, of course. It is as true today with Rodriguez as it was in 2012 with Strasburg. Despite teams’ best efforts to protect young pitchers, nobody has the answer.
