Ace pitchers an endangered species
Here is the state of the ace as this baseball season hits its stride: Gerrit Cole of the New York Yankees, who led the American League in ERA, innings pitched and walks and hits per inning en route to the Cy Young Award last season, got “fired up” — his words — because he threw 15 pitches off a mound last week. He has yet to pitch in a game.
Spencer Strider, the Atlanta Braves’ 20-game winner from 2023, is out for the year after elbow surgery.
Max Scherzer and Jacob degrom, who should join Nathan Eovaldi atop the rotation for the World Series champion Texas Rangers, haven’t pitched yet this year. Eovaldi has joined them on the injured list.
Blake Snell, the National League Cy Young winner from 2023, didn’t sign until late in the spring and sports an 11.57 ERA with his new team, the San Francisco Giants, for whom he is now on the injured list.
Logan Webb, Snell’s teammate with the Giants who was runner-up for the Cy Young last year, hasn’t seen the fifth inning in either of his last two starts.
Pitcher injuries are widespread and have been well-documented. But more than that, it’s fair to ask: What even is an ace anymore?
This question isn’t new this year. It has been building for decades. It’s driven by the forces that run the game now — a desperate search for velocity and a reliance on statistics that say it’s bad for pitchers to face hitters three or four times.
What’s lost isn’t just the way things were. Sports, like anything, should allow for and embrace evolution. If someone had suggested implementing a pitch clock in, say, 1970 or ’80, he might have been ostracized as a heretic. In the 2020s, the pitch clock saved the sport.
No, what’s lost as the true ace creeps closer and closer to extinction is one of the game’s great characters. Whether you grew up with baseball in the 1970s (Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan), the ’80s (Jack Morris, Roger Clemens, Dwight Gooden) or the ’90s (Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, John Smoltz), you knew who these guys were. They came with a pitching arsenal, and those could vary. But they also came with an alpha attitude, a swagger that said, “When I take the mound, you have no chance.”
Baked into that — an absolute necessity for a team’s best starting pitcher — was durability. That’s not just over the course of a season. That’s during a game. Six innings a night and 200 innings a year weren’t achievements. They were assumptions.
Look at the numbers. In both 1970 and 1980, 56 major league pitchers threw at least 200 innings. (In 1980, Carlton became the last pitcher to throw 300 innings in a season — 304). In 1990, the 200-inning eaters were down to 42. But for the majority of this century, the number was pretty consistent. From 2000-14, between 31 and 50 pitchers completed 200 innings each season — up some years, down others — with an average of 37. The league leaders in that span ranged from a high of 266 innings (Roy Halladay in 2003) to a low of 238¨ (Justin Verlander in 2012).
The job was clear. Take the ball until either your effectiveness or your energy — or both — run out.
That has changed. From 201619, no more than 15 pitchers reached 200 innings in a season. After the pandemic, the number plummeted further: four in 2021, eight in 2023 and just five last year. Moreover, the last pitcher to throw 230 innings — a plateau 10 pitchers reached as recently as 2011 — was David Price in 2016.
The reason is simple: Organizations know what the numbers say about pitchers facing hitters a third and fourth time. Through last Wednesday’s games, starting pitchers held hitters to a .695 OPS the first time through the order. That jumped to .747 the third time, and .856 thereafter. That’s a difference that matters.
By now, it’s an established baseball truism that the more times a hitter sees a pitcher, the more decidedly the advantage swings toward the hitter. The problem is what’s good for a team on a given night is at war with what’s good for the sport, which is to have starting pitchers among the game’s leading men.
Is someone whose night is over after five innings every five games a leading man?
Here’s another data point: Through last Wednesday’s games, 118 pitchers had started at least six games this season. Only 20 averaged six innings a start.
So in 2024, what is an ace? Some of the characters — Scherzer, Cole, Verlander, maybe a few others — are still there. Their ranks are thinning.