Is Baseball in the Midst of a Pitching Revolution?
May 24, 2010 · Aaron Torres · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
Saturday night.
There I was on my couch, watching the Magic-Celtics game, watching Kendrick Perkins physically abuse Dwight Howard like they were acting out a shower scene in a prison movie, when out of the corner of my eye, I caught a graphic on ESPN’s bottom line…
“Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka has no-hitter through six innings”
Wait, what?
I quickly flipped channels, looking for the game, convinced that my eyes had mistaken me.
It just couldn’t be right. Daisuke Matsuzaka, the most hated man in Red Sox Nation, hadn’t given up a hit through six innings? Daisuke Matsuzaka, the guy that up until this year refused to challenge hitters with fastballs, instead choosing to throw 3-1 changeup after 3-1 changeup and walk four straight batters without throwing a hittable pitch, was tossing a no-no?
The guy whose starts I’ve come to purposely avoid because he pitches at the same pace that my 94-year-old grandma walks up a flight of stairs…THAT guy was throwing…a NO-HITTER!!!
I was like a kid finding out there was no Santa Claus for the first time. “No, no, no, this can’t be true!” But it was true.
(This is just PART of Aaron’s article on baseball’s pitching revolution. To read the rest, be sure to click here or visit him at www.aarontorres-sports.com)
Although I couldn’t watch any of the game because of FOX’s goofy blackout coverage, Matsuzaka pitched eight innings of one-hit ball, and the Red Sox went on to win, 5-0.
As I sat back late Saturday night to review it all, I started thinking. Crazy thoughts at first, like, “Did my Starbucks barista slip something into my frappuccino this morning?”—still not 100 percent sure I totally believed what I’d seen from Dice-K.
Then I started thinking about this baseball season as a whole. About how it seems like once a week we see a pitcher carrying a no-hitter into the seventh inning and beyond. How more than ever, ERAs seem to be bottoming out like the stock market 18 months ago. How every team seems to either have an ace on its staff or one that’ll be in the big leagues in six months.
And then it hit me: After years of watching 10-8, four-hour baseball games…is pitching back? I’d say so.
Now before I go any further, I want to make a few things clear: I’m not any Sabermetrics guru and don’t have a detail-oriented, ESPN research department backing up what I’m going to say. All I know is what I’ve seen with my own two eyes, and from what I can see, we’re in the midst of a pitching revolution. From what I can tell, it’s not only for the reasons you think.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, I think the easy—and unfortunate—place to start has nothing to do with the pitchers themselves, but with hitters and steroids. While we’ll never know how much of an effect PEDs had on the power surge from the early 1990s to the middle of the 2000s, I think we’d all say it was pretty large.
After all, every Major League Baseball organization decided to build their team the same way during that time: Find the biggest, baddest slugger you could, pay him lots of money, watch him hit home runs, watch fans get excited about those home runs, and hope that somewhere along the way you won a few games.
By the turn of the century, that line of thinking turned guys like Greg Vaughn, Jeff Bagwell, and Juan Gonzalez into folk heroes and multimillionaires many times over.
(If you’re enjoying Aaron’s work, be sure to follow him on Twitter @Aaron_Torres)
Sure, the game was tainted to a degree, but the fans seemed to be happy. The fact that most first basemen looked more like middle linebackers than ballplayers became irrelevant. The fact that Albert Belle bulldozed second basemen like they owed him money was considered “gamesmanship,” not “’roid rage.”
And when Barry Bonds’ biceps grew three sizes overnight, like the Grinch’s heart on Christmas Eve, it was considered insignificant. The home runs kept coming, and the fans kept turning out, even if it was hurting the game.
As for the here and now, while we all know that PEDs aren’t entirely out of baseball, since the Mitchell Report came out a few years ago, they at least seem to be under control. Maybe the most apparent sign is that baseball players again look like, well, baseball players, rather than mutants created in Victor Conte’s BALCO lab.
Yes, Ryan Howard is a big dude, but then again, he comes from a family of big dudes and doesn’t really look any different than he did as a minor leaguer. Albert Pujols is strong, but not overwhelmingly, disgustingly, “Maybe this guy is on something” burly, like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were a decade ago. As for Prince Fielder, if there’s any secret to his super-strength, it definitely comes dipped in chocolate.
Beyond just the dearth of HGH, steroids, the cream, and the clear, though, are other factors too.
For example, teams are getting smarter in how they build their clubs.
Take the Padres and Giants, for example. These are two teams that play in two of the biggest ballparks in baseball, yet a decade ago were constructing their squads the way everyone in baseball did: by overpaying for whatever slugger fresh off the WWE scrap heap they could find.
Since then, though, someone had the bright idea to say, “Hey, we play in huge ballparks; how about we stock up on some pitching rather than boppers who’ll break down in a year?”
The result has become tangible, as those two teams are ranked No. 2 and No. 5 respectively in team ERA coming into Monday night’s games. In a related story, they’re also a combined nine games over .500. Weird, I know.
Looking around the majors, it seems like every roster has at least one front-line starter, sometimes more, the result of what I’m going to call pitching’s “perfect storm.” My theory is basically that as we’ve made our way out of the steroid era, this is the year where everything came together for the guys on the mound.
Think about it…
(This is just PART of Aaron’s article on how pitching is being revolutionized this season in baseball. To read the REMAINDER, please click HERE or visit him at www.aarontorres-sports.com.
Also, for Aaron’s thoughts on all things sports, be sure to add him on Twitter @Aaron_Torres)
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