Madison Bumgarner’s Selfishness Could Save Baseball!
We know why you don’t want to work with openers, MadBum. Bless you!
San Francisco Giants ace starting pitcher Madison Bumgarner has said if manager Bruce Bochy decides to use an “opener” in a game in his place, in other words a pitcher designed to only pitch the first inning or so as the Tampa Bay Rays experimented with last season, he would “walk right out of the ballpark.”
Bumgarner is in the final year of a $56 million contract and if he can regain the form he had before his last two injury plagued seasons he’ll be poised to make Clayton Kershaw money of perhaps $30 million a season.
But he won’t be getting that kind of money if he cannot prove that he can accumulate 200 innings, as he did for six straight years before slumping to two injury plagued losing seasons.
An opener eating up his innings or even casting an asterisk against any positive performance he might accumulate against a lineup poised to face a right-handed pitcher rather than Bumgarner’s southpaw deliveries won’t help his reputation as a stud pitcher.
Still, don’t be surprised if the “opener” becomes a thing in baseball. And frankly, if we’re going to have designated hitters in the National League and criticize a manager’s strategy only when he allows a pitcher to complete a no-hitter, it makes sense.
We’re now inundated with statistics that tell us the third time around a batting order a hitter becomes more effective than his second time through the lineup. What we often aren’t told is he also becomes more effective the second time through the order as well.
The fact more runs are scored in the first inning than any other? Um, well, uh, you know the best hitters are batting at that time and all . . . .
The Major League Baseball Players Union wants a universal designated hitter because the position is the second highest paid, behind first base, of any on the diamond.
When the DH was first implemented, it meant managers didn’t have the natural removal of a starting pitcher for a pinch hitter. Now a hurler going strong through seven innings but tied 2–2 didn’t need to be pinch-hit for. He could go nine.
So in 1975 Billy Martin never called on a relief pitcher for Catfish Hunter. Hunter therefore threw more complete games than any American League pitcher since 1946.
He also was never the same pitcher afterwards and was out of baseball four years later at the age of 33.
Five years later Martin, as manager of the Oakland A’s, let a promising young staff throw 94 complete games. The staff, Mike Norris, Steve McCatty, et al, were done in two years.
Hence, the incorporation of the pitch count, which insists upon not removing a pitcher when the game situation calls for it but rather when there’s a nice number of pitches that it is assumed is enough for the pitcher to throw.
Now you know why so many baseball fans believe the DH is abhorrent. Baseball has literally made up strategy out of whole cloth largely because of past managerial ineptitude.
But the pitch count mantra is so strong pitchers are regularly relieved in the National League even if their time at bat is coming up in the next inning, something that would be said to be poor strategy prior to the DH and now isn’t even thought of.
But what doesn’t quite make sense is that if pitchers are micromanaged in the fifth through eighth innings, where mid-inning pitching changes are made before a hurler can get settled or is thought to tire or to play lefty-righty or to present a different style of pitcher than the batter faced before; why isn’t the same done in the first four innings or, for that matter, in the ninth? A closer is essentially given the entire inning and is never removed in modern major league baseball regardless of effectiveness or what batters box a hitter may use.
Is the second inning less important than the eighth? Can’t the winning run be scored in either frame?
What we’re likely going to see in the future is a universal DH that will cover the voluminous pitching changes that are now so prevalent. And while owners will certainly have to pay the aging slugger more money than we’ll ever know to chase 600 home runs, what they’ll find is without the stud pitcher, with instead the “opening pitcher” going through the lineup once on his array of left-handed sinkers followed by the right-hander with a good hard slider and then a knuckleballer before a closer handles the ninth, the pitcher will no longer be a highly paid star but rather paid like the utility role player he will become.
The three-batter-an-inning rule will prevent too much micromanaging within an inning; a right-handed opener who walks the first two batters will then be spared being removed for a lefty reliever in the first inning against a left-handed third hole hitter. After all, eventually one has to play the game.
But the product will not be baseball in the classic sense. It will have the sport specialized to the point not of two-platoon football but instead akin to a sport of place-kickers and punters.
The MLBPA will then have done what unions do, protect seniority and maybe even pick up a few jobs along the way as rosters expand and any limit for pitching staffs forgotten.
The owners will rejoice in no longer having to pay stars’ salaries on the pitching staff.
Unfortunately, what you’ll then have is a longer game with less action, more waiting around for 3-run homers, more lopsided scores and, instead of the cry of “nobody comes to the ballpark to see a pitcher hit” you’ll hear “nobody comes to the ballpark to see pitchers.” Period.
Bumgarner. His interests may be his own in rejecting the notion of the opener.
But they are what’s best for the game.
Marky Billson is a sports talk show host based in Tri-Cities, TN. Watch his show live 12–2 p.m. ET weekdays or here.
