Is Baseball 90% pitching?

Can baseball survive the decline of the starting pitcher?

With baseball season gearing up again, the New York Times Magazine runs a long article about the decline of the starting pitcher. If starters aren’t allowed to throw more than 100 pitches per game, how can they achieve traditional superstar pitcher statistics such as 20 wins per season? How can this be good for baseball?

How Analytics Marginalized Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers

Why has pro baseball made it so hard for today’s pitchers to achieve greatness?

For example, 2024 was the first year since 1961 when none of the top ten players in major league baseball were pitchers, according to the synthetic Wins Above Replacement statistic of all-around value:

Since 1950, pitchers peaked in star value in the 1970s due to the huge number of innings the best pitchers threw at the end of the four-man rotation era.

(By the way, for 2021-2023, I listed two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani as 0.5 pitcher per year.)

So far, the 2020s have had lousy starting pitchers, but not much worse than the 1950s. People who grew up during the 1970s, the great era of starting pitchers, are probably most likely to be dissatisfied with current baseball.

By Bruce Schoenfeld

Mr. Schoenfeld is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of ‘‘Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports.’’

March 26, 2025

… Starting pitchers were traditionally taught to conserve strength so they could last deep into games. Throwing 300 innings in a season was once commonplace; in 1969 alone, nine pitchers did it.

Here’s a graph of league leaders in innings pitched from 1950-2024:

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