The Sunday Read: ‘How Analytics Marginalized Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One day at Wrigley Field in Chicago last May, Paul Skenes was pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, carving out a small piece of baseball history in his second big-league game. He struck out the first seven batters he faced. By the end of the fifth inning, he had increased his strikeout total to 10. More impressive, he hadn’t allowed a hit. Over the past two decades, analysts have identified a treasure trove of competitive advantages for teams willing to question baseball’s established practices. Perhaps the most significant of competitive advantages was hidden in plain sight, at the center of the diamond. 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. But at some definable point in each game, the data came to reveal, a relief pitcher becomes a more effective option than the starter, even if that starter is Sandy Koufax or Tom Seaver — or Paul Skenes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Bruce Shonefeld, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
0:05.5	I've been writing about baseball for four decades,
0:08.5	and my most recent piece for the magazine is about one of the sports' biggest evolutions in all that time.
0:15.7	It has to do with some of the marquee stars of Major League Baseball. Starting pitchers are throwing fewer
0:24.4	innings per game than ever. The act of throwing a baseball 90 to 95 miles an hour off a mound is not
0:32.8	natural. A pitcher's arm undergoes an enormous amount of physical stress, and the body needs time to recover from that.
0:41.6	Just how much time no one can seem to agree on, despite years and years of accumulated knowledge and data.
0:51.2	Today's baseball is heavily optimized by data. Anyone who has been following the sport for more than a few
0:58.8	years can see how the study and use of that data has changed the game. For example, the data
1:06.7	says that bunting isn't that beneficial, so almost nobody ever bunts anymore.
1:12.7	And this optimized version of baseball also dictates that if there's any doubt,
1:18.9	take the starting pitcher out of the game before something bad happens.
1:22.8	The longer he goes, it turns out, the more likely he'll give up hits and runs.
1:29.3	Or even worse, get tired and maybe injure himself.
1:34.1	And so, when a game might be at a decisive point in the late innings,
1:39.1	these days starting pitchers are rarely still around.
1:43.1	But then last year, a starting pitcher named Paul Skeens made his debut in the major leagues.
1:50.0	He struck him out with 100. Paul Skeens.
1:54.0	He has faced four Cubs. He has struck out each of them to begin his day.
2:00.0	He's incredibly exciting to watch and draws huge crowds nearly every time he takes the
2:05.3	mound.
2:06.4	Here it is.
	...

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