Add new comment

There have been better rotations in terms of DNRA?xFIP/ERA+...but since the lowering of the mound, the advent of the DH and the institutional acceptance of the 5-man rotation, the Seattle Mariners are almost entirely unique in the history of baseball for two main reasons:
1) They get incredibly deep into games with good results
2) They do so without being in an organization that dogmatically preeches pitchers' needs to be tough and throw a ton of pitches.
The Mariners are second in baseball in pitches thrown by the starters with 8674 in 85 games (or roughly 102 pitches per start) but they're not doing this because they routinely run guys out there for 120 pitches when they're having good nights. The Rangers (run by Nolan Ryan...the king of durability and in-game stamina in the modern era) have talked about needing to get more out of pitchers when they're performing well, and they do...the Mariners have run a 120 pitch count on one of their starters 7 times this year, 5 by Felix Hernandez (LOL)...the Rangers have done it more tha twice as often. The oly thing that keeps most teams from having a high pitch count per start like the Mariners do is that most teams have more very ineffective starts where the pitcher only throw 72 pitches and gets booted in the third inning such as what happened to the struggling John Lackey in yesterday's Jays/Sox match-up.
The fact of the matter is...the Ms are running five (now six) guys in the rotation that routinely go 100 pitches and not much more...and yet routinely throw 7+ innings.
Starters have thrown 566.2 innings (tops in baseball) despite the lack of long pitch counts...putting them on pace to get approximately 1080 of the necessary 1470 innings or so that most teas play from their rotation and only 400 from their bullpen. For the whaling and gnashing of teeth about the top three guys in our bullpen getting overworked...they just aren't. There's no reason for the Mariners to plan on using 7 relievers again for a very long time. This staff is uniquely capable of making a short (1970s-like) bullpen a workable solution.
Here's a point of reference to illustrate the effectiveness of the Mariner rotation toward unusually efficient bullpen-saving efforts:
Starters have throw 8674 pitches (the second most in the AL), relievers have thrown 2898 pitches (!!)...the next closest team (Rays) have thrown 500 more pitches than that...and the rest of baseball sees no team below 3625 pitches. In terms of IP, pitch count efficiency, and workload, the Mariner rotation is remarkable and it's not obvious until you see the results for the Mariner bullpen.
Incidentally, while their pitching is being ridiculously efficient, their offense, for all of its flaws, is wearing away at opponents a bit more than is obvious from the face value stats. They've taken 12330 pitches (as compared to 11572 pitches thrown), which is a 1.066 ratio, which is far and away leading all of baseball (FWIW). If they could do more with their time of possession (on offense) they would be a brutal team to face.
While we're talking about domino affects....do you suppose that the Mariners' pitchers might look better than the rest of the league as we go down the stretch by more than they looked better in the first half simply because they're fresher than everyone else's guys during the dog days of summer? Or perhaps, do we image it possible that the Mariner offense might be poised to improve by a LOT more than is appears cosmetically with the addition of a bat or two in key spots because they're already winning the time of possession battle and getting plenty of chances to score...a difference maker in some of those RBI situations might change our fortune more than you might guess sabermetrically?
Just noodling here.