The big story of the first few weeks of this baseball season has been all injured starting pitchers. To name just a few big name starters who have already missed significant time with arm injuries: Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, Sandy Alcantara, Spencer Strider, Robbie Ray, Lucas Giolito, Framber Valdez, Shane Bieber, Walker Buehler, Brandon Woodruff, and Kodai Senga. That list also does not even include Jacob deGrom and Shohei Ohtani, who were injured last year and are each still recovering from a second Tommy John surgery.
This is obviously a huge problem for the league, not to mention the teams that have to deal with these injuries, and it has led to a lot of consternation about the source of the problem. The MLB Players Association put out a statement that essentially blamed the pitch clock, which was introduced last year and then shortened this season. But then the commissioner’s office released their own statement, saying that was a silly theory, and instead attributing the problem to increased focus on velocity and spin rate. One of those injured pitchers likened the spat to a fight between divorced parents.
As much as I hate to disagree with the union, it does seem clear that this problem predates the pitch clock. While it’s worth looking into whether that change made things worse, this is clearly the result of deeper issues in the game. Specifically, this is an extension of the point I’ve been writing about for a couple years now: the proletarianization of the pitching staff.
When I first started writing about this back in 2022, I was focused on how the trend was impacting middle relievers. Middle relief pitching — which used to be a weakness for every team — is now SO GOOD, in large part because great young pitchers are being diverted away from roles as starters, and towards roles as guys who throw with maximum effort for one or two innings at a time. This is, at its root, a wage suppression strategy, in part because relievers make less than starters. But the bigger reason that it keeps wages down is that this style of pitching burns through players before they ever reach free agency.
Let’s look back at specific players I happened to mention in that piece I linked to above, and see what’s become of them in less than two years since I wrote about these “elite relievers”:
Devin Williams: injured, out at least three months
Ryan Teperea: DFA’d in May 2023, not on a major league roster
Kendall Graveman: out for the season, recovering from elbow surgery
Andrew Kittredge: pitched only 32 innings over 2022-23 seasons due to Tommy John surgery
Seth Lugo: pitching well on a three-year deal with Kansas City (hey a happy ending!)
Jonathan Loáisiga: out for the season, Tommy John surgery
So, of the six elite relievers I happened to mention in that piece, five are now injured or working their way back from injury. To those you could add Chad Green (recovering from Tommy John surgery) and Dellin Betances (retired after a shoulder injury), who were once elite relievers but began to decline before I wrote that piece. And there are dozens and dozens of others if you go through every team’s roster.
Yet I don’t recall the kind of outcry over pitcher injuries when these players all went down, because middle relief pitchers are not stars the way that starters are. Fans are used to seeing them go down with injuries. In fact, teams have gotten so good at minting pitchers like this that most of them were pretty quickly replaced as if nothing had even happened.
But it was only a matter of time before this trend started coming for the starters. Once you have pitchers who can come into the game in the sixth or seventh inning and throw over 100mph, it gets harder to justify leaving in a tiring starter going through the lineup for a third time. So if a starter wants to keep his job, he has to throw even harder, with even more spin — until eventually he gets hurt.
And don’t expect these guys to be replaced by other elite starters. After all, elite starters don’t grow on trees. Instead, teams will recreate them in the aggregate — chop up the innings that used to go to Cole/Alcantara/Verlander/Strider/etc. and give them to a bunch of guys like Tepera/Loáisiga/Kittredge.
In other words, what is happening here is that pitching is being deskilled. When you hear John Smoltz go on and on for the umpteenth time about starters not learning how to get through the order a third time, he is talking about proletarianization.1 Because on one level, Smoltz is right: Learning to pitch deep into ballgames IS a skill that takes time to cultivate and develop. Not everyone can do it, and the ones who can are paid handsomely for that ability.
Which is exactly why teams would rather they not learn it! It’s much cheaper to just turn every pitcher in your farm system into a two-pitch, max-effort guy who can give you ~60 innings a year for four or five seasons, blowing out their arms before they ever reach free agency. And, in many respects, it’s working: Despite all the injuries, pitching has been better than ever over the last few seasons. The league’s batting average has been lower than it’s been in 50 years. Proletarianization is great — as long you’re not the proletariat.
But for anyone who doesn't actually own a baseball team, this trend has been terrible. It’s even bad for consumers: What makes sports different than other aspects of the economy is that the players really ARE the product. If you take the stars out of the game by deskilling pitching and defense, then maybe you’ve saved some money — but you’ve alienated fans who WANT to see great starting pitchers and healthy players.
It is fun to watch great starters work deep into games. Nobody wants to watch a parade of anonymous relief pitchers, who will all be hurt in a year, come in and strike people out for 2.5 hours, but this is a natural result of owners pursuing their own interests. Quality starting pitching is being gradually sucked from the game so owners don’t have to pay for good starting pitchers — yet another example of how the interests of owners are opposed to the interests of not just players, but fans and the general public as well.
So far in these pieces I’ve been using “proletarianization” and “deskilling” interchangeably, which isn’t, technically speaking, “right.” The former term really refers to the process by which self-employed people (or the unemployed, or small business-owner) become employees, while the latter term refers to the process by which skilled labor becomes unskilled, usually through technological change. But refer to processes by which people have less and less control and autonomy over their own work, which is really what I’m getting at here. And “proletarianization” sounds cooler anyway…