Free Baseball's Best Decade by Carroll Conklin Page A

Hitters were forced to face relievers with stronger arms and a different sense of mission, as teams began grooming pitchers for a career in the relief role.
    All of which means major league ERA s should have been continually trending down … but it hasn’t. Since the 1960s, when the major leagues unveiled the most sub-2.00 ERA pitchers in the modern (i.e., lively ball) era, ERAs have been trending steadily up on a decade-by-decade basis. The ERA for the 2000s was the highest in modern history. Yet major league hitters in the 2000s struck out almost twice as much as their 1930s counterparts, scored fewer runs per game, and averaged half-a-hit less per game than the batters of the 1930s (which may not sound like all that much, but that’s a difference of more than 16,000 hits over the course of a decade-long schedule).
     

    Dick Radatz
     
    How can ERAs be up when hits and runs per game are down? Blame it on the relief pitcher, and the relief specialist mentality. Because of the role of the relief specialist in today’s game (as well as in the game played in the 1990s), pitching staffs have to be necessarily bigger than they were 40 or more years ago … by as many as 2 to 4 pitchers at any given time. That means fewer hitters on the bench for pinch hitting or late-inning substitutions. It also means that more multi-position utility players are needed to make up for the fact that a manager has fewer non-pitcher resources at his disposal.

    The designated hitter has alleviated some of that problem for American League teams, but in most cases the DH doesn’t really give the manager more flexibility in late-inning substitutions for 2 reasons: first, the DH can’t be inserted as a substitute for any player in the field without losing the DH advantage and putting a pitcher into the batting order. And second, the regular designated hitter is almost never someone who should be filling in defensively in the late innings. If the player were that well rounded, he probably wouldn’t be a DH.
    The American League’s earned run averages have been consistently higher than the National League’s for every decade except the 1950s. The gap between the 2 major leagues was relatively close from the 1940s through the 1970s. Since the 1980s, the American League ERA has been growing faster than the National League’s (thank you, designated hitter). Yet all of this flies in the face that hits and runs per 9 innings are down for the 1990s and 2000s compared to the 1930s.
    Let me suggest a reason … not the only reason for that discrepancy, but I believe an important one. The role of relief specialist means a team will have more pitchers on the roster and more pitchers pitching more games. The reliance on relief micro-specialists also means that, generally, more pitchers are pitching fewer innings since the 1990s than was true in the 1930s.
    Whether you are a starter or reliever, fewer innings means fewer opportunities to amend a wounded ERA. So one or two bad outings are going to have more impact on a pitcher’s ERA because he will have fewer subsequent opportunities to string together scoreless innings and thereby whittle away at a bloated earned run average. In addition, it is exceedingly rare for a starter today to work on less than four days’ rest between starts, so he has fewer starts available than the typical 1960s starter working consistently every fourth day.
     

    Don Drysdale m ade 42 starts in 1963 and 1965 … the kind of iron man performance unlikely to be repeated in the era of relief micro-specialists.
     
    The days of the 40+ start season are long gone. A pitcher today who logs 30+ starts and 220+ innings is considered a workhorse and the management of pitching staffs has been trending that way since the 1970s, when the price of a ballplayer – particularly proven winning pitchers – escalated with the advent of free agency. Pitchers have simply become too expensive to work them the way teams used to. So today’s