Nothing can keep a baseball coach up more at night than ruminating about the order of pitchers for an upcoming game. I remember reading a biography of Vince Lombardi where he is quoted as saying that football was an odd game since 90% depended on the quarterback. I remember reading that and thinking “well baseball is probably just as dependent on the pitcher.”
So I asked chatGPT (the latest in AI that really works by just doing an amazingly good job of predicting the next word that is going to be said, but I digress) about the role of the pitcher and got this:
“Pitching is widely considered to be one of the most critical aspects of the game of baseball. It holds immense importance as it directly influences the outcome of a game and can heavily impact a team’s overall success.”
No argument.
At all levels, pitching matters a LOT.
The only reason youth baseball has things like tryouts and drafts is to try to spread around the pitchers. If one team had the 10 best pitchers in the league and the other teams had no pitchers, well then it wouldn’t be a very balanced league.
So now we’ve established that pitching is a big deal, but I realize i haven’t really blogged or written much about who to pitch when.
So for most of my games in youth baseball I try to find a strong starting pitcher, find some players who can throw strikes for the middle innings and then close with my most dominant pitcher.
In major league baseball, there are clear Starters and relievers and you might change pitchers for every couple of batters based on matchups as the game progresses, but in youth baseball you aren’t going to make 10 pitching changes a game. Parents would be unhappy, kids would be unhappy, umpires would be unhappy, you name it.
So if you go with the formula for a 6 inning game you end up with something like S (2), M (1), M(1), C(2) so that’s starter for two innings, a couple of middle inning pitchers for an inning each and then a closer. The goal is the closer is so good the game becomes a 4 inning game and all ends well. This also tracks nicely with some leagues, like the one I’m in now, that has a run limit each inning and unlimited run policy in the last inning. So you wouldn’t want to give up 20 runs in the unlimited run inning, all the more reason to keep your closer last.
So I ran this formula for my current season and lets just say my team hasn’t been winning as much as I would have thought. Why? Well the middle pitchers had trouble throwing strikes and so the closer never really got into a game situation or didn’t get into it very often.
So last game I changed it and went with the closer first. The idea was to get a lead, build on momentum and hope we could get out of the game without some devastating comeback.
My now 17 year old son really talked me into it by saying that by holding the closer to the end you are reducing your advantage by not pitching the closer the max number of pitches the closer is allowed to pitch (whatever threshold you like based on pitch count limits, etc.). By starting your most dominant pitcher, you can make sure that pitcher throws every pitch up to the limit that you might have for a particular game. I couldn’t argue and the game went very smoothly. so it made me want to write about it.
I still like my original formula of S (2), M (1), M(1), C(2) as that gives me a chance to teach a bunch of players to pitch by giving them the middle inning. I still like the closer at the end as I hate the thought of giving up a bunch of runs in the unlimited inning. However, I may well go with C(3), rest of pitchers 1 inning each or maybe someone gets 2 who is going well. I really did like the momentum boost and it was contagious and helped our offense too.
Its interesting to debate and whatever you choose, if your team wins it’ll look great and if it doesn’t it won’t look so good. I think as a coach you want to just maximize the likelihood that your team will win and my guess is that lots of approaches can be used to come up with a successful plan for pitchers and conversely lots can be used that won’t work.
I will add that I like to pair my pitchers with a catcher that they know and like and I have to say one reason things went well in our last game is there were a couple of moments when the catcher went out to talk to the pitcher and you could tell they were just having a friendly encouraging conversation. That probably matters more than all of this stuff coaches worry about regarding the core pitching plan.
