Extremes

On July 2, 1933, Carl Hubbell pitched an 18-inning shutout over the Cardinals, winning by a score of 1-0.  On July 1, 2016, the Indians beat the Blue Jays, 2-1 in 19 innings.  Cleveland used 9 pitchers, Toronto 10.  There has to be a happy medium somewhere.

Baseball in the age of specialists is not made for 19-inning games; pitching guys for 1/3 of an inning in the seventh comes back to bite you in the eighteenth, which is exactly what happened to the Jays.  They used position players on the mound for the eighteenth and nineteenth innings.  Toronto has 13 pitchers on the roster, yet they still ran out.  Better yet, one of those player-pitchers for Toronto went on the DL.

Yes, pitching is a valuable commodity, and what Carl Hubbell did comes about as close as you can to cruel and unusual punishment this side of the electric chair.  But 19 pitchers in a game is dumb baseball.  Back when I rode my dinosaur to school, the White Sox had Hoyt Wilhelm with either Eddie Fisher or Wilbur Wood, all inning-eaters with their knuckleball; at the age of 42 in 1965, Wilhelm threw 144 innings, all in relief, with a 1.81 ERA.  That same year, Fisher threw 165-1/3 innings in relief, going 15-7 with a 2.40 ERA.  Oh, and those Sox also had Bob Locker throw another 91-1/3 innings in relief.  Locker didn’t throw a knuckleball, but he had a good sinker.  In case you’re wondering, Wilhelm pitched another seven years (in a 21-year MLB career) and Fisher another eight in a 15-year big-league career.  Locker was a rookie who lasted “just” ten seasons.

The moral here is you don’t need power arms and specialists to win.  You can win with inning-eaters, whether they start or relieve.