Paul Skenes, baseball’s great Gen Z hope, threw seven no-hit innings today and was then removed from the game, having thrown 99 pitches. This is customary in modern Major League Baseball. No-hit bids end not on hits, but when a pitch count reaches too high a number. And while it may be customary, it is also sad. Here is a thing that every baseball fan would love to see, a blossoming star turning in a career performance while still on his ascent, and it didn’t get a chance to happen. Worse still, we’re only 25 years past a time when pulling Skenes would have been unthinkable. In only one generation, this is how far the game has moved. We remember the thing that we’ve lost.
This conversation isn’t new. This is far from the first time a pitcher’s lost a no-hit bid due to pitch count. In this case, too, the decision for Pittsburgh manager Derek Shelton was particularly straightforward. Skenes is 22 years old. Skenes is a cornerstone of what the Pirates are trying to build. The odds of Skenes completing this no-hitter were in the neighborhood of 20%. Skenes was regularly throwing more than 120 pitches in a start just a year ago, but that was a short-lived stint in college baseball, where the season ends quickly and starts are generally more spaced out. Shelton’s job involves pulling Paul Skenes in that moment, and Skenes and Shelton and everyone else involved in the Pirates’ decision expected the hook to come.
That doesn’t make it a banner moment for baseball. Fans wanted Paul Skenes to stay in. Paul Skenes probably wanted Paul Skenes to stay in. Derek Shelton presumably wanted Paul Skenes to stay in. The moment felt like denying a child a third slice of pie at Thanksgiving. Sure, the decision was reasonable. But that didn’t make it fun.
As far as I can tell, there are two ways to approach baseball’s no-hitter-pulling problem. The first is to accept the new-ish pitch count constraints and consider this part of the challenge. The second is to figure out the risk associated with letting pitchers chase these glories and adjust accordingly.
There’s merit for the first. No-hitters aren’t getting less common. We’ve had 27 individually thrown no-hitters since the start of the 2015 season, and the 1990’s saw 27 as well. Pitchers have gotten so much more effective in recent years that in the absence of these pitch count restrictions, we might be growing sick of no-hitters anyway. Pitch count awareness is helping keep no-hitters rare.
The second is more compelling.
We understand that running young arms into the ground is a bad idea. Dusty Baker made a few big contributions to the sport of baseball, and his Kevorkian-esque experiments on Mark Prior and Kerry Wood led to one of them. Just because we understand this, though, doesn’t mean young pitchers aren’t still getting hurt. You guys aren’t going to believe this, but Tyler Glasnow’s back on the IL. Don’t know Glasnow? Well, how about Stephen Strasburg? Strict pitch limits may have helped. Strasburg still spent a lot of his career on the IL.
For a minute there, baseball made a lot of movement in trying to keep arms healthy. It’s hard, though, to know how much of a difference this movement made. Right as the pitch count revolution happened, different revolutions made pitching harder on the body. Velocity and spin rate moved upwards. New pitch variants were invented at a heightened pace. Would we have more injuries without our newfound pitch count awareness? Probably. How many more? There’s no way to know. Some contend that the health benefits of reduced workloads were intentionally canceled out by the health risks of increased strain—that coaches tried to keep injury rates constant. If they did, they did a bad job. Injuries are up.
What baseball needs, I would offer, is a comprehensive study on the risk associated with a hypothetical 100th, and 101st, and 102nd, … , and 143rd pitch today from Skenes. It wouldn’t be a simple study. It wouldn’t have that much competitive value—the Pirates won today’s game. Economically, though, from an entertainment and romanticism standpoint, such a study might be revolutionary for the sport. What happens if Skenes pitches that eighth inning? Is there any amount of extra rest which negates the risk such an effort creates? How do we make it safe for pitchers to attempt complete games? Can it be done?
Baseball teams today face a catch-22 when it comes to no-hit bids. Take the guy out after 100 pitches and no one has any fun. Leave the guy in and catch all hell on earth if the pitcher eventually gets hurt. Maybe the studies have been done and the confidence is there. Maybe this is what keeps pitchers as healthy as they can be kept. But I’m worried that what we’re really seeing on days like today is groupthink and the devastating power of consensus. Are the Pirates sure 100 pitches should be Paul Skenes’s limit? Or were the Pirates scared of looking stupid?
Miscellany
- No decision yet on NCAA Tournament expansion, but the committee who decides such things did alter the team sheets used in NCAA Tournament selection. With Jeff Sagarin quietly retiring last year from college basketball ratings, there were only two predictive ratings on the page, rather than three. To get back to three, the NCAA will add Bart Torvik’s ratings. Elsewhere, the Wins Above Bubble (WAB) metric will be formally listed. Hopefully the committee quickly learns what WAB means,* because it’s likely the best measure we have right now of how impressive a team’s résumé is. I’m not sure who created WAB, but I consider it popularized by Seth Burn and Torvik. Big day for Torvik. Good for him.
- At the risk of greatly oversimplifying Judge L. Felipe Restrepo’s opinion in Johnson v. NCAA (Restrepo wrote for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which denied the NCAA’s motion to dismiss the case and sent the case back to a district court): The gist of it is that Restrepo and the court suggested the district court form a test to determine which college athletes meet the definition of an employee and which don’t. Where will this lead? It seems pretty clear that FBS football players are working long hours generating money for their schools. What’s unclear is how “generating money for their schools” will be defined. Almost all college athletes work long hours. In theory, colleges make money off all sorts of sports, with pictures of softball fields and lines like “We have 18 varsity sports” all over admissions brochures. Does this make all athletes employees? This assessment involves a lot of conjecture on my part, and I am not a lawyer or a legal expert. I would imagine any test would have to consider three dimensions: The commitment asked of the athlete. The sport in question. The level at which the sport is played. This third one is important: An SEC football player is different from a MAC football player is different from a Big Sky football player is different from a Patriot League football player. And that’s just within Division I.
- Two more Georgia players were arrested this week for driving crimes. Starting linebacker Smael Mondon and a backup offensive lineman were charged with reckless driving, with the police report stating Mondon was racing a teammate. It’s possible this problem exists across major college football and that Athens-Clarke County Police tolerate less bullshit than their peers. Even if that’s the case, though (and the magnitude of the discrepancy suggests it isn’t), that doesn’t excuse the players involved, and it doesn’t excuse Kirby Smart and his staff from continuing to fail to make clear to their players how dangerous cars can be. If Georgia doesn’t figure this out, more people are going to die. The program’s already got two deaths on its hands.
- U.S. Soccer finally fired Gregg Berhalter, much to the excitement of Gio Reyna, who one year ago was ranked the 38th-best U21 player in the world. Why do I bring up Reyna’s global ranking? Because while Berhalter certainly wasn’t coaching well, the USMNT’s main weakness continues to be its talent. It doesn’t have good enough players to win at a high level internationally. That doesn’t mean it can’t pull off a string of upsets—and I understand the logic that one strong World Cup could lead to better talent by steering more American youth towards soccer—but the singular focus on the head coach feels like when NFL fans singularly focus on their team’s quarterback. I might be wrong about a lot here. But USMNT fans putting all their hopes in Jürgen Klopp (who quickly turned U.S. Soccer down) felt a lot like 2009 Bears fans putting all their hopes in Jay Cutler. Would be cool if it worked that way!
*What WAB means: It’s a measure of how many wins better or worse a team is than an “average bubble” team would be expected to be against the first team’s schedule. If a team went 4–1 against a schedule where the “average bubble” team’s win probabilities, based on home-court advantage and a rating system like Torvik’s or Pomeroy’s, would have been 50%, 50%, 75%, 25%, and 40%, their WAB score would be 1.6, because the “average bubble” team would have been expected to go 2.4–2.6. There are nuances to how this can be calculated, including where to draw the “average bubble” line, but that’s the idea. It’s a lot easier to calculate than Strength of Record.
