Staff Infection 2: The Snare of the Five-Inning Pitcher

This won’t take too long. Before the current season, and at various points during the early part of the season, we posited that there is such a thing as a five-inning pitcher. By this, we meant a starting pitcher who can pitch well through five innings, but then usually fouls the nest in the sixth. We further hypothesized that, with the success of the impermeable Kansas City and Pittsburgh bullpens, and the burgeoning population of pitchers who can throw 97 MPH for 20 pitches at a time every couple of days, more and more teams would be constructing bullpens that can take over in the sixth inning and remain nonporous through the ninth. And finally, we surmised that an enlightened and stat-wise new breed of managers would start removing the five-inning pitchers after strong performances through the fifth inning, notwithstanding the pitchers’ desire to stay in the game. This, we concluded, would lend unexpected (by everyone but us and our fortunate readers) value to the aforesaid five-inning pitchers, who would now be unable to sabotage their own victories, and their own ERAs and WHIPs, via sixth inning self-immolation. We found for ourselves, and identified for those same fortunate readers, a bunch of such pitchers whose 2015 (and sometimes early 2016) stats suggested they belonged in this category. And in many instances we acquired these pitchers in our various drafts, auctions, waiver claims, and FAABs.

Did it work? In a word, no. In six words, no, even when it seemed to. Some of our five-inning pitchers were just flat-out awful. Chris Bassitt had five starts—ERA in the first five innings, a sparkling 6.85—before he went under the knife for TJ surgery. Mike Wright, whom we identified as a five-inning guy on May 25th, thereupon had 5 starts in which his ERA in the first five was 8.22, then got banished to the bullpen, and then to the minors. Chad Bettis, whom we told you about on May 18th, thereafter had an ERA of 6.31 through the fifth, and actually did better when he staggered through to the sixth and seventh. Likewise Mike Fiers, with an ERA of 4.95 in the first five and less than 3 in the sixth and seventh.

Then there are a couple of guys we were sort of right about, but it didn’t matter. We figured that Wade Miley would benefit from the new, enlightened management in Seattle, and then from the solid bullpen in Baltimore after he got traded. Miley was indeed very slightly better in the first five (5.20 ERA) than afterwards (5.58 ERA), but it didn’t matter, because his managers kept leaving him in after the fifth, resulting in four Blown Wins, as we call them, in the sixth inning, and two more in the seventh.

And then there’s Nathan Eovaldi. We regarded him almost as a lab experiment: Good for five innings, bad thereafter, very strong bullpen, smart and statwise manager. But Eovaldi, at least this season, was a four-inning pitcher, with an ERA over 8 in both the fifth and the sixth. Moreover, over the course of 5 starts in June, Eovaldi’s Phi Beta Kappa manager let him carry a good game from the fifth into the sixth often enough to get three Blown Wins, while yanking him after the fifth only once. Eovaldi was pretty good in three relief appearances, and the bullpen may be where his future lies, assuming–as we hope is the case–that he recovers from the surgery he’s going to have to repair his torn UCL and flexor tendon.

A couple of guys we mentioned have done pretty well, and performed about as we envisioned, but we still can’t take any credit. Hisashi Iwakuma’s 2016 numbers fit the model: 3.44 ERA in the first five, 5.52 in the sixth and seventh. But he was way better in the sixth than the seventh, and we’re not seeing a lot of situations in which it would have made a difference if Scott Servais had yanked him after five good innings. We count one blown win all season. True, it would have helped your ERA and WHIP if he’d left after five sometimes, but hard as it is for us Fantasists to acknowledge, the actual outcomes of actual games factor into managerial decisions.

Maybe we can take a little bit of credit for Kyle Hendricks, if you avoided all the guys mentioned above and drafted him on our say-so. As we noted last August, Hendricks isn’t exactly a five-inning pitcher. He just can’t pitch in the sixth inning. His numbers are almost comical. Career ERA in 67 starts, innings 1 through 5: 2.65. Career ERA in innings 7 through 9: 2.59. Career ERA in sixth inning: 5.52. On the other hand, maybe we don’t deserve any credit. We figured that Joe Maddon—whose genius, and we use that word advisedly, is to think like Billy Beane while behaving like Don Zimmer—would notice this trend and start yanking Hendricks after the fifth inning, performance to that point vel non. And he’s done that twice this season. But he’s also let Hendricks pitch his way into four sixth-inning blown wins. We get that there are reasons—among other things, Hendricks’s lights-out record after the sixth—to gamble on his sixth-inning performance. And Hendricks has been great from a Fantasy standpoint. But not great for the reasons and in the way that we thought, and (for present, full-accounting purposes, plus which we didn’t draft him ourselves) that’s all that matters.

Finally, there’s Alex Wood, who in some ways is the most interesting case, though more for what he suggests about the Dodgers than what he himself did or might do. We wrote about Wood on April 18th, noting that he’d been a five-inning pitcher in 2015 and so far in 2016. We observed at the time that new manager Dave Roberts was sending mixed signals about how far into games he’d let his starters pitch, but expressed hope that he’d be aggressive in removing Wood before he got into trouble in the sixth. The problem for Roberts at that point was that he hadn’t sorted out his bullpen yet, but we suggested he might.

As it turned out, he did, but not until June and not with the help of any of the guys (except for Joe Blanton) that we thought he might use to do so. Unfortunately, between April 18th and May 30th, when Wood went down, probably for the season, with a blown elbow, Roberts let Wood pitch into the sixth often enough to give him three Blown Wins in addition to the one he already had. Since then, though, Roberts’s bullpen has gotten better, his confidence in it has apparently grown, and he’s shown some willingness to take his starters out after five good innings. It’s too late to do Wood and his owners any good, but how about Brett Anderson (ERA, in 113 career starts, innings 1 through 5: 3.58; innings 6 and 7: 4.34)? Anderson’s return from TJ surgery this past Sunday couldn’t have been worse: 1 inning pitched, 2 home runs and 5 earned runs, removed after that one disastrous inning with a “mild sprain” of the wrist on his pitching arm. Who knows what that means? Not us. But if Anderson’s healthy enough to start, he might be the five-inning pitcher we’ve sought in vain all season.