Funeral For the Complete Game

Last week, Mets pitcher Johan Santana was pitching his best game of the year against the Arizona Diamondbacks: 7 innings, no runs, three walks, 10 Ks. He was dominant and showing no signs of tiring. Despite this, Santana was still taken out of the game. It wasn't a situation of being pinch-hit for in a scoreless tie. The Mets led 2-0 and Santana had things well at hand. The reasoning was that Santana had thrown 116 pitches and that was deemed enough for the day. That's ludicrous. 15 more pitches wouldn't have doomed him, especially the way he was throwing. Sure enough, almost on cue, the bullpen blew the game and Santana got a N/D for his efforts. It's very likely that he would have gotten the win if he was allowed to go all the way or at least get to the 9th inning where the closer takes over. Instead, as is the way these days, managers will hand the ball to any number of relievers who ordinarily should only be used in a mop-up roll.

This is far from an uncommon occurrence in baseball. The practice of removing a pitcher no matter how well he's doing when he reaches a certain pitch count or after the 6th inning - whichever comes first - is a strategy designed to conserve the the pitcher's long-term health. A good philosophy, but only to a certain point, and that point has long since been surpassed. Combine this with the advent of the bullpen to major status over the last 30 years and it means the complete game is going the way of the Dodo and it's costing teams a lot more wins than the risk of a complete game would be to the health of a pitcher. It's absurd.

Check out the numbers of the following Hall-of-Famers:

Bob Feller:
18 years, 279 CG, 44 shutouts.

Ferguson Jenkins:
19 years, 267 CG, 49 shutouts.

Bob Gibson:
17 years 255 CG, 56 shutouts

Tom Seaver:
20 years, 231 CG, 61 shutouts:

Now compare that with the numbers of the current legends:
Roger Clemens:
24 years, 110 CG, 44 shutouts.

Greg Maddux:
23 years, 109 CG, 35 shutouts

Randy Johnson:
21 years - 98 CG, 37 shutouts.

Tom Glavine:
22 years - 56 CG, 25 shutouts.

And the new kids on the block?
Johan Santana:
9 years, 6 CG, 4 shutouts.

Jake Peavy:
7 years, 6 CG, 3 shutouts.

Roy Oswalt:
8 years, 12 CG, 4 shutouts.

When you do the "at this pace" math, the results are alarming. The leading pitchers used to complete 20 games a year, easy. Now you're lucky to see the leader board top out at three and in the last two years, a couple of teams went through an entire season without one complete game by their starters, a first in major-league history in any era. The pattern is shaping up that the starter will go seven innings, the holder goes one and the closer pitches the 9th. That could result in the 20-game winner becoming a thing of the past as well, as evidenced by the fact that no National League pitcher has won 20 games since 2005.

It's a disturbing trend that's partially dictated by agents to protect their clients, and by the current generation of unimaginative, by-the-book managers who don't have the guts or the smarts to do the best possible thing to increase the team's chances of winning. If your pitcher's doing well, keep him in the game. Take him out when he tires, gets hit hard, or when he reaches a really high pitch-count, say 150 or so. These guys are getting paid millions more than their Hall-of-Fame predecessors, but between the pitch count watch and going from a 4-man rotation to a 5-man rotation over the years, they're working a lot less hours on their shifts than the old-timers did. Baseball got itself into this trend, they can get themselves out of it. But as important as they say it is to win at all costs, that urgency no longer seems to apply in the most important part of baseball: Pitching.

Footnote: Do you know how many complete games Roger Clemens had over the last nine years of his career? Four.
So much for performance enhancing drugs.