It’s been a few years ago, but I got wind somewhere along the way that position player development in the minors was more about games played than it was innings or plate appearances. That seems to be accurate to me.

Someone else suggested that pitcher development was similar, so perhaps better to stick good SP prospects into the bullpen. They appear in more games, but pitch fewer innings, and in the process are less likely to get hurt. Made sense.

And yet I’m not totally sure I’ve developed a pitcher very well since beginning that strategy - but I also haven’t had many really great prospects to judge the strategy against.

What do we think?

I'd hazard a guess that pitchers only need 1/5th the game appearances as position players to get the same level of development credit, otherwise SP would never fully develop. That said, I tend to (or used to until I got lazier) put all my pitching studs in Setup roles to get max appearances just in case. I also try to set low pitch counts (5-10) so they recover to 100% quicker and get more appearances but also so they throw fewer pitches over the course of the season and therefore less likely to get injured. 10 pitches/game over 81 games (if they can even get in that many) as a SuA is roughly 1/3-1/4 the amount of pitches they'd throw as a starter. I've had too many great prospects become good, or good prospects become meh, to let them play the typical amount of starter innings in the minors.

I've been using the Tandem role in the minors for the past few seasons, with pretty good results. I'll have a 6-man rotation with 3 tandem. That way, they're starting every 3 days. The day after they're start, I'll move them to a Set A role, reduce the pitch count to 10. Most of the time, they'll get in another 2/3 to 1 1/3 inning in relief and be fresh for the next tandem start. It's a lot of load management, but appearances are way up.

I tried that theory with this pitcher, whom I took in the season 55 Rule 5 draft... there's an earlier post describing how I got the worst pitcher on my ML team to pitch 66.2 innings in 125 games. You can see the result... for as big a DitR bump as he had I don't know that the season 55 increases are all that special.