So doing the research for a theme league team I looked up pitchers between 1947 and 2001 with 190 plus IP and with WHIPs between 0.00 and 0.99. Starting pitchers with elite seasons in other words. 

There were 47 in those decades - 55 years, 47 pitchers' seasons with WHIPs below 1.00. 

When the research is extended to 2015 - 1947 to 2015, the result is 69 pitchers' seasons. 

So in the 14 years since 2001 there have been 22 such seasons, despite there being only around twice as many in the preceding 55 years. 

Actually, there were only two such seasons between 1947 and 1963 - Warren Hacker in 1952 whom I am going to straight up admit that until 20 minutes ago I had never heard of, and Don Newcombe in 1956. So we now have 45 seasons of 190 plus IP with WHIP below 1.00 from 1963 to 2001, in 38 years. 

Still, we have 22 such seasons, half as many, the past 14 years, which seems rather anomalous. 

BUT  - fully 20 of the 45 seasons were between 1963 and 1968 ! 

That means that excluding 1963-68, there were 25 such seasons between 1947 and 1962 plus 1969 to 2001, 48 seasons, 25 WHIPs under 1.00 by starting pitchers. 

But 22 such seasons between 2002 and 2015. Let's keep exploring: after 1968 there are no such seasons until Tom Seaver and Vida Blue in 1971. Altogether there are 9 such seasons in the 1970s, the last by Ron Guidry in 1978. 

Don Sutton has on in 1980, after which there are none till John Tudor and Dwight Gooden in 1985. All told there are 7 in the 1980s. So: 

1950s: 2
1960s: 20 - ALL between 1963 and 1968
1970s: 9
1980s: 7
1990s: 8 - which is surprising given the era, but one is by Schilling, one Kevin Brown and the rest are Maddux and Pedro
2000s - 10 - ALL between 2000 and 2005 - again mostly in the steroid era.
2010s - 13 - the second most ever after 1963-68 in the postwar era/integrated baseball modern era. Wow. 

There were four just last season. 

My first thought was: maybe it is low IP/G - few IP overall, the whole way starters are used sparingly. And indeed it would appear that pitchers in the 1970s and 1980s with WHIPs under 1.00 and at least 190 IP pitched about an average of 1 IP/G more than those since 2001 have  - this is a quick glance at each listing, I did not do the math in a rigorous way, but suspect that it would show somewhere around a full inning per game difference. 

But only 7 of the 23 post-2000 pitchers' seasons with WHIPs below 1.00 pitched fewer than 220 innings on the season, and only 4 I think pitched fewer than 200. 

So while, again at a glance, it would seem that the post-2000 pitchers with such great seasons have pitched fewer innings (especially compared to the often 300 plus IP of the 1968-72 crowd), they are not dramatically low over the length of the season. Still, it is hard to win 20 games with 225 IP - which would be 25 starts overall if you pitched only complete 9 inning games, unless you averages 6-7 IP/G as today's starters do. 

So, this is how unusual since WWII it has been in RL baseball to meet a pitcher with a WHIP below 1.00, even in an all-star game. When we load up our staffs with such pitcher seasons and then expect batters to do much of anything in an OL loaded with such pitchers and staffs we are really a bit over the top. 

By the way, by a strange historical symmetry, there were also 69 seasons between 1885 and 1946 of pitchers with 190 plus IP and WHIPs below 1.00. 

So we now have a total of 138 between 1885 and 2015 - 130 years, or just over one per season. 69 in the 69 years from 1947 to 2015, and 69 in the 61 years from 1885 to 1946. 

1880s- 3 
1890s - zero 
1900s - 42 (!!)
1910s - 20
1920s - 1 - Babe Adams in 1920
1930s - 1 - Carl Hubbel 1933
1940s - 2 - Mort Cooper and Tiny Bonham, both in 1942. 

Therefore: 83 of the 138 such seasons occurred between 1902 and 1920 or between 1963-68 with another 13 occurring in the past 5 seasons of baseball up to today, for a total of 96 of these seasons being 1902-1920, 1963-68, 2010-2015. 96 in 30 years and 42 such seasons in the other 100 years of baseball represented in the WIS database. 

If we were to see these two decades 1902-20 and the ten years of 1963-68 and 2010-15 as resulting from anomalies (I realize that this is methodologically problematic at best and Paul Feyerabend of "Against Method" fame would make me stay after school for such a sloppy approach - that reference was for you marcstuart), and likewise considering the 1920s and 1930s as equally anomalous on the other side (by now Feyerabend has called in his friend Lakatos, and along with Thomas Kuhn himself they are making an effigy of me and burning it on campus) and treating 1969-2010 as "normal" (Foucault is now circulating a petition against me just for using the word) then we should see between 7 and 10 such seasons every decade, that is 7-10 starting pitchers every ten years that have a WHIP below 1.00. 

Despite the howlings of my scientific philosopher colleagues noted above (plus whatever the heck Foucault was), I would argue that a period as long and as varied (hitters era after mound was lowered in 1969, then new, more mild pitchers' era, then close to century-long average through much of the 1980s, then the steroid era) as 1969-2010, that is a 41-year period, is a good enough sample size to make claims about a standard deviation. Seven to ten a year is a pretty narrow band. 

Ten in five years, 20 in five years (the mid-60s anomaly), or 62 in the deadball era stand out as exceptional, despite their covering a total of 30 years of baseball history as well overall. 

So, this gives us some idea of how likely it has been or not to see a WHIP below 1.00, or, more relevant to batters, having to face one at least before the 8th or 9th inning of a game. 

28 pitchers ended a season with a WHIP below 1.00 and fewer than 190 IP in the seasons from 1885 to 1946 - one before 1905 and four in the 1940s, the rest all between 1905 and 1919.

11 of the 28 did start in half or fewer of the games that they pitched. Only 3 - Joe Berry in 1944 (0 out of 53 games pitched), Tom Ferrick (1 out of 25) and Earl Caldwell (0 out of 39) both in 1946 stand out as overwhelmingly relief pitchers and not at least part-time starters. 

The only other two that fit that description are Deacon Phillippe in 1910 and Mike Prendergast in 1916 - Prendergast started 10 of the 35 games he appeared in in that year, and Phillippe started only 8 out of 31. All the others were starter-relievers or else starters who had few starts and so few innings that given season. 

Dividing the modern era, from 1947 to 1990 this time, again using the criteria of zero to 189 IP over the course of a season with WHIPs below 1.00 we find a huge number of such seasons compared to either 1885-1946 (28 with fewer than 190 IP) or among my operationalization (fancy academic word for "working definition") of 190 plus IP with WHIPs below 1.00 which was, we recall 69 from 1885-1946 and 69 from 1947 to the present day for a total of 138. 

For there were no fewer than 118 such seasons by pitchers with fewer than 190 IP between 1947 and 1990 !

Giving us up to now: 

Seasons by pitchers with WHIPs below 1.00: 

1885-1946 190 IP plus  - 69
1947-2015 - 190 IP plus - 69
1885 - 1946 - 0 to 189 IP - 28
1947-1990 0-189 IP - 118 

This should not surprise us, since the role of relievers grew steadily over this period. But let's look more closely: 

Exactly 12 of the 118 pitchers in question from 1947 to 1990 started at least 10 games and all of these without exception started more games in which they pitched than they did not. Indeed nearly all of them were really full-time starting pitchers with not enough starts to get them to my operationalizing minimum of 190 IP to qualify as a starting pitcher. This means we need to take this into account and maybe even that I should expand the definition of who counts as a starter for purposes of this research. 

Pascual Perez and Sonny Siebert each started 27 games in the seasons in question - 1988 and 1965 respectively, though Perez started all his games, while Siebert appeared in 12 that he did not start. 

But ten seems to be a magic cut-off number - once you get past the 12 pitchers who started at least 10 games and had fewer than 190 IP between 1947 and 1990 with WHIPs below 1.00, instead of essentially starters who sometimes pitch in relief, you basically have relief pitchers. Number 13 on the list in number of starts is none other than Rollie Fingers in 1971 - 8 starts, 48 appearances. 

Fully 70 of the 118 pitchers on the list had no starts at all. A big change from 1885-1946 and if we exclude the 12 starters with few innings just mentioned we have 70 pitchers out of 108 that had no starts among the under 1.00 WHIP achievers. 

Sorry, the dishwasher was beeping in continuation that it had finished its cycle and wanted to be turned off - don't you hate machines telling you to get off your *** and service them? But I digress. Where were we? 

Oh yes, so from 1947 to 1990 - a period of 44 years, there were 106 relief pitchers (118 seasons with fewer than 190 IP minus 12 essential starters noted above) with WHIPs below 1.00. that is well over two per season, around 2 2/3 per season or 8 ever 3 seasons, compared with 150 (our 138 starters over 190 IP plus the 12 with below 190 IP) plus the 23 starters (excluding the 5 I described above as mainly relievers) from 1885 with fewer than 190 IP to make 173 in 130 years, or 1.3 starters per season between 1885 and 2015 with WHIPs below 1.00. Adding the 5 relievers of the 1885 to 1946 period to the 106 from 1947 to 1990 we have 111 in the 105 years between 1885 and 1990. 

Summarizing: 

1885 to 2015 - starting pitchers (operationalized now as more starts than non-starts in a season) with WHIPs below 1.00:   173 in 130 years, or 4 every 3 years. 
1885 to 1990 - relief pitchers (fewer starts than non-starts) with WHIPs below 1.00: 111 in 105 years.

We now have to throw in some more starters however. Some of you very familiar with the database at WIS may have noticed that I had one more, unmentioned till now, operationalizing criteria - I cut off the starters at 400 IP. I was not counting seasons with more than 400 IP mainly because I consider those listed in the WIS database bogus - even among pitchers with high IP the number listed are not factual, but have been stretched to the point of absurdity, listing hundreds of innings for some pitchers that they never pitched that season to get to the standard IP/162. This despite the fact that the same WIS claims that they cannot include Negro League or All-American Girls Baseball players because the stats are incomplete. But I have written on this here before and it is another kettle of fish. 

Let us now, taking WIS' numbers at face value list the total of starting pitchers with 190 or more IP in a season and WHIPs below 1.00 from 1885 to 2015: 

Including these mega-seasons, fictional or not the grand total comes to 155 in 130 seasons from 1885 to 2015, The decade by decade breakdown is as follows:

Searching for pitchers with 190 to 1000 IP/162 with WHIPs between 0 and 0.99

1885-9 - 11
1900-1909 - 48
1910-1919 - 23
1920-29 - 1
1930-39 - 1
1940-49 - 2
1950-59- 2
1960-69 - 20
1970-79 - 10
1980-89 - 7
1990-1999 - 8
2000-2009- 10
2010-2015 - 13

There remain just three more categories to clear up:

relief pitchers (those with fewer than 190 IP and/or fewer starts among their appearances than starts) between 1991 and 2015 with WHIPs below 1.00,

starting pitchers (more starts than non-starts among appearances and fewer than 190 IP 1991-2015)

and the same grand total for pitchers with fewer than 190 IP from 1885 to 2015. 

First the 1991 to 2015 number for pitchers with below 190 IP: 

READY?  Remember we have, up to now - a grand total of 155 starting pitcher seasons with WHIPs below 1.00  over the whole history from 1885 to 2015, if we take 190 IP as a minimum criterion. We have another 23 that mainly pitched as starters from 1885 to 1946 but had fewer than 190 IP, and another 12 who were starters from 1947 to 1990 but likewise had below 190 IP, giving us a maximum total for starters 1885 to 2015 of 155 (starters 190-1,000 IP 1885-2015) plus 23 (pitchers with more starts than non-starts among appearances 1885 to 1946 but who had fewer than 190 IP) plus 12 (pitchers with more starts than non-starts but with fewer than 190 IP 1947 to 1990)  for a total of 190 starting pitchers so far with WHIPs below 1.00. 

Here is the total of pitchers with fewer than 190 IP since 1991 to today who have posted seasons with WHIPs below 1.00: 

356 ! 

In other words, ALL relief pitchers from 1885 to 1990 had posted 111 seasons of WHIPs below 1.00 in 105 seasons. And ALL starting pitchers as we have defined them had posted 190 such seasons in 130 seasons from 1885 to 2015, adding up to a total of 301 such seasons. 

But relief pitchers defined as pitchers with fewer than 190 IP from just 1991 to 2015 - a 24 year period or the time from when Bill Clinton ran for President to today, have posted 356 such seasons. Mamma Mia ! as they say in Italy. 

Let's have a closer look:

First of all, once again we do have a few starting pitchers mixed in given our operationalization - which again is the simple, un-adjusted total of IP with 190 as the cutoff between starters and relievers. But now again using our more sophisticated criteria of including those who had as many starts as non-starts among their appearances as starters we get a total of 14 pitchers out of this group of 356 who belong rightfully among starters. 

This time however there are a few differences, compared with the 1946-1990 group. 

To begin with the cutoff at which we find a precipitous and clear decline in the proportion of starts to non-starts among a pitcher's appearances here is not 10 starts but 6. 
Second, the drop is even more dramatic. The definition of a relief pitcher compared with a starting pitcher is as well-defined as we could ever want (I actually don't want or like it, but I don't like the de-industrialization of North America and Europe, nor Coca-Cola in anything but glass bottles either. But no one asks me anything, so let's just forge ahead): 

There are 16 pitchers with 6 or more starts between 1991 and 2015 who had fewer than 190 IP but WHIPs below 1.00: 

Of these only two had more non-starts than starts - Carlos Carrasco for Cleveland in 2014 who started 14 of his 40 appearances, and Kris Medlen for Atlanta in 2012 who started 12 of 50 appearances. I can only hope that these two are signs of a renewal of this sort of pitcher whom I have always liked for some reason as a social type. 

The other 14 with 6 or more starts but fewer than 190 IP and WHIPs below 1.00 between 1991 and 2015 ALL started ALL of their games except for two: Roy Oswalt in 2010 started 12 of 15 and Doug Fister in 2011 started 10 of his 11 appearances. Both clearly to me belong in the starters category. All the others started all their games. So we can add 14 starters to the overall total and end up with a definitive, grand total of 204 starting pitchers in 130 years with WHIPs below 1.00, which comes to 1.57 per year over the whole history of baseball from 1885 to today, so one and a half per year or 3 every 2 years. That is how often we should expect historically to see a starting pitcher with a WHIP below 1.00, and since we previously decided to ignore all the best minds in history and call the period 1969 to 2010 "normal" we find that the numbers for that era will have to be revised in light of our deciding to include pitchers who started as many games as they did not as starters regardless of overall season IP. We will do that momentarily. First, let's have a look at the rest of the 1991 to 2015 cohort whom we may now, with considerable confidence and even intellectual swagger call relief pitchers. 

We have excluded 14 and so have 342 relief pitchers between 1991 and 2015 with WHIPs below 1.00, a huge number that dwarfs all the other such seasons in baseball history by all categories of pitchers. 

Kris Medlen pitched in 2012 of which he started 12, and had a 2.76 IP/G. Since that number will be inflated by some higher number of innings pitched during his 12 starts which is an average we don't have available without recourse to the box scores themselves, we can assume that his IP/G as a reliever was slightly lower than 2 IP/G at the most as an educated guess. Carrasco in his 2014 season started 14 games out of 40 and had an IP/G of 3.35 so let's guess that his IP/G as a reliever may have been as high as 2 innings per appearance. 

Having looked at these two anomalous but admirable performers, we can do a DC search for pitchers with 0 to 189 IP and no more than 5 GS from 1991 to 2015. 

And we have our 340 - 356 minus 14 starters as defined above, minus Carrasco and Medlen = 340. 

Of the 340, NO ONE has more than 1 game started, and ONLY 7 out of 340 have even 1 start. ALL the rest had 100% of their appearances in relief. The contrast with the rest of the history of baseball, including of previous relief pitcher cohorts, could not be starker. 

Keith Foulke has the highest number of total IP - 106 in 1999 for the White Sox. Listing the 340 pitchers in question in order of IP we find that there is absolutely no clear cut off point - no break between long relievers and middle relievers, stoppers, setup men, closers, in terms of IP. The hierarchy of IP is completely incremental, that is every single integer is represented after Foulke, who is a statistical outlyer, from number 2 - Octavio Dotel in 2002 with 98 until pitcher number 270 where we should have 43 IP but skip from 44 to 42. All the other numerals are represented to the lowest number represented of 25 IP. 

to be continued below...

Of the 340 relief pitchers who between 1991 and 2015 posted seasons with WHIPs below 1.00,

53 were in the 1990s. No season lacked at least one. Since 1990 was included in the previous grouping that give us just about 6 relief pitchers per season in the 1990s (remember that we are looking at 1.5 starting pitchers per season in baseball history as noted above and we had 146 pitchers with fewer than 190 IP from 1885 to 1990 total - 105 seasons - who had WHIPs below 1.00 which again is actually below the adjusted number for starters, though from 1947 to 1990 the number was 106 (118 minus 12 starters with low IP) in 44 seasons, or 2.4 per season. 

So we have: 1.5 starting pitchers a year with WHIPs below 1.00 over the whole history from 1885 to today, 1.4 per season for relief pitchers over 1885-1946, 2.4 per season for relief pitchers 1947-1990 and suddenly for 1991-1999 we have 6 per season.

Let's keep going: from 2000 to 2009 there are no fewer than 125 such season, or 12.5 pitchers per year, doubling the average for 1991 to 1999. 

The other 161 seasons with WHIPs below 1.00 have been since 2010 - or 16.1 pitchers per season.  Rather than a mere, civil "Mamma Mia !" we can go to the colloquial Italian expression "cazzo !" 

 

Again, summarizing: 

In the whole history of baseball from 1885 to today, the frequency of starting pitchers posting seasons with WHIPs below 1.00 haseen around 1.5 pitchers per season, or 3 every 2 seasons, or 15 in a decade. This means our estimates of the period 1969-2000 are surely on the low side and need to pushed up a bit if we are to consider those seasons "normal" (quiet down Foucault, you are getting on my frickin' nerves). 

Over the history of baseball from 1885 to 1946, relief pitchers defined as having pitched fewer than 190 IP in a season AND having had more non-start appearances than starts, saw around 1.4 pitchers per season have a WHIP under 1.00 or around 7 pitchers every 5 seasons or 14 in a decade. This number moved up to 2.4 per season from 1947 to 1990. And all told we had 217 WHIPs below 1.00 by relief pitchers from 1885 to 1990 - 111 from 1885 to 1946 and 106 from 1947 to 1990, or 217 in 105 seasons or 2.06 - call it 2 per season basically. 

Meaning that up to 1991 we should have expected, all told, starters and relievers combined, to have witnessed 3-4 pitchers a year - maybe 3 starters and 4 relievers in some combination over a 2-season period, to post WHIPs under 1.00.

Since 1991 the frequency of relief pitchers as we have defined them having such seasons has moved up steadily from 6 pitcher per season 1991-1999 to 12.5 per year from 2000-2009 to 16.1 per season from 2010 to 2015. 

So, to move to a conclusion: remember we needed to still clear up three categories: 

1) relief pitchers from 1991 to 2015, which we just did - there 340 with seasons of WHIPs below 1.00, and we find a startling rising trend of such seasons per year each decade during that period.

2) also easy to settle now is the grand total of relief pitcher below-1.00 WHIP seasons which comes to a total of 217 (see just above) 1885-1991 plus 340 1991 to 2015 = 557 over a 130 year period or an average of 4.3 per season, compared with 1.5 per season for starting pitchers over baseball history 1885-2015, or about three times as common. 

This means we can now again adjust our estimate baseball-history-wide to be 6 below 1.00 WHIPs per baseball season, with 9 by relief pitchers and 3 by starting pitchers every two seasons. Except, as we have seen, this total is highly concentrated among starting pitchers in a composite 30 year period that goes from 1901-1920 and 1963-68 plus 2010-2015, with the other 100 seasons of baseball history being much less likely to see a starting pitcher post a WHIP below 1.00. 

Fully 84 of the 155 seasons by starting pitchers with WHIPs below 1.00 were in that 30 year composite period, with the other 71 being in the other 100 seasons. So in the 1901-1920, 1963-68, 2010-15 eras the likelihood of such a season, or to put it differently, the likelihood of the batter facing a pitcher having such a season before say the 7th inning was 2.8 pitchers per year, while in all the other seasons of baseball it was 0.7 per year. 

This leaves us just one last category to clear up: starting pitchers from 1991 to 2015: 

3) From 1991 to 2015, 31 pitchers who had pitched at least 190 innings and/or made at least 6 starts (see above) had seasons with WHIPs below 1.00. That comes to 31 pitchers in 25 years, or 1.22 per season, actually BELOW the historical average for overall era 1885-2015 which as we have seen is 1.5 pitchers per season. 

Again, let's look one more time close-up: 

8 such seasons were 1991-1999. 
10 were in 2000-2009
13 have been since 2010, in just a 6 year period, so we could project another 9 for the next 4 which would come to 22  for the decade. This is double the number for the preceding decade, a total already surpassed in any case in real terms, and almost three times the total for 1991-1999. How "abnormal" - dear Dr. Foucault, go watch the scene with Eyegore in "Young Frankenstein" where he steals a brain and then come back and talk to me then okay? - how abnormal is this historically? 

Well, this brings us back to whether the 1969 to 2000 era can legitimately be seen as normal, defining other eras as anomalies. Rather than belabor the methodological stuff again (though I like to leave no dead horse unbeaten) Let's just look at how many pitchers posted WHIPs below 1.00 during the whole period 1969-2000 to see how different or not our own era looks: 

Between 1969 and 2000, 26 pitchers had seasons in which they pitcher 190 or more innings AND had at least 6 starts - though we have an issue of consistency since we found that in an earlier period the real cutoff between starters and relievers was more realistically 10 starts minimum, but for the moment let's use the same minimum of 6 starts and then examine whether anybody sticks out like a sore thumb. 

26 starting pitchers with WHIPs of lower than 1.00 over 32 seasons is well below the historical average of 1885-2015 of 1.5 per season, since we end up with around 5 pitchers posting such seasons every 6 years in the period 1969-2000. That does not look "normal". BUT, let's remember that the overall average is skewed by those 30 seasons that have over half of the lower-than-1.00 WHIP seasons - 1901-1920, plus 1963-68, plus 2010-2015. Instead we found that the overall average of the other 100 years of baseball history as represented in the WIS database was 0.71 pitchers per season, or 7 pitchers a decade with WHIPs below 1.00. From 1960 to 2000 we have 0.83 per season, a little higher than the overall 100 year average, and which comes to 1.6 every two years, or 8.3 pitchers a decade over that period, compared with 7 pitchers a decade over the whole 100 years excluding the 30 in which such starting pitcher seasons are heavily concentrated, in which instead we found 28 pitchers per decade with such seasons over the years 1901-1920, plus 1963-68, and 2010-2015. 

If we just split the difference (a colloquialism that has no actual basis in mathematical rigor, I am aware) and said, "what the heck, in the weirdo pitcher years we got 28 pitchers per decade that have WHIP seasons below 1.00 and in the seemingly normal 1969 to 2000 era we got 8 per decade and 7 per decade for the 100 years that were not super-pitcher friendly, so if we split the difference between having 28 a decade and having 7-8 a decade we get 14-15 a decade or 1.5 per season or 3 every two years which is also the overall 130 year average, that is about how many we should see in a normal era"we might be getting somewhere. Then, if we noted "hey, wait a minute, this long-winded professor guy just told us to expect that we are going to get 22 in this decade and we already have had 13 in just 6 years! That doesn't look quite right. That is over 2 each year, not 3 in two years among the starting pitchers, not out of the ballpark but a little too high. Maybe we need a smidgen more offense so that we can tell which pitchers really are having great years and which ones are having very good ones. 

But the relief pitcher numbers are off the charts - having 16 pitchers a year instead of 1.5 or 2 or even 3 - which would be double the norm for starting pitchers - among relievers posting WHIPs under 1.00 is ridiculous. It isn't steroids - there is no reason to assume that only relievers take them and not starters, or that relievers have better drug dealers than starters, especially since starters probably make more money - so we have to assume that it is how the relievers are used. 

Okay, fair enough, but...it doesn't seem quite fair to batters after 130 years to find that instead of facing a Sandy Koufax and maybe two other guys that pitch that well every two seasons you now face 5, plus 16 each year that come in AFTER you get Sandy out of the box. Something about the rules or pitcher usage needs to be changed in the rules - maybe no more than a certain number of pitchers per team roster - maximum 10 so that each pitcher has to pitch more innings, and maybe some minimum innings or batters faced or some lowering of the mound again like in 1969, which didn't hurt the Mets or the astronauts any anyhow - or maybe a minimum number of days of rest after a pitcher is used so that they can't use the same closers to strangle the hitters at the end of each game or something. We don't need fireworks like in the late 90s, but the thing has gone too far in the other direction." 

The normality of a baseball game should be, based on this overview, that unless one of the 3 best starters of any two seasons is on the mound or unless the starter is relieved by one of the best 3 or 4 relief pitchers in all of baseball, that at least one batter should reach base each inning on average. Since no team is likely to have more than 2 of these pitchers out of 7 and in any case their years are spread out over two seasons, and there are 30 teams, that means that in facing 27 of baseball's teams, you should expect to get a man on base per inning on average. And it means that since most teams use five starters that even facing the other 1-2 teams with the best pitchers each season, you should expect to get a man on base per inning on average even against those teams except on Thursdays and alternate Wednesdays. Instead, facing 16 pitchers a season coming in with Koufax-like quality after the starter, and at least 5 teams every two seasons with a Koufax to throw at you as a starter, takes more away from the game than it gives. 

My tale is told. Now, a public service announcement by bagchucker...(see what I did there?):

The floor is open to discussion. 

you can't say My Tale Is Told and then offer a postscript. it's a rule

"Moderation is as difficult for me as abstinence is for you" 

- Oscar Wilde

besides, "The End" just meant I was done so people would feel free to post without worrying that they were f---ing up my s---.

so you done good bagchucker

It's a direct correlation to pitchers per game.

All innings are not created equal. Starting Pitchers are, in general, more successful the first two times through the batting order, and start to fade when it's the third time through. This is partly a fatigue issue and partly a "batter sees the pitcher enough times tonight" issue. In the old days seeing a pitcher three, four, five times was probable. Now, it's not uncommon to see them twice, maybe three times at most, before the slew of relievers comes out -- which you almost never see any reliever more than once in a game.

I don't recommend roster construction rules as a fix -- any time you try to take the roster into defining more than just "X players" I suspect you leave things open to exploitation because now you have to go into rigorous definitions of "what is a pitcher", when there's no active game on.

A rule I proposed a while back might help with the reliever flood a bit: Any player that enters the game in the middle of a defensive inning must finish that inning unless a) they are injured, in which case they are ineligible to participate in the next scheduled contest for their team, or b) they are a pitcher that has been charged with at least 2 runs.

But this is an incomplete solution. That stops "three pitchers in an inning for three batters" but not so much "four new pitchers in four innings". Not sure offhand what a good solution would be in full. Will think about it.