Baseball: How to stop Tommy John surgeries and beat the shift

Whenever there is a discussion of who should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame, I always argue for Tommy John.  I mean, not only did he win 288 games and finish in the top five of Cy Young voting three times, but he applied his name to the most famous medical procedure outside of the Heimlich.  Did anyone name a surgical procedure after Frank Thomas?

The major leagues have seen a rash of Tommy John surgeries this season, with a chance that the record of 36 in 2012 might be broken.  One not-quite victim is Cy Young/Rookie of the Year candidate Masahiro Tanaka, who is resting his arm in hopes of avoiding Tommy John surgery (and apologizing profusely to Yankee fans; forgive him, he hasn't been in New York that long).  At this point a lot of major league coaches, managers and scouts would tell him to just get the surgery.  It’s almost as if every 16 year old kid who wants to be a pitcher is contemplating Tommy John surgery as a preventative measure.

Another Japanese pitcher, Yu Darvish, has a suggestion: America should adopt the Japanese practice of a six man rotation.  There is only one problem with this strategy.  Most teams don’t have three good starters, much less six.  Promoting what is now a middle-inning mop-up man to be the sixth starter is nothing but a recipe for higher batting averages and more scoring.

But if you can’t increase the time between starts, maybe you can decrease the innings pitched per start.  We already have relief “closers” who never pitch more than one inning, preferably to only three batters.  In the past when pitchers like Kerry Woods came up, the debate would rage whether he should be a starter or a closer. I thought the answer was obvious; if he’s a good pitcher, do you want him pitching six innings every five games or one inning every three or four games?  If he’s good, you want more innings.

But more innings leads to injuries and the scalpel.  But what if we chucked the whole idea of starting pitchers?  Treat you pitching staff as a collection of middle relievers.  Have a starter go no more than three innings, then someone else pitch the next two, then maybe someone pitch two more, then a set-up man in the eighth and the closer in the ninth.  Rotate slots around based on right/left match-ups, differences in pitching styles, have mediocre pitchers come in for the bottom of the line-up then a better pitcher the next inning. 

The quality start is a dying statistic.  The years of Grover Alexander throwing 16 shutouts in a season are long gone.  Managers are now under pressure to pull a pitcher throwing a no-hitter if his pitch count hits 100.  Why push it?  Don’t expect more than three innings from your starter, four tops.  Don’t expect more than two innings from any middle-reliever.  Finish off with your closer even if you’re down by two runs.

It would take some time to get the timing right, to see how many games in a row you could expect a pitcher to go three innings, or how soon after pitching two innings three days in a row could you expect a man to come back.  You would lose some flexibility; you couldn't just pull someone in the middle of a bad inning without throwing off the “rotation.”  But you would gain some flexibility too; instead of saving your closer for the ninth when the seventh, eighth and ninth hitters are up, you could use him when there was two on and one out in the seventh and the heart of the order was on deck.

It’ll never happen.  Bullpen by committee is one thing, but rotation by committee?  But with good starters being harder to find, maybe the answer is to stop looking.

On another baseball subject, we have an irresistible force approaching an immovable object.  Last week pitcher Colby Lewis complained when batter Colby Rasmus, a .223 hitter, bunted against the shift that the Rangers had deployed.  Lewis claimed that Rasmus was just trying to pad his batting average (yeah, because he’s so close to the batting title at .223).  So basically he’s saying hitters should be forced to hit into shifts.

But this week SI’s Tom Verducci suggests that maybe it is time for baseball to consider making the shift illegal.  It simply isn't fair to left handed power hitters to expect them to bunt down to third.  So basically he’s saying batters should never be forced to hit into shifts.

When ESPN ran a poll asking if people had a problem with Rasmus bunting against the shift with his team up by two runs in the 5^th inning, a whopping 97% responded “No” (the smidgen of yes votes must have come from Texas).  If only voting in political elections was this sane.  In some cases, a well-placed bunt against an extreme shift could almost be stretched into a double (assuming the batter has any speed, which is probably a bad assumption).  Ted Williams refused to hit to left field against the shift, but may I suggest that Colby Rasmus is NOT Ted Williams. 

Baseball, most sports actually, are about adjustments.  Rasmus hits a lot of singles to right field.  The other teams employ a shift and his average falls.  He starts bunting to third base, and his average goes up.  Teams stop employing a shift.  The circle of life is complete.

I am sick of hearing about baseball’s unwritten rules.  It used to be an unwritten rule that if you hung a curve ball and the batter hit a home run, you hit the next batter in the ribs with a fastball.  You screw up, you risk injuring someone else.  Baseball’s unwritten rulebook should be thrown out.

As was said in the film Bull Durham, baseball is a simple game; you throw the ball, they hit the ball, and you catch the ball.  There is no need to complicate it by creating rules for illegal defenses or unwritten requirements that players not try to exploit their opponent’s weaknesses.  Just play the game.  Please.