The Complete Game Edition

Keith O’Brien (KO) is a writer and content strategist at Total Emphasis. He previously wrote about 4DX.

Keith here. In the National League Championship Series, we just witnessed a magical moment - a once in a blue moon display of excellence. I am sure you are thinking of Japanese unicorn Shonei Ohtani and his 3HR, 10 strike out Game 4 victory that sent the Los Angeles Dodgers to the World Series. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Ohtani’s feat was impressive - historians will tell you that combination of hitting and pitching prowess has never been done; stat nerds will tell you it was the second most impressive individualistic performance in playoff history. (Ironically, he was second because his two distinct feats were so impressive, they made the other one less necessary and therefore decreased the historic nature of his performance WAR - a real Catch (ha ha) 22.

They ding Ohtani because no one was on base when he hit his homers or because the score wasn’t closer when he launched the last two, factors beyond a batter’s control. (Beyond any other batter’s control, at least: If Ohtani the pitcher had been a bit worse, Ohtani the hitter’s homers might have had higher WPAs.) - The Ringer

But something equally impressive happened in Game Two - something that hadn’t happened in the last eight years of playoffs: a complete game. If Ohtani didn’t have that once-in-a-lifetime Game 4, all of the baseball would be fixated on Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s rare complete game.

Why is this interesting?

A complete game is when the pitcher who starts is the only person from his team to throw a pitch. For winning teams, that’s nine innings, 27 outs. For a losing team, it could only be 8 innings (if the home team is winning, they do not bat in the ninth inning).

For much of baseball history, a complete game was the platonic ideal. That means the pitcher was playing well and the team was likely winning (or close to winning), and it saved the team from using additional pitchers. Starting pitchers are typically part of a five-man rotation, which means they have at least four days for their arms to recover before their next start.

How rare was Yamamoto’s feat? The Dodgers did not throw a complete game in the entire regular season (162 games!)

For all the talk about which records in baseball may never get broken - Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive games with a hit streak (56), Barry Bond’s single season HR record (73), those are at least in play because batters get up every day and attempt to get hits and home runs. No one, with any volume, attempts to throw complete games anymore.

Never say never in sports, except in this one situation. No sentient human will break Cy Young’s record of 749 career complete games.

It’s been 14 years since we’ve seen any one pitcher throw double digit complete games in a season. It’s more likely you’ll see the league leaders throwing 2 or 3 complete games than anything more than that.

For a thought experiment, 42 year-old Justin Verlander is the active complete game leader at 26 (which, if you’re keeping score at home, would be almost one-third the single season complete game record of 73 held by Old Hoss Raburn). Your man went 60-13, pitching every inning of every game he started. No relief in sight.

Let’s be optimistic and say Verlander discovered a fountain of youth and doubled the norm - 6 complete games a year. He would have to pitch a shade over 120 more years to best Cy Young’s record.

Okay, no need to drown you in stats. I think I’ve proved how rare complete games are compared to the past. (Nowadays, the average pitcher count per team hovers around 29.) But why, exactly, has the complete game disappeared as a viable baseball strategy in the last few decades?

1. Specialization

At the risk of being over simplistic, there were three types of pitchers during the complete game era. Starting pitchers (those considered to be the best pitchers on the roster), one closer (the guy you absolutely trusted to throw heat for one inning and nothing more), and then the middle relievers that you hoped and prayed wouldn’t mess things up. Middle relievers were not good enough to be the starters and not dependable enough to get the job done with three outs until victory. They were nameless jobbers (very much akin to the generic wrestlers who would get destroyed by the Hulk Hogans of the world during Saturday morning wrestling shows) whose fortunes would only change if they could move up to starter or down to closer.

If you’ve ever seen or heard of Moneyball, you likely know there’s been some adaptive strategy. Baseball teams and their managers think more modularly about their pitching resources.

The modern game now has starters, spot starters (those who can be counted on to take on the assignment every now and then), openers (those who start games with the intent of just getting through the top of the order once), long relievers, middle relievers, set up men, and closers.

(Side note: there used to be the delightfully named LOOGYs (Lefty One-Out GuY) - left-handed pitchers that would come in to throw against just one batter - often a threatening left-handed hitter - but, in the interest of speeding up the game, the MLB changed the rules that any newly inserted pitcher now needs to pitch to at least three batters or end the inning).

2. Manager Intelligence

Without being too harsh on the crusty old manager of yore, it was often a retirement package for Hall of Famers who wanted to stick close to the game and were not necessarily known for their strategic brilliance. They wanted to pick one pitcher they could depend on getting through the entire game, a lineup that could hit every at bat so they and the benchwarmers could get started on the post-game beers. If they were actively making in-game decisions, something went very wrong. Today’s managers are analytical freaks who are constantly tweaking their lineups and think nothing of having a box score with six or seven pitchers. The Ty Cobbs of the world would react in disgust if they had to go to the mound to make a change. Today’s manager is bored if he isn’t actively making a decision every 15 minutes.

3. Injuries and Health

Some of MLB’s most promising pitchers were felled by high pitch counts early in their careers. Another complete game record-holder Fernando Valenzuela won 21 games in his best season. He only won 10 or more games four more times in the 12 seasons that followed, a decline the Dodger’s orthopedist attributed to overpitching. The Cubs were particularly snakebitten when two can’t-miss phenoms ultimately missed - Kerry Wood and Mark Prior - undone by too much too fast.

Like other sports, MLB teams now invest heavily in sports science and view pitching too long into any one outing as a liability. Instead of treating pitchers as generic tools you can wear into the ground, they have the novel idea that keeping them fresh will pay dividends throughout the years.

4. We’re Not Going Back

Baseball is a sport of constant reinvention - due, in part, to its lagging popularity against the NBA and NFL. Every year brings new rules and regulations to speed up the games and make them more enjoyable. But nowhere in that potential roadmap is a return to teams putting their star pitchers through the ringer to avoid the bullpen or to avoid making decisions on when to replace and with whom. Records will fall, but Cy Young and Old Hoss should rest easy - no one wants their records and no one will come within a fraction of them. So when we do see a complete game in the wild, it is to be celebrated. Even if it came a few days before another unbelievable game from the league’s most miraculous player. (KO)