Baseball’s Next Frontier Is Pitcher-Position Players
Baseball is notoriously slow to change. It is a sport – mired or steeped, depending on your perspective – in tradition. While we’ve seen flashes of innovation every few seasons – multi-inning relievers in the 2016 postseason, or the Dave Roberts / Terrance Gore playoff X-factor – but things seem to quickly revert to The Way Things Are Done. To be sure, the overall pace of change has increased of late, with infield shifts continuing their exponential march toward ubiquity (and away from being reasonably called “shifts”), and of course, this year more has been written about the phenomenon of The Opener than can be reasonably summarized here.
More than ever before in the history of the sport, smart teams abound, and they aren’t being knocked, lampooned, or lambasted for trying to think outside the box. Whole articles were devoted to Dodgers’ manager Dave Roberts’ reaction- or lack thereof – to the Brewers’ decision to lift fake-starter Wade Miley in NLCS Game 5 after just 1 hitter. The Brewers’ gimmick was used to exploit platoon advantages against the Dodgers’ lineup. To Roberts, something that in 1988 or 1998 or even 2008 would have been a scandal and possibly incited allegations of ‘Bush League’ play and violations of unwritten rules, is just good strategy.
Those paying attention will recognize familiar storylines in the Astros use of analytics in pitching decisions, the Rays are reorganization of pitcher usage (and development), the Yankees building a superbullpen to bolster their flimsy rotation, and so on and so on and so on. There aren’t too many teams still trying to win with five starters going 7 innings before handing the ball to a setup man, a closer, or a mop-up guy; the same position players are rarely in the same order on offense every day. Times have changed.
I believe we can catch a glimpse of the next frontier if we look to Philadelphia.
This year, rookie manager Gabe Kapler of the Phillies made a point to use position players as pitchers in blowouts to save his actual relievers from accumulating too many unnecessary innings. This was a plan: Position players were throwing bullpens in Spring Training, and at the start of the season it was understood that for some on the team (mostly backup infielders), their role included occasional mound duty.
The revelation of Shohei Ohtani – baseball’s first true two-way player in about a century – is totally unique in the totality of impact, but has proven that with the right guy, in the right role, at the right time, with the right support, can absolutely be useful to a team both on the mound and in the batter’s box.
How is this not the next great Market Inefficiency?
Every team in baseball, no matter their differences, is limited by the fact that they can only carry 25 players (on non-doubleheader days before September, leave me alone). It is the unbreakable barrier in roster construction and an absolute equalizer for all teams. But what if it’s not? What if you got 26 guys or 27 or 28 or 30, because one or more of your guys could play third base, bat sixth, and then throw the 7th inning of a close game? Wouldn’t that give you a massive advantage?
There’s been a trend in baseball over the last dozen years to carry bigger and bigger bullpens in order to accommodate more specialists and more take advantage of more matchups. There’s a ceiling on this strategy though, as you can’t carry so many pitchers that you leave your position player bench short-handed and end up hurting your team in other ways. But if your position players could pitch too, it would function like having a bigger bullpen than is currently even possible.
There’s a report out of Chicago that Matt Davidson, a guy who played 123 games as a first and third baseman for the White Sox, has been working on pitching this winter with the hopes of being a viable bullpen option for his team next year. In the article, Davidson mentions that he grew up a pitcher/DH and only started playing a position in high school.
I think he’ll be able to learn how to pitch at the big league level just fine. And I think there are a lot of guys out there with similar pasts.
The utility of this type of two-way playing might be a bit limited in the AL, as a team loses the DH as soon as a position player takes the mound. (Even Ohtani never pitched and hit on the same day.) Still, even in AL, having a guy that can pitch one day and hit the next still gives a team the advantage of basically carrying a 26th man. In the NL though, the possibilities are boundless.
Imagine if your team’s left-handed right fielder happened to have frisbee curve, a nasty split, and sat 92-94. Wouldn’t it be great to bring him in to get the other team’s big left-handed three-hitter out instead of burning a relief pitcher for that one batter? He could even go right back to right field after pitching to his one batter! It would be like the old strategy of putting a pitcher out in left for a batter while another pitcher faces a specific hitter, and then bringing the first pitcher back into the game, except by design, and often.
Imagine if that guy was Charlie Blackmon, who was a pitcher in college, before turning into an All-Star Centerfielder. If he had been a minor leaguer in 2018, rather than 2010, might Blackmon’s fate have been even more impressive? Would he have been given an opportunity at the Big League level before he was fully ready to contribute with the bat?
The AL-East-inhabitant-yet-still-innovative Rays are unsurprisingly at the vanguard here. Brendan McKay was the 4th overall pick in the 2017 draft and spent 2018 across three low minor league levels. Listed as a first basemen, DH, and pitcher, McKay had 242 plate appearances, slugged 6 homers, and posted a .368 OBP. He also pitched in 19 games, 17 of them as the starter, and had a 2.52 ERA and a .88 WHIP across 78 innings.
In 2018, the Rays drafted another two-way talent, Tanner Dodson, in the 4th round. Dodson hit .320 last season for the University of California and had a 2.48 ERA in 17 pitching appearances.
With the right players and the right skill sets, the possibilities are boundless. We’ve seen the value of positional versatility in guys like Kris Bryant and Ben Zobrist, but imagine if lefty specialist, set up man, or even closer were added to the normal conception of a players’ possible list of duties.
-Max Frankel
