Lance Lynn, Other Older MLB Starters Are Having Trouble With Pitch Clock

As major league baseball unfurled its host of rule changes this season, there was plenty of conventional wisdom being tossed about regarding potential effects, both intended and unintended. The stolen base was coming back, thanks to a cocktail of rule changes. Lefthanded pull hitters were going to be aided by the new ban on shifts. And the pitch clock was going to have a multitude of impacts, on players, announcers and fans. Hey, beer sales have been extended past the 7th inning in Milwaukee!

There was another potential impact of the pitch clock that I pondered over the winter, and then even more so once spring training began. Pitchers expend an awful lot of effort on every pitch, and some hurlers require more recovery time than others to gear up for the next offering. Those few seconds less of recovery time add up over a long, say 25-plus pitch inning, and losing just a little bit of a pitcher’s peak stuff level can make a big difference. Would the older, perhaps slightly less athletic pitchers pay a price with the advent of the pitch clock?

Well, it’s way early, and far be it for me to make sweeping conclusions based on relatively small samples, but – hell yeah, such pitchers have definitely been negatively impacted in the season’s early going.

Through Saturday’s games, a total of 98 pitchers had pitched enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, i.e., one for each game their team had played. 31 of them had ERAs under 2.50, while another 31 were at 6.00 or higher.

Of the 31 low-ERA guys, exactly two were age 33 or older, and both were particularly lean, fit guys – Sonny Gray of the Twins and Zack Greinke of the Royals. The 31 high-ERA guys, shall we say, fit a different mold.

9 of them – 29% – were age 34 or older. Here they are:

Max Scherzer (Mets) – 38

Corey Kluber (Red Sox) – 37

Madison Bumgarner (Diamondbacks) – 33

Patrick Corbin (Nationals) – 33

Lance Lynn (White Sox) – 36

Miles Mikolas (Cardinals) – 34

Rich Hill (Pirates) – 43

Chris Bassitt (Blue Jays) – 34

Chris Sale (Red Sox) – 34

Now I’m going to toss out Bumgarner and Corbin from the get-go. They haven’t been getting anybody out for a while regardless of the amount of time allowed between pitches. But Scherzer? Lynn? Mikolas? Bassitt? Again, it’s only been two starts, but it’s unusual to see those guys on any list of subpar performers, and the one common thread among them is their advanced age.

Scherzer allowed 3 runs in a 22-pitch 6th inning of his first start in Miami, and 3 more in a 29-pitch 6th inning in his 2nd start in Milwaukee.

Lynn, an especially burly guy, allowed 3 runs in a 33-pitch 1st inning of his second start against the Giants, and 2 more in a 27-pitch 4th inning in the same game.

Mikolas allowed 3 runs in a 37-pitch 1st inning of his first start against the Blue Jays, and 3 more in a 34-pitch 1st inning of his second start against the Braves.

Bassitt allowed 3 runs in a 23-pitch 3rd inning of his first start in St. Louis, and then took 12 more pitches to get the first out of the 4th before being removed while trailing 8-3. The only two runs he allowed in six innings in his second start at the Angels were in a 27-pitch 1st inning.

So what we have here is a subset of an even larger group of older starting pitchers that need to make adjustments in light of the new pitch clock reality. It could be mechanical. It could be resolved with tweaks to pitch mixes. Or it could be, and very likely is to varying degrees with these pitchers, a matter of conditioning. For an especially fit guy like Scherzer, this might not be a big deal. For a hoss like Lynn, this could take awhile.

What until recently was imply conjecture has become reality – starting pitchers are expending quite a bit more effort to complete their job. And this added effort piles up in long innings when pitchers are in the stretch for considerable lengths of time, often with multiple runners on base.

This would seem to be one of those unintended consequences of this year’s rule changes, but it appears to be a real one. It looks like starting pitching has become more of a younger, more athletic man’s game.