Rob Manfred has no shortage of ideas.
And the baseball-watching world shows no shortage of derision.
During a recent appearance on Chris O’Gorman’s “Questions for Cancer” podcast, Major League Baseball’s commissioner discussed his perception of the starting pitching problem and two ideas that had been floated to address it.
Kevin Gausman, the All-Star starting pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays, didn’t want to hear any of them.
“Don’t believe a word this man says,” Gausman wrote on X. “Get ready for 6 innings you get to keep the DH, if not a fan hits in their spot.”
Gausman’s post quote-tweets a clip from Manfred’s appearance on the “Questions for Cancer” podcast during which the commissioner responds to deliberations about a minimum pitching requirement.
Such a rule would dictate a threshold, which a pitcher must surpass before a manager would be allowed to pull them from the game.
“[That’s] just too blunt an instrument to fix this problem,” Manfred told O’Gorman during the podcast.
The problem, as Manfred sees it, is that starting pitchers are trending towards throwing less innings before managers decide to reach into their bullpens.
According to CBSSports, the innings-per-start rate has declined from 6.3 in 1984, to 5.9 in 2004, to 5.2 in 2024.
That’s problematic, because, as Manfred said, “the name and the face that you see the most in a broadcast is the starting pitcher. The matchups of great starting pitchers, historically, have been important in terms of the marketing of the game … I think we need to get back to that.”
More appealing than a minimum requirement, Manfred continued, would be changes to transaction rules that ensure managers don’t reach into the bullpen until they really feel they have to.
“One of the things that happens today [is a] guy pitches three days in a row, he gets outrighted, [and then the team] brings somebody else in to give him some rest, as opposed to him staying on the roster the whole time,” Manfred said.
“I think we need to create incentives, through things like roster rules, transaction rules, for clubs to develop pitchers who go deeper in the game,” the commissioner continued. [We need to create] rules that create incentives for the clubs to develop pitchers of a certain type.”
It’s something of a double-edged sword because forcing starters to pitch deeper into games would likely increase the prevalence of injuries.
“The injury issue, our physicians have studied this carefully [and] they continue to believe that the focus on velocity and spin rate is a specific cause of the increase of injuries,” Manfred said.
At the same time, if the league doesn’t take any action, all signs indicate that clubs will continue to pump comparatively anonymous relievers into the game at the expense of more well-known starters.
Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire after the 2026 season so the conversation is far from over.