Collette Calls: More About the 200 IP Problem

I appreciate you readers who take the time to provide feedback in the comments section after each article. Sometimes, they even predict what is coming in my next column, which was the case last week as I posted the data behind my 200 IP rants from recent podcasts and radio appearances:

That is the purpose of this week's article. I had thought about diving further into that for the previous column, but two things deterred me from doing so.  Primarily, I was 72 hours post surgery on my wrist and forearm, so typing was a bit of a problem and voice recognition software in Office struggled with my Percocet-enhanced accent. Secondarily, I thought the article was a bit long with the data tables, so thought it best to break up the point into two separate pieces. 

This week, as I listened to an episode of the Razzball podcast that had the Athletic's Eno Sarris as a guest, even he said "something like 30 guys a year throw 200 innings," which validated the premise of the entire piece. I love Eno like a brother, and even someone as tuned into baseball as he is doubled the actual figure out of habit. 

We should first get back into the data and see where 200 IP come from. We will use the same data set — looking at the last five full baseball seasons. That gives us 150 opportunities (30 teams x 5 seasons) for a team to have a pitcher work 200 innings in a season. What if I told you that 72 of those 150 instances — 48 percent — did not have a single pitcher work 200 innings?

Five teams failed to have a single pitcher throw 200 innings in the last five seasons:

• Baltimore (last: Chris Tillman in 2014)
• Cincinnati (last: Johnny Cueto in 2014)
• Miami (last: Mark Buehrle in 2012)
• Milwaukee (last: Yovanni Gallardo in 2012)
• New York Yankees (last: Hiroki Kuroda in 2013)

That list of teams is a mix of success and failure in the win-loss standings the last five seasons, showing that the 200 IP is not limited to successful teams. It can also come from awful teams that need to give the bullpen a night off (see James Shields in 2018), and can even come from the same sub-.500 team as it did in 2015 when Chris Sale, Jose Quintana and Jeff Samardzija each threw at least 200 innings for a 76-86 White Sox club. 

The table below shows which clubs have done the best job in pumping out 200-inning pitchers the last five seasons:

Washington is certainly helped with Max Scherzer having four of the nine instances on their list; Cleveland has Corey Kluber with four of their seven; Houston with Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke and Gerrit Cole covering three of the seven just last season. Certainly, being a winning franchise helps, yet the White Sox are up there and haven't had a winning season since 2012. Let's also not forget that only four pitchers the last five seasons have made at least 30 starts in each of those seasons: Julio Teheran, Jose Quintana, Jon Lester and Mike Leake. Not even Ken Jennings would have known that answer in Final Jeopardy.

 All that said, let us now look at some pitchers who could join the 200 IP club this season. I'm only using pitchers who worked fewer than 180 innings last season because the purpose is to find pitchers who can get a surge in workload, either out of necessity or skill performance, and outperform their projections. I also will include pitchers who some believe will pitch 200 innings this season, while I see reasons for concern. We will start with one of my favorites from last season.

Sonny Gray - He enjoyed a resurgence in Cincinnati last season after escaping from New York to return to the form we saw in his younger days in Oakland. Gray worked 175.1 innings last season, so it is easy to see people saying he can get to 200 because he has done it twice before, and he showed a lot of success last year in his new home. I am not in that camp because those earlier 200-inning seasons came from his time in the American League where the manager did not have to lift him for a hitter in the middle innings. There is also the problem in that opponents hit Gray at a .281/.369/.461 clip last season the third time through the order, which is why his workload was limited. Gray had a 2.16 ERA and a .172 opponent batting average the first two times through the order last season but saw those numbers fall apart if he was left in games too long. The 32.1 innings Gray worked facing opponents for a third time took his ERA from 2.16 to 2.87, and his WHIP from 0.95 to 1.08. Gray has the well-rounded repertoire, so it's not an overexposure issue as much as a physical issue. He is not a big guy (5-foot-10, 192), and the results say the Reds should pull him a batter early rather than a batter late. 

Max Scherzer - Scherzer is the most obvious candidate to rejoin the 200 IP club given he he had been a member of that group each of the previous six seasons before last year was disrupted with the back tightness. There is no need to go into any analysis here — as long as his back is fine, he is a lock for 200-plus innings. I would say the opposite for Clayton Kershaw given that he has missed the mark each of the last four seasons with physical issues. That is a tough trend to overcome in your 30s.

Yu Darvish - Darvish has not thrown 200 innings since 2013, coming close pre-Tommy John surgery with 186.2 innings in 2017 and bouncing back to 178.2 innings last season in his first full season back from the injury. Darvish's 2019 season saw him start very slowly as he failed to go more than four innings in four of his first eight starts. New manager David Ross could lean on the veteran to work a little longer than Joe Maddon was apt to do, and Darvish earned it with how he pitched as the season wore on last year. Darvish had a 5.40 ERA after two times through the order, and that mostly came on mistakes with 10 of his 40 hits allowed coming as home runs. His .247/.297/.506 batting line allowed to opponents after two times through the order looks like a Khris Davis season, but that was the weirdness of 2019. 

Robbie Ray - Ray has twice pitched 174.1 innings in a season, but has never done more than that. Both seasons, his final ERA finished higher than 4.30, whereas his ERA in seasons with a lower workload was less than 4.00. I think you know where this is going; these are his numbers the last three seasons:

Ray is all fastball and two breaking balls, as he has not been able to establish any kind of effective off-speed pitch. He is also an inefficient strikeout pitcher in that Ray averaged 4.16 pitches per plate appearance the last three seasons, a rate topped only by three other pitchers:

• Drew Pomeranz: 4.18
• Blake Snell: 4.20
• Jake Odorizzi: 4.30

Two pitchers — Verlander and Cole — averaged 200 innings the last three seasons with a pitches-per-plate-appearance rate higher than 4.0, and their rates were 4.02 and 4.11. That is two pitchers out of 28 examples; a 7 percent success rate. Ray is in his walk year before free agency, so the Diamondbacks might choose to ride him out in style, but the numbers are very pessimistic against that happening.

German Marquez - Marquez came very close to eclipsing 200 innings in 2018, but fell back last year as his season ended in late August with forearm stiffness. That alone should preclude him from making the surge up in workload in 2020 given the Rockies are in the second year of a five-year deal with him. Then again, when do the Rockies ever do anything that makes sense? They have one of the best players in baseball and refuse to build a quality team around him. Anyhow, if you are looking for a pitcher on a bad team who could get to 200 innings, this could be one of those guys if the club thinks his arm issues from late summer are a thing of the past. 

Chris Archer - Archer has three times worked 200 innings in a season with Tampa Bay but has missed time each of the last two seasons with injuries. He is in the penultimate year of the deal he signed years ago, but the Pirates need only to spend $250K to buy out Archer's $11M 2021 contract. Given their race to the bottom of the payroll, they may decide to use Archer at his old workload in what could be his final season in Pittsburgh if he is not traded to a contending club in the middle of the year. Archer has been surprisingly good the third time through the order by batting average in most seasons, and Derek Shelton, who watched Archer from the Tampa Bay dugout as the team's hitting coach, could revert back to Archer's previous workloads. 

Dallas Keuchel - Keuchel is back in the American League where he has three times worked more than 200 innings in a season. Chicago has a history of allowing its veterans work, and this club needs a workhorse pitcher behind Lucas Giolito to take some work off the bullpen. Two hundred innings of Keuchel pitching to Yasmani Grandal could be a lot of fun to watch in 2020.

Tanner Roark - Roark worked 210 innings for the Nationals in 2016, but has not come close to that the last three seasons as he has moved around baseball. Now he is in the American League in Toronto, which desperately needs a pitcher to absorb innings given the team already said it wants to limit Hyun-Jin Ryu's work in 2020. The Jays have constructed an intriguing staff of non-fastball pitchers who have the potential to pitch more efficiently and go for batted ball outs more than strikeouts. That is how Mark Buerhle worked his 200 innings in his prime, and Roark is the one pitcher on this staff who has the potential to shoulder the largest workload given his durability the last few seasons. The extra exposure likely would impact his overall numbers given his poor performance deeper into games, but the Blue Jays need innings, and Roark is the guy they'll likely lean on to go an extra frame most nights.