Decline of starting pitching bad for baseball

TOKYO — Another MLB season has started and while there are many reasons to enjoy this year — Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto debuting with the Dodgers, and Juan Soto with the new look New York Yankees — there are also many reasons to look askance at the 2024  brand of baseball.

First and foremost among them is the ever growing trend of removing starting pitchers after two times through the batting order. Some of the greatest pitching names on the planet — Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer — start a game and seldom make it past 100 pitches, no matter how good they are pitching because Sabermetrics and baseball analytics reveal that in the third time facing the same pitcher the batter’s chances of getting a hit increase. It has been conclusively proven that a pitcher’s effectiveness declines, and remarkably so, with each trip through the order.