This time, Paul Molitor's optimistic plans didn't even survive April.
The Twins manager opened the 2016 season with a 12-man pitching staff, just as he did last season (when he held out until May 22), just as Ron Gardenhire did in 2014. And for the third straight year, only a few weeks had passed before the manager decided he needed more pitchers.
It's not just a Twins thing, of course. Three major league teams opened the season with a 13-man staff, and the Twins are among six teams now carrying seven relievers. But Molitor's difficulty in holding the line illustrates how much MLB rosters have changed. During Molitor's rookie season of 1978, the Brewers carried only nine pitchers and 16 position players until rosters expanded in September.
Younger fans might not realize what's been lost, but baseball games used to include far more strategy in the late innings, with managers trying to maneuver their teams into advantageous matchups using a half-dozen extra players on the bench. Managers would occasionally platoon at certain positions to beef up their lineup, and veterans who could still play semi-regularly were around to provide late-inning offense. The Twins could carry players like Randy Bush, who started just 467 games in a 12-year career but regularly contributed big hits off the bench.
Today? With no bench, there's little choice but to stick with bottom-of-the-order hitters who are increasingly overmatched by relievers bred to throw 98-mph pitches an inning at a time. Late-inning rallies of more than one run seem increasingly hopeless. Molitor has pinch-hit for a position player only six times this season; last year's total of 75 pinch-hit plate appearances was the second fewest in franchise history.
Now Molitor gets by with four bench players, and for a couple of games last week he had only two. And since one of them is a backup catcher, that bench is even slimmer, because Molitor, like most MLB managers, is hesitant to use both catchers in the same game, for fear of having no options if one gets hurt. He's done it just once this year, and only 16 times in 2015 before September added a third catcher. That means, for instance, though Kurt Suzuki is batting .224 and John Ryan Murphy .094, they have combined to receive 23 plate appearances in the late innings of close games, largely against elite relievers. They have three hits between them.
"Our circumstances, with close games and extra innings, have necessitated the addition of additional pitching depth," Molitor said. "Your bench is made up of guys who can protect you at multiple positions: A catcher, an infielder, an outfielder. We've been fortunate in having some versatile guys."
Can the pitcher/position player imbalance be addressed? It may take a rule change, and an adoption of a concept that's used in other pro sports: the healthy scratch. Allow teams to carry an active roster of, say, 28 players, but designate which 25 — with a limit of nine or 10 pitchers — are available that day. Teams could deactivate their surplus starting pitchers, who are essentially useless on the days they don't pitch, and replace them with pinch hitters, pinch runners, extra defenders.
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