Baseball, much like most things in life, is always changing.
It’s possible that’s one of your favorite things about baseball, it’s possible that you are praying the game will crystallize right now because it’s making your head spin. It saddens me to be the one to break this news to you, but as it happens your opinion on the matter will not be taken into consideration. Baseball is going to evolve with or without your approval.
The most commonly cited change in the game in recent years is the increase in strikeouts or “strikeout scourge”. Whether one believes the increasing frequency of punchouts is compromising the integrity of the game is up for debate, although there isn’t a very vocal pro-strikeout lobby which is why words like “scourge” are getting thrown around with reckless abandon.
Another trend we are seeing in the modern game is increased bullpen usage and fewer starters working deep into games. Relievers are hot right now, especially with the Kansas City Royals winning the World Series behind their virtually untouchable bullpen. The Royals have made the most volatile assets in the industry sexy again, but the trend of starters pitching fewer innings has been going on for a while now.
One way to measure this precipitous descent is the decrease in complete games league-wide. Starters simply aren’t going the distance anymore and what was once a mundane event to the point of being an expectation is now a rarity. In 2015 there were only 104 complete games in baseball, in 1915 there were 2067, directly between the two there were 739 in 1965.
The New York Yankees were no different than most teams in keeping with this trend. The team had only three complete games, which sounds like nothing but was tied for 14th-most in the league, and were one of a whopping eight teams without a shutout. It was the fifth non strike-shortened season the Yankees had failed to pitch one, all since 2004. In theory, it’s a rare occurrence, but it’s not really so unusual lately.
There are a couple of things particular to the Yankees that made them less likely to toss complete-game shutouts last year than other teams. Firstly, none of their starters were particularly durable or effective. A confluence of both traits is ideal and that certainly wasn’t happening. Secondly, they had top-notch options at the back of the bullpen. In close low-scoring games Girardi was better off going to Andrew Miller or Dellin Betances than sending out his starter for the ninth inning.
Really it only takes one guy to have a special day to make this happen, so it still has to be considered a surprise it didn’t even considering the factors listed above. So, how close did the Yankees get? As it happens, not very. In order to have a shutout you need to throw a complete game, which makes that a good place to start. Last season the Yankees only threw three of those; one each by CC Sabathia, Michael Pineda and Masahiro Tanaka.
This gives us three leads, but only one of them demands further investigation. Both Sabathia and Pineda got complete games of the cheap eight-inning variety in a loss. As a result, there is no moment to identify where they went wrong, because the nine innings required to throw a shutout were not available to them due to poor run support.
Tanaka is the only Yankee to throw and honest-to-goodness nine-inning complete game in 2015, and it was a doozy. On August 15 against a stellar Toronto Blue Jays lineup he went the distance allowing a single run on five hits, striking out eight and walking three. On paper this looks like the perfect example of a near-miss shutout. Technically it was, but paper can be a lying bastard sometimes. The play he allowed his only run on is a sacrifice fly off the bat of Josh Donaldson shown below.
In a sense it was really cheap way to give up the only run of a game. However, he couldn’t have missed that pitch in a worse place. With the bases loaded and no one out Tanaka piped a 89 mph fastball in a 2-0 count to one of the most lethal hitters in the game; in a park where he hit .330/.398/.647 on the season no less. More often than not Donaldson unloads on a pitch like that and an innocent fly ball to left field is one of the best realistic outcomes for the Yankees
For that mistake alone he wasn’t unlucky to miss out on a shutout, he was lucky that he only gave up a single run. The complete game shutout is becoming more and more of an achievement in baseball today as the way pitching staffs are used is changing. Not only did the Yankees fail to record one in 2015, they were never really on the brink of doing so.
(Photo: Thomas B. Shea-USA TODAY Sports)