Another solution in search of a problem … one of the few trends to counteract the inexorable tendency toward specialization in sports, and they've got to figure out some convoluted way to constrain it?

Like many here, the parade of position players to the mound has been puzzling to me: you've got these vast pitching staffs, with the AAA shuttle expanding them well beyond the guys on the ML roster – and you still need so many pitchers that you have to enlist your fourth outfielders and utility infielders? But as long as it was happening, why not let it take its natural course: maybe evolve a situation where bench players who could both hit and pitch a little had some actual value at both?

and you still need so many pitchers that you have to enlist your fourth outfielders and utility infielders?

I don't think it's that they have to, it's more "why waste a good pitcher for a losing cause"?

I don't think it's that they have to, it's more "why waste a good pitcher for a losing cause"?

If you have 13 pitchers on your roster you aren't wasting anyone. You will have plenty of pitching tomorrow.

Also, if you have 13 pitchers on your roster you aren't wasting a "good pitcher," you are wasting some AAA fodder. If you have 13 pitchers and they are all good don't worry about it, you are going to win 125 games.

Wondering how big of a seat at the table Rob Manfred's cherished Official Gaming Partners of Major League Baseball™ have given that the expanding use of position players to pitch can't be good for their O/U lines or generating action on their live odds.

GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST!

"The rule that saw a free runner placed on second base in extra innings last year will continue in 2023 and beyond, reports Jesse Rogers of ESPN. Also, position players will only be allowed to pitch in extra innings, or in the ninth inning for a leading team that is up by ten or more runs or anytime for a trailing team that is down by eight or more. MLB’s Joint Competition Committee voted unanimously for both measures."

It used to be the mopup guy would come in but teams don't have one of those anymore. Everyone is afraid to use a reliever for more than 2 innings because of injury risk.

Everyone is afraid to use a reliever for more than 2 innings because of injury risk

But that's another thing we've noticed here: they do not seem concerned about injury risk to, say, Wil Myers or Nick Gordon. Now maybe there is no reason to care about position players of that caliber, and of course they're not throwing very hard during a pitching appearance. But a professional pitcher ought to be able to throw the same batting-practice stuff for a couple of innings in a blowout.

But that's another thing we've noticed here: they do not seem concerned about injury risk to, say, Wil Myers or Nick Gordon.

Not to mention Jose Canseco......

Everyone is afraid to use a reliever for more than 2 innings because of injury risk

Understandable seeing how limiting relievers to 1 inning at a time keeps them so healthy and consistent from year to year.

Surely you can get good action on "will Franmil Reyes strike anybody out?" ... answer YES in his one (near-)perfect inning of relief. (Man, he's like the John Paciorek of position player pitching -- 1 IP, 3 BF, 10 pitches, 6 strikes, 1 K, 1 HBP, 1 GDP. Gotta be worth 1/$4 in today's relief market.)

I didn't realize it was as thin as 6 runs. Still, of those 132 appearances, what was the average run differential? The distribution? Anyway, no objection to raising the differential, in fact I'd have no problem with "the leading team can't do this period."

One way around this is that a team has to set a pitching roster before each game and no position player can pitch until those guys have all been used. (To implement such a rule, you'd also add that you can use a non-rosetered pitcher in extras after all the rostered pitchers have been used.) If you've got a genuinely tired/injured reliever (who you don't want to just option out or IL) then don't roster him for that day.

Generally a position player is used instead of one of the team's top 2-3 relievers. Since a team will almost always want those 2-3 guys on that day's active roster, teams will no longer be able to use position players in place of those guys. You'd likely see more abuse of the shuttle guys and the rule would probably last right until some closer blows out his arm pitching in a blowout but it would solve this "problem" until then.

EDIT: Actually I guess that makes Reyes the Esteban Yan of position player pitching. (Yan 2-2 with 1 HR and a sac bunt as a batter ... 771 OPS+)

But a professional pitcher ought to be able to throw the same batting-practice stuff for a couple of innings in a blowout.

Pretty tough thing to ask a guy to do when his stats are going be used against him in a salary negotiation.

I'll recount a story I'm sure I've told here before. But this is another example of what BDC points out....

At one of my jobs, we used to have a technical training offsite (they probably still do). Before my time there, it was a full week and it was highly technical and so it was called "methodology week." Now over the years (again before I got there) it had become 3 days and it was only about half technical and half more "team leader, management, vision" type workshops but "methodology week" stuck.

I was put in charge of organizing it my first year there. They had collected feedback from the last couple of workshops. There was complaint after complaint after complaint that it was called "methodology week" even though it was only half methodology and not a week. Thinks I "this is great, I can get a cheap win by changing the name!" We settled on "professional development offsite" (a name which stuck the entire time I was there -- PDO naturally.)

And what happened? All those "stop calling it methodology week" complaints were replaced by "what happened to methodology week?" complaints, probably mostly from the very same people. And of course that's pretty obvious -- nobody actually cared what it was called, they just wanted things back the way they used to be and the name was just an easy target. Of course things were never going to go back to the way things were and, if anything, the new name was just further acknowledgement of that. And since things are never going back to the way they were, those folks will always have something to complain about. Even if you did change it back to what it was, they'd complain that it wasn't as good as it used to be.

Point being nobody really cares about position player pitching. The players always seem to enjoy it although the novelty will wear off fast; fans seem to mostly get a kick out of it. What you have (besides the gamblers and the union) are folks who just want baseball back "the way it was" and position player pitching is just an easy target for the "decline of the game" crowd. But you'll never satisfy them and fixing this "problem" is most likely just a waste of time.

Sorry for turning this into another political thread.

a professional pitcher ought to be able to throw the same batting-practice stuff for a couple of innings in a blowout

An arbitration eligible pitcher is not going to go in and try to get blown up

Wil Myers or Nick Gordon

Nick Gordon and his brother Dee pitching in mop-up means Flash Gordon is one of two people who pitched in MLB who had two sons who also pitched in MLB.

position players will only be allowed to pitch in extra innings, or in the ninth inning for a leading team that is up by ten or more runs or anytime for a trailing team that is down by eight or more

Beware the perverse incentive. A trailing team who is down by seven is incentivized to give up a run and make that eight, in order to use a position player and save their real pitchers.

Or even if they didn't do it intentionally, when the situation happens it will look questionable anyway. Particularly to the Official Gaming Partners, of course.

Thank goodness. Use the pitchers you have.

Awwww.... but I enjoy position players pitching. It is a fun distraction in a blow out, and a really funny sight when done in a non-blowout as hitters feel more pressure and swing for a 600' home run and miss over and over again. Let MLB be fun again.

Wondering how big of a seat at the table Rob Manfred's cherished Official Gaming Partners of Major League Baseball™ have given that the expanding use of position players to pitch can't be good for their O/U lines or generating action on their live odds.

what does position players pitching have to do with gambling?
plus there is plenty of action on "under" in any given name. and even if more position players pitching eventually ever led to total runs scored changing by more than a rounding error, the total posted by the book would easily and effortlessly simply adjust accordingly.

and live odds are based on probabilities. a batter who might have been 30-to-1 to homer in his first 4 ABs could be offered at 12-to-1 vs a third baseman who just allowed a HR to the previous batter.

there's all kinds of issues with sports and gambling operators - the proliferation of ads being Public Enemy No. 1 - but not everything can or should be blamed on it.

or am I missing something?

what does position players pitching have to do with gambling?

Once game protests disappeared from the rule book without any of the usual announcements, fanfare, trial balloons, MLB Network pump priming, etc, but almost certainly at the behest of Big Gambling so a "final" score can not ever be reversed, my default position is "How is Big Gambling rewriting the rule book to suit their needs?"

Like many here, the parade of position players to the mound has been puzzling to me: you've got these vast pitching staffs, with the AAA shuttle expanding them well beyond the guys on the ML roster – and you still need so many pitchers that you have to enlist your fourth outfielders and utility infielders?

Yeah, but if you're in a position where you might send a position player out, you're getting blown out, and the good relievers don't really pitch when you're behind, so you've probably used the B-level and the interchangeable dudes at the end of the bullpen, and you're not going to bring out your closer/set-up types in those games, because you might want them tomorrow in a game you haven't given up on.

Or at least, I presume that's the thinking - don't waste your best relievers on a low-leverage situation today when there may be a high-leverage situation tomorrow, although I suppose there might be some dumb "folks like to know their roles"(*) stuff to it as well. The amount it's done recently feels more like surrendering yourself to the probability tables and paying too much attention to the long term versus the game that a bunch of folks in the stands have paid to see.


(*) My thoughts when I hear this are always "your role is to get hitters out".

Nick Gordon and his brother Dee pitching in mop-up means Flash Gordon is one of two people who pitched in MLB who had two sons who also pitched in MLB.

Mel Stottlemyre, right?

you've probably used the B-level and the interchangeable dudes at the end of the bullpen

That sounds plausible. In practice, I wonder. Nick Gordon made four appearances in 2022; in one he was the Twins' fifth pitcher, in two their fourth, in one just their third (getting shelled in that one and relieved by another position player, Jermaine Palacios).

Myers is more the pattern you suggest: in one game he was the Padres' seventh pitcher, in two their sixth, in his other their fourth.

Of course I don't know the contexts; there could have been any number of other reasons to go to the position player. But whenever a position player is the fourth pitcher in a game, hence the third pitcher (not) out of a bullpen where five or six guys are still sitting around while others are circling in AAA – it sounds more like they're saving some useful but fungible guys for tomorrow, guys who could easily pitch an inning if the game were closer. In other words, using their roster creatively, and we apparently can't have that :)

What Rob Manfred and his toadies have difficulty acknowledging is the NFL many years ago blew past MLB in terms of popularity in spite of its myriad of rules as to what constitutes a catch, touchdown, penalty, etc, not because of them.

The change would see the limits stretched so that a team that’s winning a game would have to be ahead by 10 runs, whereas the trailing team would have to be down by at least eight.

I guess my question is why not just ban position players pitching, period? The desired effect here is clearly to make it as rare as possible, so why not just disallow it?

At any rate, my problem with position players pitching has always been more about it just being anti-competitive. Say you're down 8 runs - that sucks, and you're almost certainly going to lose. But teams score eight runs in an inning fairly frequently! Why aren't you still trying to win the game?

Nothing is lamer in pro sports than throwing in the towel. Like, OK, position players pitching is "fun". You know what would be even more fun? An 8-run comeback!

Why would gamblers/casinos care about position players pitching?

What bets would change from winning to losing and vice versa when a team brings in a position player to pitch? This move would effect how many bets over a season? 1? 2?

I think BDC in #1 touched on a really good point:

But as long as it was happening, why not let it take its natural course: maybe evolve a situation where bench players who could both hit and pitch a little had some actual value at both?

I thought that the growing number of position players coming into increasingly competitive games was going to eventually lead to a few teams identifying position players who could pitch well enough to become their regular mop-up guy. I can easily a guy like Brock Holt, who got a decade out of being a super-sub, figuring out that he could pitch 10-20 innings a year of garbage time. In fact, Holt pitched in three games late in his career. I think the super-sub role is optimal for this, because:

1) Let's be honest, if you are at all worried about injuries, you'd rather take that risk with a super-sub than your starting first baseman or something;
2) Their mentality is already built for something like this, and their professional value is largely built around their versatility. Pitcing a couple innings in a 14-2 game, even if you end up giving up a few runs, actually enhances your market value;
3) Putting in an everyday position player carries a greater risk of messing up your lineup if the unthinkable happens - your team actually comes back from 12 down in the final two innings to threaten to tie/win the game. With the DH being universal, this is probably a little less important than it used to be...

Anyway, I kind of liked the whole evolution of strategy on hitters pitching that was happening, so I'm a little disappointed about this rule change. But it's always good to remember: It's not that big a deal.

This rule actually encourages use of position players pitching. It's like the save rule. Now that there's a rule clarifying exactly when you're allowed to use a position player, it turns into a guideline.

"Oh, we're down 6, it's time to put in the position player"

It's the old 5 dollar fee if you're late to pick up your kids. They should have read that book.

What bets would change from winning to losing and vice versa when a team brings in a position player to pitch? This move would effect how many bets over a season? 1? 2?

Over-under when the position player gives up a bunch of runs. Most such games will already have reached the over, but there will be cases where 8-0 turns into 12-0 and swings it.

Sure. How often? Once? Twice?