Athletics Aren't Alone in Trying to get Length From Starting Pitchers

Despite leading the American League with 17 wins, the Oakland Athletics have struggled to get as many as five innings per game from each of the team's starters. Thursday's starter Sean Manaea hopes getting to five innings his last time out is a good omen.

There is a tendency to see what’s happening with one team during a baseball season as separate from what is happening with the other 29 teams.

Sometimes it works that way. When the Yankees hit a Major League record 267 home runs in 2018, they were, in fact, all by themselves; no team finished the season was within 30 homers of New York.

Sometimes it doesn’t work that way. When the Twins shattered that record with 307 homers last year, possession of the new record came down to the final game of the season. The Yankees finished second with 306 as four different teams broke the old record.

So, with the A’s struggling to have starters pitch get deeper into games, Jesus Luzardo’s 6.1-inning start Wednesday, there might be a sense that they’re all alone in this. In their first 25 starts, they have, after all, seen their starters fail to go five innings 11 times.

The A’s aren’t alone. Not even close. In 25 games heading into Thursday’s series finale against the Diamondbacks, Oakland starters are averaging just 4.89 innings per start. What gives? This is an A’s team that thought it was loaded with starting pitching.

Well, they can join the club. On Wednesday alone, in 16 MLB games played, 11 times pitchers didn’t make it through five innings. In three games, neither pitcher got that far. And through Wednesday, starting pitchers across baseball are averaging 4.72 innings per game.

Part of that has to do with the short period of time, about three weeks, clubs had to get ready after baseball settled on a plan to execute the 2020 season in the middle of a pandemic.

Part of it has to do with injuries, which show up seemingly out of nowhere.

Part of it has to do with roster sizes. Capped at 25 last year, the limit was at 30 players for the first two weeks of the season and it’s at 28 now, meaning there are simply more pitchers ready to do work.

And it’s an issue, costing jobs. The A’s on Wednesday sent James Kaprielian back to their alternate site in San Jose and brought up Paul Blackburn, and not for anything Kaprielian had done. The A’s just needed someone who could be relied on to give them four or five innings because Lou Trivino (2.1 innings) and Daniel Mengden (4.0 innings) weren’t available after having pitched in long relief Tuesday in the wake of Frankie Montas being unable to make it out of the second innings.

“It certainly wasn’t anything Kap did wrong,” manager Bob Melvin said. “You always want somebody that can give you, if you have to, upwards of five or six innings.”

It’s not as if five innings makes for a magic number. It’s enough to qualify for a win, but nobody believes five-inning starts are the way to go. Starters in another age aimed for eight or nine innings. For this age, it’s more like six or seven. Oakland starter Chris Bassitt went 5.1 innings his last time out, Monday in Arizona, and was frustrated by his own expectations.

“I’m confident about my stuff; I’m just pissed off about not going deep into games,” said Bassitt, who has gone 4.1, 5.2, 7.0, 5.2 and 5.1 innings in his first five starts. “I feel way too good to be going 5.1 or 5.2. Where I’m at right now, and how my pitches are working, I feel like I could go seven or eight innings; I should go seven innings, so it’s pretty frustrating to me.”

Bassitt is scheduled to start Saturday against the Angels. Thursday’s pitcher in the finale against the Diamondbacks is Sean Manaea, who is winless and who has made it as far as five innings in a start just once – his last time out against the Giants, when he gave up three runs, two earned in five innings.

Compare that to his only five starts of last year – five innings at a minimum, maxing out at seven innings after missing the first five months of the season while coming back from injury. His ERA then was 1.21. His ERA now is 7.65.

The A’s are trying not to be concerned. Manaea, too.

In the start against the Giants, he’d faced the nine-batter minimum through three innings, allowing one hit, but the first three batters of the fourth inning all reached base and scored. There was a real chance he wasn’t going to survive the inning, but he got the last three outs, then three more outs in the fifth, after which he could breathe a sigh of relief.

“It was huge (to make it through five innings),” Manaea said after his most recent start. “I haven’t gone past five innings all year, and honestly, that’s always one of the biggest goals. To get through the fifth was huge, and it’s definitely a building block for my next start.”

We'll see tonight.

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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