How should the Mets handle their starting pitchers in 2021?

It’s natural to have a fear of the unknown and in MLB, one of the unknowns for the 2021 season is how teams will handle a season where the top pitchers make 32 starts rather than 12 like they did in 2020. The trend throughout MLB history is to ask pitchers to do less and less. Here’s a chart of the leader in IP the last 50 seasons, in 10-year increments:

1970 – 328.2 IP
1980 – 304 IP
1990 – 267 IP
2000 – 251 IP
2010 – 250.2 IP
2019 – 223 IP

It’s a reasonable bet to believe that the 2021 leader in IP won’t match what the 2019 leader posted above, just because clubs will be hesitant to push their pitchers due to the shortened season in 2020. It’s easy to understand why clubs act the way they do when it comes to starting pitchers. It’s preferable to have a guy throw 215 IP a year for 15 years, rather than 275 IP for a handful and then fall apart.

The greybeards will wax nostalgically about when guys threw 300 IP and wonder why it can’t be that way again. But for every Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan who were capable of handling that workload, there were a bunch of Don Gullett and Gary Nolan types who couldn’t. Maybe the advanced surgical techniques and training regimens of the 21st Century would reduce the number of early casualties from a heavy workload. Or maybe having to go max effort through an entire lineup, rather than just two or three guys like in the past, would still mean an equal number of injuries.

The 6-7-8 guys for the 2021 Mets could be J.D. Davis–Dominic Smith–James McCann and over the past two seasons, that trio has put up an OPS+ of 129-150-114. Compare that to 1970, when the bottom of the Mets’ lineup was Ken Boswell (82 OPS+) Jerry Grote (68) and Bud Harrelson (79). It was a lot easier for Bob Gibson to put up 294 IP in 1970 when regularly facing squads with multiple weak spots in the lineup like that. And it wasn’t like the Mets were some huge outlier. Here are some other NL clubs 6-8 hitters. These are taken from the “Most Common Batting Orders” from Baseball-Reference:

Phillies – Larry Hisle (77), Byron Browne (106), Larry Bowa (58)
Braves – Tony Gonzalez (87), Clete Boyer (79), Bob Tillman (84)
Cubs – Ron Santo (115), Johnny Callison (101), Randy Hundley (63)

And while the Cubs’ trio doesn’t look too bad, they were using Glenn Beckert (73) and Don Kessinger (77) at the top of their lineup. And this was a team that won 84 games. And we’re not even considering the second-year expansion teams of Montreal and San Diego.

There were 12 teams in the NL in 1970 and among batters with at least 400 PA, there were 20 that had a sub-80 OPS+. In 2019, with 15 teams in the NL, there were only seven players with at least 400 PA and a sub-80 OPS+. Pitchers face tougher hitters today than they did 50 years ago.

Okay, maybe you’re convinced that we shouldn’t ask pitchers to throw 300 innings in 2021. But what should we expect, particularly with the Mets’ starters? First, let’s look at the seven hurlers whom the team hopes will make the vast majority of starts:

Player	Age	2020 IP	2018-20 IP	Career Hi IP
Carlos Carrasco	34	68	340	200
Jacob deGrom	33	68	489	217
Joey Lucchesi	28	5.2	299.1	163.2
David Peterson	25	49.2	49.2	49.2
Marcus Stroman	30	0	286.2	204
Noah Syndergaard	28	0	352	197.2
Taijuan Walker	28	53.1	67.1	169.2

My opinion is that because of their age and previous MLB innings totals, that there should be no unusual restrictions for Carrasco, deGrom and Stroman. Health permitting, there’s no reason those guys shouldn’t be able to put up 192 IP, which is an average of six innings per start for 32 starts. Synderggaard will obviously be restricted, as he has already been placed on the 60-day IL. As an aside, at some point we should expect there to be exasperation – whether from fans or Syndergaard himself – for being too quick to sideline him for that long, just so they didn’t have to DFA Daniel Zamora.

The rest there are some questions. If we’re being honest, the hope is that Lucchesi makes the fewest starts of the bunch. This isn’t a dig on Lucchesi, who seems capable of being an average MLB starter. It’s just that the other six guys have more upside. Peterson is the wild card. He was so good last year but he was also the beneficiary of some good fortune along the way. In an ideal world, he’d be lights out for his first seven or so starts and then run into some trouble right around the time that Syndergaard is ready to come back.

Which brings us to Walker.

His season high in innings is significantly lower than the other top four hurlers on the team and his IP the last three years ranks a distant sixth. Given that he’s under team control for 2022, too, there seems little reason to push him to 190 or more innings. But even if the team and the player agree that he should be treated differently than the others – just how do you do that? Do you have him take a regular turn in the rotation but give him the Blake Snell treatment and remove him early every start? Do you look to keep everyone else on a five-day regimen and skip Walker whenever there’s a day off in the schedule near his turn to pitch? Do you give him “scheduled” IL stints and look for him to make 22 rather than 32 starts?

It’s far from clear how the Mets will handle Walker. But my preference is to take a page from the Dodgers’ playbook and use the IL to your advantage. The Dodgers had just one pitcher in the 2018-19 seasons make 30 starts in a year. Now, partly why they didn’t have more were legitimate injuries to some of their hurlers. But just about everyone believes they used the shorter 10-day IL to their advantage. That option is no longer available, as the standard IL stint in 2021 for pitchers is expected to be 15 days.

But the Mets can put Walker on the IL three times during the year, have him miss the minimum of 15 days each time and still have him make 20+ starts this year. This would allow him to pitch as long as he’s effective and not have to pull him because of season-long innings concern. They could even time it so that his first scheduled sidelining occurs when Syndergaard is ready to return, assuming everyone else is still performing well.

Or they could do it earlier than that and give Lucchesi a chance to get some starts in, helping to keep him stretched out in case of an injury to another pitcher later in the season.

There’s an old Yiddish saying that translates to: Man plans and God laughs. It’s easy to make plans to how you want the season to unfold but it’s fairly common for those plans to be blown to pieces by the All-Star break. Still, my preference would be to have a plan and then be forced to deviate from it, rather than no plan at all and just keeping your fingers crossed.

One of my criticisms of Sandy Alderson in his first stint with the Mets is how he never seemed to have a backup plan in place and adjusting on the fly was not a strong point. However the Mets plan to attack their rotation on Opening Day, here’s hoping there’s a Plan B and even a Plan C ready to call upon if needed. We may not be able to come to a consensus on how the shortened 2020 will affect pitchers in 2021. But hopefully we can agree that there should be a plan for the Mets to need eight or more starting pitchers this season.