The Evolution of Pitcher Usage, Cy Young

by Lincoln Mitchell

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack.

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Cy Young, along with the great shortstop Honus Wagner, is one of a handful of great players who straddle baseball’s nineteenth century pre-history and the early twentieth century. Although most fans now think of Young, whose career lasted from 1890-1911, primarily as an award, he was also a pitcher, and naturally, a very good one.

Young is the career leader in WAR, wins, losses, games started, complete games, innings and batters faced. His 511 wins, 94 more than the number two all-time, Walter Johnson, are illustrative of Young’s greatness, but also his place in pitcher evolution.

Young accumulated those records because he was an extraordinary pitcher, but he also benefited from playing much of his career in the nineteenth century. Young’s career evolved alongside changes in pitcher usage, allowing him to extend his career, becoming one of the first pitchers to pitch in 20 seasons, and establish himself as one of the greatest ever.

For example, Young won 266 games in the nineteenth century when he started 46 or more games every year between 1891-1899 and started fifty games every year from 1891-1894. Since 1900, only one pitcher, Jack Chesbro in 1904, started more than fifty games and only nine others started 46 or more games in a season.

Young had a five-year peak in the 1890s that was a cut below Old Hoss Radbourn’s 1880s peak, but nonetheless spectacular by twentieth century standards. From 1892-1896 Young averaged 32 wins, 42 complete games and 414 innings.

Young’s best season during that run was probably 1892 when he went 36-12 with an ERA of 1.93, good for an ERA+ of 176. That season, Young also threw 453 innings and completed 48 of the 49 games he started. The following season, Young completed 42 of 46 starts and pitched 422.2 innings. After 1897, Young never threw 400 innings in a season, although he pitched more than 300 innings seven times in the twentieth century.

As the new century began, pitcher usage was beginning to change in some subtle ways. During the first decades of the twentieth century, pitchers were still expected to pitch complete games, but not quite the way they had in the 1880s and 1890s. One way to see this is that in 1890, Young’s first year in what was then the Major Leagues, pitchers completed 89% of their games. By 1911, Young’s last year, that number had dropped to 58%. However, despite the substantial growth in the use of relief pitching, the bullpen had not begun to take its modern form.

In the first decade or so of the twentieth century, relief pitchers were, with very few exceptions, players not quite good enough to make the starting rotation or starting pitchers throwing a few innings between starts, while starting pitchers were still expected to consume the lion’s share of their team’s innings. For example, on Young’s 1911 Boston Braves, a pretty dreadful team that had a .291 winning percentage, six pitchers, including Young, combined for two-thirds of the team’s innings. The Philadelphia Athletics won the World Series that year with five pitchers combining for 89% of their innings.

Over the course Young’s career, the concept of a pitching rotation evolved into something that would be recognizable to today’s fans. In 1892, while pitching for the Cleveland Spiders, Young started just short of one-third of his team’s games. By 1905, Young’s Boston Americans, known today as the Red Sox, used a four-man rotation as four pitchers on that team started 25 or more games.

Similarly, in Young’s rookie year of 1890, there were 25 teams in various major leagues. During that season fully 25 pitchers, an average of one per team, started 40 or more games. Season length varied from team-to-team and league-to-league in those days, but in 1890 each team averaged 126 games. So, forty starts was about one-third of a team’s games. However, only 34 other pitchers, about one for every two teams, started between 20-39 games. Those are the number of starts that might be expected by a pitcher who was part of a regular rotation.

By 1911, these numbers had changed substantially as starts were generally spread out among several pitchers and no pitcher was expected to start a third of his team’s games. That year, only two pitchers, Bob Harmon (41) and Jack Coombs (40) started 40 or more games games. Moreover, 59 pitchers, at a time when there were 16 AL or NL teams started 20 or more games. In other words, each team averaged four pitchers with over twenty starts. That looks a lot like the four man pitching rotations that would last into at least the 1970s.

Young is one of the greatest pitchers ever, but he is also a transitional figure. In his early years, he was a contemporary, more or less, of greats like Old Hoss Radbourn, Pud Galvin who pitched 70 complete games in a season twice in the 1880s or Tim Keefe who regularly started more than 60 games and completed at least 50 five times during the 1880s. By the twentieth century, Young was still a great pitcher, but was, along with Hall of Famers like Mordecai Brown, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Eddie Plank, pitching in a regular rotation while still expected to finish what he started.