There was a time when Justin Verlander’s departure from a game after six innings would have felt like something of a failure. After all, Verlander, 39, has thrown 200 or more innings in a season 12 times in his career and completed at least seven innings in 251 of his regular-season starts. That leads all active pitchers since 2006, when he won the American League Rookie of the Year Award.
But after what happened in 2021, when the Major League Baseball postseason turned into a parade of relief pitchers, Verlander’s gutsy start in the Houston Astros’ 4-2 win over the Yankees in Game 1 of the A.L. Championship Series on Wednesday was something to behold. Verlander ran up his pitch count early, but then settled down to push his team to victory.
“I think as the game’s going along, you just gain more confidence as you start making better pitches,” Verlander said. “Once I started being able to execute my pitches the way I wanted, I feel like my confidence just kind of built upon that.”
It was a welcome change for Verlander’s manager, Dusty Baker, who got only two starts as long as six innings from his pitching staff in last year’s 16-game postseason run, which ended with a loss to Atlanta in the World Series.
In a midgame interview Wednesday, Baker suggested that Verlander, who made 28 regular-season starts this year after losing nearly two seasons to injuries, would steady himself, but he said afterward that he hadn’t been so sure.
“It didn’t look like he was going to get there because early, man, I’m looking on the board up there and he had like almost 60 pitches after two, I think,” Baker said. “I kept looking and looking, and I think I went on air in the third inning, and I just said, ‘Hey, if he could get a couple short innings, he could take us deep into the ballgame.’”
Verlander did just that, looking sharper for his final 25 pitches than he had at any other point in the game. He finished with 11 strikeouts, and Houston’s bullpen contributed three innings of one-run ball.
As it turns out, the demise the starting pitcher may have been highly exaggerated, despite a legitimate reason for the fear. In 2021, there were 74 starts by pitchers in the postseason; only 13 of them (17.6 percent) lasted through at least six innings. Only three of those came once the playoffs had reached the league championship series and only one came in the World Series.
That was by Atlanta’s Max Fried, who led all pitchers by going at least six innings in three of his postseason starts last year, including the decisive Game 6 of the World Series.
This year, though, pitcher usage has been closer to what had seemed like a bygone era. In 28 games (56 total starts), 21 starters, or 37.5 percent, have gone at least six innings.
It’s not exactly the good old days of dueling complete games every day, or even the OK old days of 2003, when there were 49 six-inning starts in the postseason, but in a sport where most fans would probably rather see Verlander than five effective relievers, it is progress.
In the case of the San Diego Padres, Manager Bob Melvin thinks letting starters go deep is part of the reason they’ve gotten so far in the playoffs. The right-handers Joe Musgrove and Yu Darvish have each had two starts of at least six innings this postseason.
“In general, we’ve let our starters go a little bit, and I think at this time of year when a lot of bullpens are maybe run down a little bit, I think maybe ours has been saved a little bit by the use of the starters,” Melvin said.
Musgrove thinks the strategy saves wear and tear on the bullpen and improves relievers’ effectiveness when opposing teams see them less often.
“All the pitches are nasty right now,” he said. “Everyone in the postseason is pitching their best baseball. I mean, you look at it down the course of a postseason stretch, the more you can have your starters run out there, the less you have to show the bullpen arms.”
He pointed out that the Padres saw the same relievers multiple times in their National League division series against the Dodgers and began to figure them out.
As for the strategy of leaving their starters in, Musgrove appreciates the faith.
“Bob is a guy that loves to run starters out there,” Musgrove said of Melvin. “We love it as pitchers. We take pride in our ability to stay healthy and maintain the quality of our stuff deep into the game.”
Cut from the same cloth as Verlander, Darvish and Musgrove is Gerrit Cole, the Yankees’ $324 million ace. He is expected to start Game 3 of the A.L.C.S. after pitching an impressive — by today’s standards — 13⅓ innings over two starts in his team’s division series with the Cleveland Guardians. He is one of six starters who have multiple starts of six or more innings this postseason.
After his win in Game 4, Cole, 32, said the key was finding a way out of trouble if the pitch count started to build up early in the game.
“You just keep grinding and you keep making pitches, and if you’re fortunate to catch one of those quick innings, you have more opportunities to find it,” he said.
Yankees Manager Aaron Boone told reporters after the game that he had been worried Cole was running out of gas, which led to Cole’s being asked if he had expressed to Boone that he wanted to empty the tank in hopes of getting deeper in the game.
“I do that every time I pitch,” Cole said. “I mean, whether he lets me or not, that’s another deal.”
David Waldstein contributed reporting from Philadelphia.
