Jonny Venters: Canary in a coal mine

The Braves’ reliever has followed up two years of heavy usage with two years of injury, undergoing the second Tommy John surgery of his career on Thursday. His pain may mean nothing, or it could suggest that managers are still trying to figure out a reliever’s ideal workload.

by Steven Goldman

May 17, 2013, 8:17 PM UTC

Kevin C. Cox

Like the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and the Carolina parakeet before them, in 2006 a rare breed of bird became extinct. On October 1, Scott Proctor threw his last inning of the campaign, giving him 102-1/3 on the season. After years in decline, the 100-inning reliever was no more.

On Thursday, Atlanta Braves left-hander Jonny Venters underwent the second Tommy John surgery of his career. When it comes to pitching injuries, we can never find an exact moment of causation, specify with any certainty the exact pitch or appearance that shredded an elbow. What we can say is that from 2010-2011, Venters made more appearances (164) than any pitcher in baseball and pitched the second-most innings (171) of any pure reliever in baseball -- only Tyler Clippard had more innings out of the bullpen.

As Clippard’s continued health shows, heavy usage doesn’t necessarily kill a pitcher. Still, the trend has been away from “everyday” relievers to specialists as managers let platoon matchups dictate their thinking. The result has been a continual downward trend in innings totals.

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When managers first discovered relief pitching, they tended to ride one arm as much as possible. This was because they recognized bench players as necessary to winning games and you couldn’t carry more than 10 pitchers without sacrificing flexibility. As such, some relievers were pitching nearly as much as a back-end starter. These are the top 10 single-season innings totals for pure relievers:

		YEAR	IP	G
1	Mike Marshall	1974	208.1	106
2	Mike Marshall	1973	179	92
3	Bob Stanley	1982	168.1	48
4	Bill Campbell	1976	167.2	78
5	Eddie Fisher	1965	165	82
6	Hoyt Wilhelm	1952	159	71
T7	Mark Eichhorn	1986	157	69
T7	Dick Radatz	1964	157	79
9	Jim Konstanty	1950	152	74
10	John Hiller	1974	150	59

Some of these pitchers were able to carry the workload. Others burnt out fairly quickly. There is no real pattern to it, but if you had to generalize it’s probably safe to say that the pitchers with the heaviest usage did decline. Thus the workload was spread to more pitchers, but teams still didn’t want to carry more than 10 relievers, so the pitchers who worked the middle innings tended to pick up a large part of the load during the 1990s.

		YEAR	IP	G	SV
1	Duane Ward	1990	127.2	73	11
2	Greg Harris	1990	117.1	73	9
3	Scott Sullivan	1999	113.2	79	3
4	Greg Harris	1993	112.1	80	8
T5	Doug Jones	1992	111.2	80	36
T5	Jeremy Hernandez	1993	111.2	70	8
7	Joe Boever	1992	111.1	81	2
T8	Xavier Hernandez	1992	111	77	7
T8	Danny Graves	1999	111	75	27
10	Derek Lowe	1999	109.1	74	15

The nearly simultaneous inventions of the one-inning closer and the one-batter lefty in the early 1990s forced the expansion of bullpens beyond the traditional 10-man limit, a trend that was exacerbated by the decline of the high-pitch outing in the early part of this century. If starters were going to pitch fewer innings, closers were no longer going to be “firemen,” coming into the game whenever there was an emergency and pitching one to three innings, you were also going to carry a pitcher who was going to appear in 50 games but only pitch 30 innings*, and you were no longer going to ask your middle men to pitch 120 innings a year, someone had to pick up the excess.

*Tony La Russa often gets credit for inventing the LOOGY (Lefty One-Out Guy, a term that was first coined, I believe, by my SBN colleague John Sickels) with his usage of Rick Honeycutt, but a look at the record suggests that the LOOGY was a case of convergent evolution, with several managers going to the spot-relief model at once. For example, in 1991 Tommy Lasorda used John Candelaria to get one batter 24 times; he made 59 appearances and pitched 33-2/3 innings. That same year, Honeycutt made only three one-batter appearances. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Rob Murphy, who Pete Rose and Joe Morgan had used as a 100-inning reliever, was being repositioned as a spot reliever by Jim Lefebvre.

The question of who discovered the LOOGY reminds me of a line in Disney’s “Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier,” a favorite film of mine when I was a child. When Crockett arrives at the Alamo, he’s introduced to the defenders, including Colonel Jim Bowie. Crockett is impressed; he’s heard of the guy. “You’re Jim Bowie,” he says, “inventor of the knife?” Bowie replies in the affirmative. This always perplexed me. The Battle of the Alamo took place in 1836. Clearly the knife had been invented long before that -- after all, Rome did not conquer the world with spoons and medieval knights did not have pillow fights. It was only later that what Crockett was saying was, “You’re Jim Bowie, inventor of [the eponymously-named, large customized] knife [that you are famous for using?]

Similarly, in “1776,” the musical play and film about the Declaration of Independence, John Adams introduces Benjamin Franklin to someone by saying, “Have you met Dr. Franklin, inventor of the stove?” Whenever I hear that line, I think, “That’s not quite accurate; he invented a stove, not the stove.

By the beginning of this century, the 100-inning guys were starting to disappear. Their innings totals were coming down, and the closers had largely vanished from the list. Also, your name had to be some variation of “Scott” for managers to notice you:

		YEAR	IP	G	SV
1	Steve Sparks	2003	107	51	2
2	Scott Sullivan	2000	106.1	79	3
3	Scot Shields	2004	105.1	60	4
4	Guillermo Mota	2003	105	76	1
5	Scott Sullivan	2001	103.1	79	0
6	Scott Proctor	2006	102.1	83	1
7	Rick White	2000	99.2	66	3
8	Matt Herges	2001	99.1	75	1
9	Byung-Hyun Kim	2001	98	78	19
10	Vladimir Nunez	2002	97.2	77	20

Doug Pensinger

Since the Reign of the Scot(t)s came to an end, the upper limit of relief work has been lowered still further, as the list of pure relievers with the highest innings-pitched totals shows:

		YEAR	IP GS	G	SV
1	Heath Bell	2007	93.2	81	2
2	Saul Rivera	2007	93	85	3
3	Matt Belisle	2010	92	76	1
T4	Tyler Clippard	2010	91	78	1
T4	Jim Johnson	2011	91	69	9
6	Peter Moylan	2007	90	80	1
T7	J.P. Howell	2008	89.1	64	3
T7	Josh Rupe	2008	89.1	46	0
9	Josh Roenicke	2012	88.2	63	1
T10	Craig Stammen	2012	88.1	59	1
T10	Tyler Clippard	2011	88.1	72	0

Venters’ 88 innings in 2011 just misses the top 10. Relievers are inherently volatile, rising and falling with the speed of anthills, so it’s unsurprising that so many of the pitchers on the 2007-2012 list no longer enjoy the same place of prominence. Still, it seems reasonable to wonder if their usage contributed. Let’s go back to Venters’ 2010-2011 peak one last time and see how the pitches with the highest innings-pitched totals have changed:

		IP	G	STATUS	NOTES
1	T. Clippard	179.1	150	↓
2	J. Venters	171	164	INJ
3	M. Belisle	164	150	↔
4	C. Marmol	151.2	152	↓
5	S. Marshall	150.1	158	↔	Just off the DL after shoulder tendinitis.
6	D. Bard	147.2	143	↓	Lost at sea.
7	N. Masset	147	157	INJ	Recovering from surgery.
8	E. Mujica	145.2	126	↑	Now closing for the Cardinals.
9	F. Cordero	142.1	143	↓	Gone.
T10	M. Adams	140.1	146	↔
T10	M. Albers	140.1	118	↓	Pitching poorly in Cleveland.
T10	B. League	140.1	135	↓	Closing for the Dodgers.

As the old song goes, correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causality, if the above even shows correlation. All we can say is that baseball has been involved in a great unplanned experiment since the 1970s, trying to find out the ideal usage pattern for talented pitchers like Venters, trying to extract the greatest value from them while simultaneously not breaking them. As much as workloads have been reduced, it’s possible that they should be reduced still further. A liberalization of roster rules in which pitchers are limited to 10 spots on the roster on any given day, but teams can designate a taxi squad from which it can pick pitchers on any given day (as is being considered for September’s 40-man roster period) would simultaneously allow for the rebirth of pinch-hitters, pinch-runners, and defensive substitutes and also further spread out the increasing number of bullpen innings.

It is probably also true that pitchers will continue to get hurt regardless of whether they pitch one inning or 100, and until real-time bio-monitoring makes it possible for trainers to look at the interior of a pitcher’s arm as he throws pitch after pitch, the causes are going to be something of a mystery. As such, Jonny Venters is a canary in a coal mine, alright, but it’s hard to say which coal mine, or what the canary is trying to say.