The Sunday Read: ‘How Analytics Marginalized Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers’

周日读物:《如何数据分析边缘化了棒球超级投手》

The Daily

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2025-04-20

31 分钟
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One day at Wrigley Field in Chicago last May, Paul Skenes was pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, carving out a small piece of baseball history in his second big-league game. He struck out the first seven batters he faced. By the end of the fifth inning, he had increased his strikeout total to 10. More impressive, he hadn’t allowed a hit. Over the past two decades, analysts have identified a treasure trove of competitive advantages for teams willing to question baseball’s established practices. Perhaps the most significant of competitive advantages was hidden in plain sight, at the center of the diamond. Starting pitchers were traditionally taught to conserve strength so they could last deep into games. Throwing 300 innings in a season was once commonplace; in 1969 alone, nine pitchers did it. But at some definable point in each game, the data came to reveal, a relief pitcher becomes a more effective option than the starter, even if that starter is Sandy Koufax or Tom Seaver — or Paul Skenes.
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  • Hi, this is Melissa Clark from New York Times Cooking.

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  • My name is Bruce Schoenfeld and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine.

  • I've been writing about baseball for four decades,

  • and my most recent piece for the magazine is about one of the sport's biggest evolutions in all that time.

  • It has to do with some of the marquee stars of Major League Baseball, starting pitchers.

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  • and the body needs time to recover from that.

  • Just how much time no one can seem to agree on,

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