The Red Sox pulled starting pitcher Tanner Houck from a game late last season at Washington even though he had a perfect game through five innings and had thrown just 53 pitches. AP Photo/Nick Wass
The Boston Red Sox had their most talented young pitcher on the mound in an October game that, if they lost, could’ve cost them their season.
He had a perfect game with eight strikeouts through five innings and, remarkably, had thrown just 53 pitches.
And yet, Tanner Houck’s day was done.
That was the scene at Nationals Park last Oct. 2, when Houck was removed with a perfect game intact and plenty of gas in the tank. The decision by manager Alex Cora robbed one of the game’s brightest young pitchers from a chance at making history.
But what was Cora supposed to do, let Houck chase a personal milestone and burn him from being available again to pitch a few days later?
Welcome to modern baseball.
This spring, the Red Sox once again find themselves in the middle of a revolution as they enter the season with two talented young pitchers who aren’t exactly traditional starters, nor are they traditional relievers, but something in between.
There’s Houck, the 25-year-old right-hander who was a first-round pick out of the University of Missouri in 2017 and took a little while to develop, but now has one of the nastiest sliders in the game. And there’s Garrett Whitlock, another 25-year-old righty who was stolen from the Yankees in the Rule 5 Draft last offseason.
They were arguably two of the Sox’ three best pitchers in 2022, but combined to throw just 142 1/3 innings as the organization took extra precaution with their workloads.
Now the Sox enter a new season hoping to utilize their weapons in a different way.
Are they starters? Are they relievers? Are they both?
Cora has suggested that Houck will open the year in the rotation, but if you think he’ll actually be unleashed and allowed to throw more than 50-75 pitches on a regular basis, you’re a bold gambler.
Whitlock is also being stretched out, but the Sox appear ready to use these guys in a whole new way.
“It’s important to get outs,” Cora said. “I think you guys make a bit a bigger deal of getting the first 15 outs or the last nine outs. But in the end, 27 outs are 27 outs.”
Whitlock will start in the bullpen, “and then you guys will see what we do with him,” Cora said. “But he’s important regardless of his role. You still have to pass the baton. The race starts when that gun goes off, but then after that it has to be a perfect relay. If you drop it, you’re done. You get disqualified. We will have a race. We will have a relay race and hopefully we can finish it.”
Red Sox pitcher Garrett Whitlock is likely to pitch three innings in a stretch out of the bullpen to start the season, but he could have some appearances as a starter as well. Colin E. Braley/Associated Press
It has to be tempting for the Sox to throw Houck and Whitlock behind Eovaldi and Pivetta and feel like they have four powerful right-handers who can go toe-to-toe with anybody in the game.
Not for this Red Sox team. The architect, Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom, spent the majority of his career in Tampa.
And if you want to blame somebody for the pitching revolution, blame the Rays, who broke the internet and perhaps the game of baseball on Oct. 27, 2020, when Manager Kevin Cash removed Blake Snell in the sixth inning of Game 6 of the World Series. Snell had nine strikeouts and just two hits allowed. The Rays’ bullpen blew it. The Dodgers won the World Series.
Cash said he had no regrets.
Michael Wacha, who the Red Sox signed to a one-year, $7-million deal this offseason, spent the 2021 season with the Rays.
“It opened my eyes to a whole new way of how the game is played,” Wacha said. “But it works. They’ve been in the postseason multiple years in a row. Some of the days I’d be like, ‘why is this guy not in the lineup?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s why.’
“They play matchups no matter what. Whatever the computer spits out to them, that’s the lineup. Plug it into the computer and roll it out there.”
Wacha entered the league in 2013 as one of the game’s brightest young right-handers. He pitched in the World Series against the Red Sox that year. The first three years of his big league career, he averaged six innings per start. The last three years of his career, he’s averaged 4 2/3 innings per start.
Wacha went from being a stereotypical right-handed workhorse to whatever kind of new-age role the Sox decide to put him in this year.
“It’s definitely changed from the time I broke in in 2013, where if you were a five-and-dive guy, you were mad at yourself,” he said. “You wanted to eat up those innings as far as you could go. Now, you go five, you go two times through a lineup, and you’re getting high fives and celebrations after those starts.”
It’s been such a problem throughout baseball that the league is testing a rule to incentivize traditional starting pitching in the Atlantic League. If a starting pitcher doesn’t go five innings, the team loses the designated hitter for the rest of that game.
Still, pitchers are skeptical that the role will ever be the same.
“I don’t know if it’ll ever go back,” Wacha said. “But I feel like I’ve seen bullpens getting more tired out. Those innings that a starter doesn’t pick up go to a reliever and they’re going on back-to-back days, and it’s a trickle-down effect going to those bullpens, getting a little overused with the starters not going as deep.”
The Red Sox have a few typical old-school starters like Eovaldi and Wacha, and when healthy, Chris Sale and James Paxton. But with Whitlock and Houck, they’re clearly taking a new-age approach.
Cora said he’d rather use Whitlock six innings a week than three innings a week in a typical relief role. But instead of six innings at a time, Cora seems to be targeting something like a three-inning role in which Whitlock pitches critical innings at a critical point in a game.
Whitlock said he doesn’t care. After recovering from Tommy John surgery in 2020 and enjoying a strong debut in ’21, he said, “I’m going to enjoy the heck out of it and try to pitch my tail off and try to get outs.”
Houck will likely be a starter for now, but has been roped around plenty in his first two years of big league action.
“Having a routine is always nice, but like I said last year, whether I was in Worcester or whether I was in Fenway, it didn’t matter,” Houck said. “There was work to be done.”
Starter, reliever, swing guy or anything else – titles are becoming extinct in the modern game.
“Who knows if somebody doesn’t come up with a different style of pitching?” Wacha said. “What if everyone is relievers? Everyone goes three innings at a time, come back in a couple days?
“I don’t know if we’re done seeing an opener and a starter. I imagine some teams will get more creative and we’ll see how that works.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
