TORONTO – In the very first World Series game, at the Huntington Avenue Base Ball Grounds in Boston on Oct. 1, 1903, the starting pitcher gave up four runs in the top of the first inning. He stayed in and pitched the rest of the game.
That pitcher was Cy Young. Two days later, when Boston’s starter got knocked around early, Young came in from the bullpen and worked the last seven innings. Then he went the distance in Games 5 and 7. When ol’ Cy was on the mound, well, he wasn’t leaving. Who would you rather use?
As the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays prepare for the 121st World Series, starting Friday night at Rogers Centre, that remains the essential in-game question for managers. In the old days, it was much easier to answer. Usually, the starter was the best arm you had.
Now, of course, World Series games tend to be full-staff efforts. Every game last fall between the Dodgers and New York Yankees included at least 10 pitchers, and it has been a full decade since the last complete game in the World Series, by the Kansas City Royals’ Johnny Cueto against the New York Mets in 2015.
Yet just last week, the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto started and finished Game 2 of the National League Championship Series in Milwaukee. He did so because manager Dave Roberts asked himself that fundamental question: Who would you rather use?
“When you can have your most talented pitchers get the most outs, then you’re in a good spot,” Roberts said after that game, before spelling out the essential factor.“Whoever is behind them has got to be a better option.”
The way the Dodgers’ pitching has evolved, Roberts has few options he can trust beyond the starters, setup man Alex Vesia and closer Roki Sasaki. Protracted bullpen relays, as the Dodgers often designed it in past Octobers – once to the dismay of a president – seems unlikely.
The Dodgers had hoped to have their usual stable of overpowering arms in the bullpen. They are spending more than $56 million this season (in average annual salaries) on six relievers who are injured or have been ineffective: Taylor Scott, Kirby Yates, Blake Treinen, Brusdar Graterol, Michael Kopech and Evan Phillips.
The inventory of such high-powered relievers on most pennant-winners is the main reason for the demise of the World Series complete game. The best teams have several elite arms who can reasonably be considered better options for the back half of a game than a laboring starter.
“I always felt like, at 110 pitches, there’s nobody in the bullpen that’s better – I’m still the best option, unless you’re gonna go to Mariano (Rivera),” Hall of Famer CC Sabathia said.
“And I don’t think that’s the case anymore. There’s four or five options down there that can probably get you out of a jam. So it’s just the way that bullpens are constructed. If you have those weapons down there, why not go to them?”
Sabathia made 23 postseason starts and completed just one, to close out the Baltimore Orioles in a 2012 division series. In his World Series debut, in the 2009 opener at Yankee Stadium, he threw seven strong innings but lost to the Philadelphia Phillies’ Cliff Lee, who threw a 122-pitch complete game.
In the 93 World Series games since then, only one pitcher besides Cueto has gone all the way: the San Francisco Giants’ Madison Bumgarner, who spun a shutout against the Royals in the fifth game in 2014.
“I think in the playoffs, by nature, the starter has always been given a shorter leash because of what those games mean,” said Merrill Kelly, who won Game 2 of the 2023 World Series for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
“It’s probably a reflection on the league in general, where we’re at, right? The guy who leads the league in complete games every year throws what, two? Three? I think it’s just on par with how we run bullpens now, and this 100-pitch mark that everybody seems so set on.”
Indeed, in the modern World Series, it is rare to see a pitcher last even that long. Only two pitchers in the last four have topped 100 pitches in a game: the New York Yankees’ Gerrit Cole last year and the Houston Astros’ Framber Valdez in 2022. Both times, they were done before reaching seven full innings.
Kelly did, authoring one of just three World Series starts ever to last seven innings with at least nine strikeouts, no walks and no more than three hits. (The others: Roger Clemens in 2000 and Clayton Kershaw in 2017.) At 89 pitches that night, Kelly seemed a prime candidate for a complete game, something he’d never done in the majors.
But Kelly had missed his location at times in the seventh, he said, and when that happens, it means he’s probably fatigued, whether he feels it or not. The Diamondbacks had lost the opener in 11 innings, and Kelly was honest with manager Torey Lovullo about how much he had left.
“Don’t get me wrong, I want the ball whenever it’s given to me, for sure,” he said. “But in that moment, especially after how we lost the first game, I cared more about handing it over to the bullpen with someone who’s more fresh. I felt like that gave us a better chance at closing that game out.”
Arizona soon rallied to put the game out of reach, and if those extra runs had come earlier, Kelly said he would have stayed in: “If it’s 8-1, I’m going back out there for sure.”
Indeed, Cueto only completed his start because the Royals turned a close game into a blowout in the bottom of the eighth. Otherwise, closer Wade Davis would have taken over.
“Johnny wanted to go back out,” Royals manager Ned Yost said that night. “I’m like, ‘Look, you’ve done your job very, very well tonight. And now we’re going to let Wade do his. Keep your head in the game because if we score a couple of runs we’ll let you go back out.’ And we did.”
That game aside, the Royals of the mid-2010s set a model for future World Series pitching plans. After taking the Giants to seven games in 2014, Kansas City beat the Mets in five the next fall with Davis, Kelvin Herrera, Ryan Madson and Luke Hochevar each appearing at least three times and combining for 17 scoreless innings.
The watershed moment came in Game 3 the next October, when both starters – the Cleveland Indians’ Josh Tomlin and the Chicago Cubs’ Kyle Hendricks – were pulled in the fifth inning of a 0-0 game. Ten pitchers would take part in a 1-0 Cleveland victory.
By then, Cleveland manager Terry Francona had learned that a strong bullpen could be better than a traditional starter. In Game 3 of the ALCS in Toronto, starter Trevor Bauer – who had sliced his hand while fixing a drone – started bleeding on the mound in the first inning. It forced Francona into a bullpen game, and six relievers collected 25 outs in a 4-2 victory.
That was an emergency, so Francona had little choice. In theory, the more you change pitchers, the more likely it is that one will falter.
“The (danger) for me is, you are taking out a guy that’s having a good day and now you’re going to ask three, four, five, sometimes six or seven guys to go in and not have a bad day,” said Andrew Miller, who dominated for Cleveland in relief that October.
“It’s inevitable that somebody slept wrong or just doesn’t have the feel that day. I think it’s really risky. When it works, you look like a genius, but you’re asking the whole fire drill of relievers to come in and do their jobs – and you’re facing the best lineups in baseball at this point. It’s tough.”
Much of today’s strategy, naturally, is based on data models that predict how a pitcher’s repertoire will match a hitter’s swing. Besides the methodology, though, there’s nothing really new about that.
In the 1929 World Series, Philadelphia A’s manager Connie Mack used only right-handed starters against the Chicago Cubs, whose offense leaned right. In doing so, Mack shifted Lefty Grove – the greatest pitcher of his era – to the bullpen, deploying him as the games dictated. Grove closed out two victories (once with 13 outs, once with six) and the A’s prevailed in five.
When Casey Stengel led the Yankees to a record five consecutive World Series titles, from 1949 to 1953, he used relievers in more than half of the victories. The more modern Yankees have not relied on complete games in the World Series, either – they currently have a 50-game streak without one, dating to rookie Jim Beattie in Game 5 against the Dodgers in 1978.
The Yankees used their Hall of Fame closer, Goose Gossage, to finish that World Series, and since then, just five starters have gone the distance in the clincher: Scott McGregor, Bret Saberhagen, Orel Hershiser, Jack Morris and Josh Beckett, in 2003.
Starters still grab the last out now, but they usually do it in a relief cameo. The last four Dodgers World Series have ended this way, with Charlie Morton (2017), Chris Sale (2018), Julio Urías (2020) and Walker Buehler (2024) throwing the final pitches.
From 1962 through 1971, though, every World Series finished with a complete game by the winning team. Sometimes, even the pitcher himself was surprised to stay out there. In 1971, Pittsburgh’s Steve Blass allowed two singles to start the eighth inning of Game 7, with the Pirates leading 2-0 in Baltimore.
Surely, he thought, manager Danny Murtaugh would call for Dave Giusti, who had led the league with 30 saves and closed out the NLCS. Blass stayed in and allowed a run.
“And even in the ninth inning, I went back out,” he said a few years ago, in an interview for “The Grandest Stage.” my book on the history of the World Series. “It was the heart of the order, the 3-4-5 guys, Boog Powell, Frank Robinson and Merv Rettenmund, and I think it took eight pitches and it was over.
“Boog Powell bounced out, and Frank Robinson, who had hit a slider for a home run for their only run in Game 3, is up. My first pitch to him is the same slider, hung up in the hitting zone, that he’d crushed in Game 3. You ever have those dreams where everything slows down? I let the ball go and everything slowed down – and he popped it up.
“That was unbelievable. I used to see him when he managed and he came into Pittsburgh. He’d say, ‘You got away with one!’”
It’s hard to imagine a modern starter being allowed to face a future Hall of Famer for the eighth time in a World Series – especially as the tying run in the ninth inning of Game 7. In 1971, though, chances are Murtaugh had few choices better than a 15-game winner who was rolling.
“You’re asking a lot out of these bullpen arms now, (but) they are probably better than ever,” Miller said. “I mean, the talent in every position, every fact of the game, is through the roof. The idea that you get a fresh look constantly – we’ve heard about this third-time-through-the-order penalty so much, you don’t even get to watch the guy in the dugout the previous half inning. It’s a new pitcher every time you come up. It’s got to be a challenge for hitters. It makes sense.”
In a way, it always has. In that very first World Series – which was best-of-nine – Pittsburgh’s Deacon Phillippe worked five complete games. He won the three, but lost to Young in Game 7 and dropped the Game 8 clincher, too.
In “Autumn Glory,” his book about that World Series, author Louis P. Masur wrote that critics of the time recognized that Boston had gotten too many looks at the same pitcher.
Phillippe “went up against the Bostons once too often,” The Sporting News reported. “It is natural to suppose that after a team has faced a pitcher three times in less than two weeks, that they should have time to familiarize themselves with that man’s style of pitching to sufficiently hit him.”
The third-time-through-the-order penalty now, the fifth-time-through-the-game penalty then. The World Series evolves, but the past always echoes.