Noah Syndergaard’s Big Day and the Six-Man Rotation

On Wednesday, Noah Syndergaard had a day he is likely to hold onto for quite some time. The 22-year-old Mets rookie pitched into the eighth inning, struck out six players, didn’t walk a single batter, allow an extra base hit, or allow a single run to cross the plate while he was on the mound. It was an impressive outing, and Syndergaard’s first four starts have gone well, also. To wit: the right-hander has averaged just over six innings per outing with 22 strikeouts against five walks, and is currently sporting a 2.55 ERA and equally impressive 2.60 FIP. Big things are expected of Syndergaard as the Mets try to make the most out of potential contention this year while simultaneously limiting the number of innings he pitches to save his arm both for October and also the years to come. Determining how to keep pitchers healthy can be challenging, especially when Syndergaard has outings like he did against the Phillies.

Syndgergaard’s last start against the Phillies was impressive because of fastballs like this:

Curves like this:

The start will be most memorable, however, because of this:

Syndergaard is the first rookie pitcher to hit a home run since Jose Fernandez hit one out in 2013 for the Marlins. This season, there are 185 players with at least 10 plate appearances and no home runs. Syndergaard, who’s recorded 10 plate appearances, is not among that group.

Syndergaard’s combination of run prevention and run production has represented an improvement over the underwhelming, but passable Dillon Gee and, as a result, created a difficult decision for the Mets because (a) Gee comes off the disabled list next week and (b) the Mets don’t have any open spots in their five-man rotation. Matt Harvey is the ace. Bartolo Colon is entrenched in his role. Jacob deGrom has pitched very well. Jon Niese has been decent and is signed through next season. Syndergaard’s pitching has left little incentive to remove him from the rotation, and expectations are high moving forward. Gee is signed this season for a reasonable $5.3 million, and would have some trade value if he could prove his health. With no spots obvious weaknesses in the rotation, the Mets will ditch the five-man version in place of a six-man one.

Going to a six-man rotation is relatively novel, and the move ostensibly saves a few innings for the Mets’ young starters, but it really is the path of least resistance. They cannot trade Gee when he has not pitched, and even if they could, they might not want to given the generally fragile state of major-league pitching. We have not reached June and the only team in the league to use just five starters all year is the Milwaukee Brewers. Past the top 150 starters by number of starts, teams have used 64 starters to make 126 additional starts. Teams are averaging more than seven starters per team so far, and 22 out of 30 teams have used at least seven starting pitchers this season.

The average number of pitchers who have made at least two starts is more than six per team. Last year saw teams average nearly ten starting pitchers per team. The Mets are likely not going to go with a six-man rotation the rest of the year — not because it is impractical to do so as a strategy, but because it is not realistic to be able to keep digging down to the minors and grabbing more starters that deserve to be taking starts away from the rest of the rotation.

The six-man rotation can work for the Mets because they have six major-league-caliber starters, although it is not likely to save a large amount of innings for the starters over the next few months. Between now and the end of July, Mets pitchers will make 56 starts. In a six-man rotation — without changing the rotation order over the All-Star break — that creates nine starts for Syndergaard, Colon, Gee, and deGrom, and 10 starts for Harvey and Niese. In a five-man rotation, it would be eleven starts for all pitchers except for Harvey, who would receive 12 starts. Assuming six innings per start, that saves 12 innings for all pitchers except for Niese, who would be down just six innings. The savings could be lessened if, given more rest and a potentially shorter bullpen, the starters are given more innings in individual starts.

Terry Collins indicated that we could see increased pitch counts from his pitchers while using a six-man rotation. Setting aside, at least in this piece, whether high pitch counts lead to injury (they might), the Mets will have to rework their roster to mix six starters with the rest of the team. The club will either be going short a person on the bench in order to have a normal seven-man bullpen, or short a person in the bullpen as the rotation’s six members take up a spot normally reserved for a reliever. If Noah Syndergaard is forced into the game as an emergency pinch hitter, the strategy moves further away from the stated goal of keeping pitchers healthy.

If the starters will be taking outs from the sixth and seventh members of the bullpen, the competitive effect will most likely be neutral, as the sixth starter will still be taking innings away from the first five pitchers. The problem for the Mets is that letting starters pitch deeper into games goes against their stated intention of saving innings, at least if there are increased pitch counts for their young starters. If every pitcher gets one more out per start in a six-man rotation over the next two months, the team saves fewer than 10 innings per starter. If every pitcher gets two more outs per start, the move is no different than skipping every starter once over a two-month period. If the alternatives to going to a six-man rotation really were 15-day stints on the disabled list, five-inning starts, or finishing the season in September, the six-man rotation is likely the least effective way to limit innings.

The Mets will use six starters because the team wants to keep its top-five starters rolling along and it needs to use Dillon Gee. This is the easiest path for the Mets to take right now. If the season wears on and starts are still being taken away from Matt Harvey, then the team might be more likely to return to a more traditional rotation and use their surplus of pitching to help the organization elsewhere. The experiment begins, in part, because of the fragile state of pitching, but that very same fragility will cause the experiment’s demise.