CLEVELAND — If you’ve found your way to this article, it likely means that you’re an educated baseball fan and aware of how certain elements of the game have trended toward the extremes in recent years — in particular, as marked by the home-run and strikeout records of 2017. Much hand-wringing has occurred over the lack of balls in play this season.

But there’s another extreme that’s developed, as well, one that’s received a bit less attention perhaps: the share of innings absorbed by bullpens.

Bullpens have never accounted for as much work as they did in 2017. Relievers combined to throw 16,496.2 innings this year, bettering the previous mark of 15,893.0 set way back in… 2016. Relievers combined to throw over 1,000 innings more than just two years earlier in 2015 (15,184.1) and nearly 3,000 more than in the first year of the 30-team era in 1998 (13,968.2).

To look at it another way, bullpens accounted for a record 38.1% of innings this season — and that rate has continued to inch up in the modern era. In 1959, just 21.3% of innings were pitched in a relief capacity. In 1969, that figure increased to 26.4%, to 28.9% in 1979, and then 33.7% in 1999. It’s a trend myself and others have documented in recent years.

The workhorse starting pitcher is endangered. Only 15 starters reached the 200-inning threshold this season, matching last year’s mark, which is the lowest on record.

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The first of two Wild Card games is scheduled for tonight. In addition to must-win baseball, this time of year is also typically marked by the appearance of a Dave Cameron piece on the merits of “bullpen-ing” a game — that is, the practice of using nothing but relievers in a single contest, of attempting to exploit matchups in order to maximize the chances of winning.

While the logic of “bullpen-ing” is sound in theory, it also fails to account for the comfort of pitchers who’ve potentially become attached to their roles. To get a better idea of how they might adapt to such an approach and how it might be handled in practice, I asked some actual players about it. Turns out, there’s a particular type of reliever who’s best suited to take the ball in the first few innings of a win-or-go-home game. And a particular type of pitcher who should follow him.

The first thing revealed by my inquiries is that relievers love the idea. “I’m down for whatever,” said Giants reliever Hunter Strickland with a smile. Nationals closer Sean Doolittle just laughed for a while. “Would I get paid like a starting pitcher?” he finally asked after the laughter had subsided.

Relievers would be fine with it because they’re accustomed to answering the call whenever. “We’re used to throwing in whatever inning, [if] not usually the first,” said Strickland. Added Miami’s Brad Ziegler: “I don’t think it would be very different for me, as much as it would be for the starter coming into the game [in the later innings]. His whole routine would have to change.”

And a starter probably would have to throw a couple innings in such a game — in order to reach a full complement of nine and still leave some arms for extras, that is. So the question is probably which kind of starter would adapt effectively to an otherwise unusual arrangement.

The answer? Probably a young one. Older starters are more married to their routines. “It’s very hard for me personally,” said Brandon McCarthy regarding the idea of starting a game in any other inning but the first. “My routine as a starter is fixed to the minute and a lot of guys are like that. It’s certainly not something impossible to deal with but could make a team nervous.”

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This time of year excites me for two reasons. One, of course, we’ve got the playoffs coming up, and no matter what you think about how the tournament is designed, this month is as exciting as baseball can get. Today and tomorrow, teams will be eliminated! Everything ends, ever so suddenly! It’s a gas. The other thing I love, though, is that all the season statistics are final. For the first time, I get to stop worrying about projections or extrapolations. What happened has happened. There is no more of the regular season, so the numbers on the leaderboards are as they will be forever.

It makes the writing easier, and more matter-of-fact. For example, here is a matter of certain fact: The 2017 Houston Astros had baseball’s most improved lineup. How can I say that? No one else improved by nearly so much in wRC+.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about John Jaso’s possibly career-ending comments, the ends of the Dodgers’ and Tigers’ seasons and the teams that have never had a first-overall pick, the selling points of this postseason, the changing consensus about the best team in baseball, how to analyze the playoffs and manage playoff games, the respective strengths of the Indians and Yankees, the Yankees-Twins wild card game, the best and worst WARs of 2017, the crazy debate about Austin Romine vs. Gary Sanchez, and the resignation of Braves GM John Coppolella.

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This season, 144 players reached the 502-plate-appearance threshold necessary to qualify for the batting title. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were 190 position players who tallied between one and 99 PA for the season. In between, there were 291 position players. Some of these were starters who simply missed time due to injury (Bryce Harper, for example) or the nature of their position (Salvador Perez) or because they weren’t major leaguers yet at the start of the season (Paul DeJong), but some of them are what we’d call true part-time players. At this time of year, we generally focus on the very best players. It’s awards season, after all. Part-time players get less shine. So let’s focus on them today, at the very least.

I’ve done this exercise once before, back in 2012. Now, as then, I’ve parsed the list to give us a clear picture of who is really a part-time player. My favorite tool for this exercise is the “Lineups and Defense” pages on Baseball-Reference. When they redesigned the website recently (I think it was recently? Maybe it was last year? I don’t know, I don’t even remember what I had for dinner on Thursday.) I experienced a few panicky minutes when I couldn’t find the pages, but fortunately they’re still there. Phew.

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The Dodgers snapped out of it. After an extended slump, the Dodgers did manage to snap out of it, and so they finished with baseball’s best record. The Indians ultimately had to settle for simply having the best record in the American League. And yet, one might consider the Indians to be baseball’s best team. They had easily baseball’s best second half. They had easily baseball’s best run differential. They had easily baseball’s best BaseRuns record. You could say it’s all just recency bias, but, recently, the Indians have been almost literally unbeatable. It’s quite a difficult thing to exaggerate.

The Indians this season could field, and the Indians this season could hit. More than anything else, however, the Indians this season could pitch. They could pitch when games were beginning, and they could pitch when games were concluding. It was a pitching staff without a clear weakness. According to WAR, Indians pitchers were better than the next-best staff by about seven wins. According to the other version of WAR, the one based on actual runs allowed, the Indians pitchers were again better than the next-best staff by about seven wins. Turns out these Indians weren’t just the best in 2017. They’re the best we’ve seen in a long, long while.

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Are today’s analytically inclined players the next generation of top-level front-office executives? According to several baseball insiders, there’s a chance that could happen. While some to whom I spoke expressed skepticism, it does make a certain amount of sense.

A common criticism of your stereotypical Ivy League GM has been, “He didn’t play the game at a high level.” Conversely, former players in decision-making positions have often been accused (sometimes for good reason) of being behind the times. They have on-field experience, but they aren’t critical thinkers who embrace analytics.

A former player who thinks much like an “Ivy League GM” would offer the best of both worlds. He would know what it’s like to go through the grind of a 162-game schedule, and he’d also place a high value on objective analysis while showing a willingness to think outside the box.

I asked a cross section of players, coaches, managers, and front-office executives if they think such a trend is forthcoming.

———

Manny Acta, Seattle Mariners third-base coach: “Eventually it’s going to happen, but it will take a little while. The percentage of players that believe and think like the new generation of GMs is still very low. It’s a transition that even coaches are going through right now: how to explain to players what is valued today by front offices and to convince them that they are not being valued as much by the old traditional stats.”

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Three years ago, this author, then employed as a major-league beat writer by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, traveled to Cincinnati for the final series of the regular season. The Reds were hosting the Pirates in games No. 160, 161, and 162. The conditions weren’t quite fall-like yet — temperatures sat in the low 80s in humidity-drenched southern Ohio and northern Kentucky — but the Pirates had, at the very least, secured a playoff berth, and their NL Central Division title hopes were still alive.

Those three days in Cincinnati became some of my most memorable on the beat. The series was interesting in part for the decisions made by Pirates leadership amidst the end-of-season chaos of September baseball, decisions made in a largely conventional manner at a time in the game when tradition was being challenged, when players’ roles had begun evolving more rapidly. We continue to see evidence of that evolution in 2017. On the eve of the AL Wild Card game, for example, reporters are asking managers about bullpen-ing, about probabilities, about non-traditional decision-making. This was the backdrop for my long weekend.

The series was memorable for the camaraderie in the press box and the post-game conversations outside the stadium, the type of interactions between writers and scouts — between writers and other writers — that’s perhaps becoming increasingly rare as the economics of the media industry continue to erode jobs and travel budgets. Similarly, some regard player-tracking as a threat to render scouts redundant.

Those three days in Cincinnati, for me, have provided raw material upon which to conduct a sort of personal archaeology, a collection of vignettes to revisit as the regular season comes to an end. The weekend offered some small but revealing examples of tradition’s concessions to science and efficiency in baseball. For better, for worse. The following is intended neither as analysis nor commentary. It’s simply a story.

FRIDAY Sept. 26, 2014

I arrived by air that morning in Cincinnati, having covered the previous series in Atlanta during which the Pirates had clinched just their second playoff berth — and second consecutive playoff berth — since 1992. I don’t remember much from the Atlanta series. It was the second time I had been in a beer- and champagne-soaked clubhouse, the celebration taking place in now-defunct Turner Field. I’m not sure if Uber had arrived in northern Kentucky at that time, but it must not have, because I took a cab to the hotel from the airport. I kept clothing and toiletries to one modestly sized piece of luggage, as I always did, which would fit in overhead storage in the plane, often a Southwest 737, to save time and avoid a trip to baggage claim. Fortunately, the dress code of a writer can be generously described as “business casual.”

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