Psst, Position Player Pitching Is Proliferating

On Sunday, Red Sox infielder Andruw Monasterio took the mound against the Yankees with one out in the eighth inning of a 10-1 game — one that had already sent a Red Sox broadcaster over the edge — and proceeded to allow six more runs. On Monday, Twins top prospect Walker Jenkins hit his first major league home run off a 37-mph eephus lob from Tigers utilityman Zach McKinstry, while the Cubs set a team record with nine homers in one game, the last three of them off Brewers first baseman Andrew Vaughn. Amid complaints on social media and sports talk radio calling for a ban to the practice, the reality is that managers are putting position players on mop-and-bucket duty more frequently than ever, enough to suggest it’s time to revise the rules limiting their usage.

Once upon a time, position players pitching was a rarity. The first 21 seasons of the Wild Card era (1995–2005) featured seasons where you could count such appearances on one hand; there was one in 2005 and none in ’06, and by the end of that stretch, it was still something that happened less than once a week throughout the majors. As a beat, it was a fun one to cover because of the novelty, particularly with pitch tracking allowing everyone to gawk at the low-velocity junk thrown under such circumstances. Did you know Todd Frazier had a knuckleball? How about that Willians Astudillo eephus? Eventually, however, the beat became less enjoyable as the practice proliferated to the point that Major League Baseball had to codify when teams could do it; while the occasions themselves remained appropriately light-hearted, the novelty had long worn off. Now, even with more restrictive rules governing their usage, the situation is worth revisiting.

The Monasterio and McKinstry appearances were garden variety affairs, with position players taking the mound in the eighth inning of road games where nobody would need to pitch the bottom of the ninth. Monasterio’s outing was Boston’s first such appearance this season, a sidelight to a game that included a controversial fifth-inning no-catch call of a Jazz Chisholm Jr. bloop by center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela and then an unprofessional tirade in the booth by WEEI broadcaster Will Flemming, who called Chisholm a “bush league player” who “plays the game the wrong way” after Chisholm walked and stole second and third base in the eighth inning of a 7-1 game. The steals, which were ordered by manager Aaron Boone, became moot after reliever Jovani Morán served up back-to-back home runs to Austin Wells and Paul Goldschmidt to run the score to 10-1, leading manager Chad Tracy to crank up the Monasterio.

The Vaughn appearance was more notable because Brewers manager Pat Murphy sent the first baseman to the mound in the seventh inning of a 10-2 game, making him just the fifth position player to enter a game before the eighth this season. What’s more, Vaughn — who served up homers to Matt Shaw in the eighth and Michael Conforto and Alex Bregman in the ninth, broken up by an RBI single of his own in the top of the eighth — stuck around for two full innings, facing 18 batters and throwing 55 pitches, both season highs for position players; five others have thrown two full innings, with eight more getting either four or five outs. The Brewers bullpen wasn’t especially gassed; Murphy used Grant Anderson and Bryse Wilson to cover 4.2 innings the day before after the Rangers chased starter Dustin May in the fifth inning, and then Chad Patrick and DL Hall threw a total of 2.1 innings after Kyle Harrison yielded five homers and nine runs in 3.2 innings on Monday. Murphy was likely trying to preserve the rest of his bullpen for the remainder of a pivotal four-game series against the Cubs, who are second in the NL Central behind the Brewers. While Vaughn did double duty as a reliever and first baseman during his collegiate days at Cal, the length of his outing under non-emergency conditions felt extreme.

With the aforementioned mini-wave — which also included the Royals’ Luke Maile throwing a scoreless inning against the Guardians on Sunday and then Enrique Hernández doing the same for the Dodgers against the Cardinals on Tuesday — the single-season record for position player pitching (PPP) appearances in nine-inning games has been broken. Set just last year, it’s about to be obliterated, as we still have almost four full weeks to play:

With Monasterio’s appearance, every team has now used a position player to pitch in a nine-inning game at least once this season; the Yankees have also only used one, while the Rockies have used a major league-leading nine, and the A’s and Diamondbacks eight apiece. Individually, A’s superutilityman Carlos Cortes leads the majors with eight appearances; he’s ambidextrous, throwing right-handed while playing the infield (which he’s done for only one inning in the majors but over a hundred times in the minors) and left-handed in the outfield and on the mound.

Cortes worked as a closer in high school, but that’s not the case for the Rockies’ Brett Sullivan, a catcher whose seven appearances rank second; five other players have five such appearances this season, including two who have thrown for multiple teams:

It’s probably of little comfort that it takes rounding to the second decimal to push the rate of position players pitching to 1% of all appearances, because the current rate towers over those of previous seasons:

That’s almost a 22% increase year over year, and a 79% increase from two years ago, a point when it looked as though the trend was waning.

To dial back a bit, from 2016–18, the rate of PPP appearances more than doubled before plateauing from 2019–21. In the middle of the latter span, during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to waive two rules that had been introduced in February, one that limited teams to carrying 13 pitchers on their 26-man rosters and another that limited them to using position players to pitch only in extra innings, or in games where the score margin was more than six runs. Somewhere between MLB’s announcement of the rule and the publication of that year’s official rulebook, the language was revised to include score margins “equal to or more than” six runs.

Like many other pandemic-driven practices, the waiver continued through 2021 and into the start of the ’22 season. In the wake of the owners’ lockout and a shortened spring training, teams were allowed to carry 28 players through May 1, 2022, after which rosters were reduced to 26; at that point, the six-or-more-runs requirement finally went into effect, but not until May 30 were teams limited to 13 pitchers on their 26-player rosters. While just seven position players pitched between Opening Day and May 1 of that season, once rosters were trimmed to 26, even with the six-or-more-runs rule, the floodgates opened, with 121 more PPP appearances through the rest of the season. Understandably, the rules were revised for 2023, limiting PPP appearances in the ninth inning or earlier to those where a team trailed by eight or more runs, or, for the ninth, led by 10 or more runs. Over that season and the next, PPP usage plummeted, but it has returned with a vengeance in the form of the two highest seasonal rates.

The rebound of the past couple of years has coincided with slight upticks in both per-game scoring and the share of blowout games, which I’m defining here as those decided by eight or more runs, the threshold for inserting a position player to pitch:

That’s hardly a perfect relationship, in that the years before the pandemic included higher per-game scoring rates and larger shares of blowout games than we’re seeing today. Since position players as a group generally allow more than one run per inning — they have an 11.19 RA/9 this year — their increased usage is driving up scoring levels and blowout rates, albeit only by a wee bit. Consider that a replacement-level pitcher might be the most likely candidate to throw those mop-up innings, allowing about half as many runs per nine as a position player. If that’s the case, we’re talking about a league-wide total of 80-85 extra runs allowed so far this season, enough to raise scoring levels by roughly 0.02 runs per game.

That hardly constitutes a crisis, but judging by the dialog in my weekly chat and on social media — a very imperfect means of taking the public temperature, but one that spills over into blogs, podcasts, and radio — a small percentage of fans are worked up by this, for a number of reasons. One line of thinking is that the use of PPP makes such a mockery of the game that teams should be forced to forfeit, or that the league should introduce a mercy rule. Either way seems extreme and unnecessary given that other major professional team sports (football, basketball, hockey, soccer) don’t curtail blowout games. Mercy rules are in play during in the World Baseball Classic, but those are coupled with strict usage restrictions for pitchers that don’t exist during regular season baseball, safeguards for teams loaning their precious arms out to national squads.

Besides, even if games occasionally become one-sided routs, paying customers won’t be happy getting fewer innings than advertised, and teams will still want to sell concessions and merchandise. You may not like seeing that position player pitch, and you don’t have to stick around for it, but MLB’s owners aren’t going to let you mess with their money, and ballpark employees don’t want to lose income either.

Another line of thinking is that PPP somehow makes statistical accomplishments by hitters less pure — which, oh my sweet summer child. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Cy Young, and Joe DiMaggio set some of the game’s most hallowed records in leagues that were segregated, and additionally often included teams that were competitive afterthoughts due to finances, with no league-wide revenue sharing to prop them up. Young went 4-0 with an 0.49 ERA against the decrepit Cleveland Spiders in 1899, the year they went 20-134 after their roster was stripped bare. Ruth hit .429/.525/.788 with 18 homers in 61 games against an A’s team that lost 310 games from 1919–21, while he literally established new home run standards on an annual basis. You want to goose your blood pressure over the Cubs’ single-game home run record somehow being tainted by Vaughn serving up three meatballs? Prior to Monday night, hardly anyone knew the franchise record, or for that matter, the major league record. The answer is 10, set by the Blue Jays on September 14, 1987, a season that produced the highest home run rate on record to that point (1.04 per team per game). Where is the asterisks on that one?

I’ll add that even in this PPP-saturated era, none of Aaron Judge’s American League-record 62 homers from 2022, nor any of Cal Raleigh’s 60 homers from last year were hit off position players. For that matter, none of Barry Bonds’ 73 home runs in 2001 came against a position player, either.

Still, as a reaction to the continuing proliferation of PPP, it’s reasonable for MLB to take further steps to curb its frequency in blowouts. Raising the PPP threshold to a nine-run deficit for the losing team would cut into the number of those appearances, as would prohibiting them from happening before the eighth inning. Either or both steps might serve to concentrate more PPP within a smaller footprint, which appears to be the case since 2023, but from a competitive standpoint, so what?

Rule-wise, another thing to do is to cap the length of an individual PPP stint, whether by innings, pitches, or batters faced. Since the start of the 2023 season, position players have thrown two or more innings 31 times (6.7% of all PPP appearances in that span), with a four-inning stint by the Guardians’ David Fry (September 4, 2023 against the Twins) and a three-inning stint by the Angels’ Kevin Newman (July 8, 2025 against the Angels) the longest in terms of outs. Fry (64 pitches and 23 batters faced) is the only player in that span to surpass Vaughn’s totals, while the Angels’ Scott Kingery also faced 18 batters on September 6, 2025 against the A’s. Position players are taking one for the team with their outings and are hardly stretched out to be multi-inning relievers; it’s worth protecting them from injuring themselves.

I don’t think there’d be much objection to raising the bar to 12 runs before the winning team can call on a position player for the ninth, but already it’s such an infrequent occurrence it hardly seems worth bothering. Seven of this year’s PPP appearances are by teams winning those one-sided contests, including three by the Dodgers (all by Rojas). There were 12 such instances last year, including four by the Dodgers (all by Hernández), three in 2024, and nine in ’23. That’s 6.9% of all PPP appearances in that span, and 0.05% of all relief appearances. If you think that this is the most serious problem ailing baseball, please find puffier clouds to yell at.

As for extra-innings emergency situations, those are rare as well, with just 12 since the start of the 2016 season, and five in seven seasons since the Manfred Man was introduced in 2020. They’re a different matter entirely, but we can debate ditching the Manfred Man and calling games a tie after the 12th inning another day.

Last week, as part of its ongoing propaganda campaign ahead of the seemingly-inevitable lockout, MLB proposed some new roster rules, all pegged to a salary cap-and-floor system that has lower chances of adoption than the Angels’ playoff odds. One element of that proposal is that teams would set their rosters weekly rather than daily, and (ugh) be allowed to carry a 14th pitcher on their 26-man roster. This is supposed to correct for the endless churn of fungible relievers at the base of the food chain, but you don’t need a cap-and-floor system to do that, and with PPP already rising in the age of the 13th pitcher, the last thing these teams need is more pitchers to twiddle their thumbs while a position player gets roughed up. The way to tighten the screws on PPP usage is to make long relievers and third lefties throw an inning when they’re down 9-1. Maybe those guys can work on their knuckleballs.