The Evolution of Pitcher Usage - Juan Marichal

by Lincoln Mitchell

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack.

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On July 2nd 1963, Giants fans heading to Candlestick Park for a night game between the Milwaukee Braves and the Giants could have looked forward to a pitchers’ duel. The Braves were starting 42-year-old Warren Spahn who had already won 300 big league games and was in the midst of his last great season. The Giants were countering with their 25-year-old emergent ace Juan Marichal. Fans familiar with Candlestick Park also knew that the weather could turn quite chilly on a July night at the ballpark.

In addition to the two starting pitchers, there were five other future Hall of Famers in the lineups that day, Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews for the Braves and Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda for the Giants. Just over four hours later, the game ended when in the bottom of the 16th, Willie Mays hit a walk-off home run for the Giants for the only run of the evening. The most extraordinary thing about that game was that both Spahn and Marichal pitched complete games.

Spahn and Marichal were among the very last pitchers who completed more than half their games. Spahn, finished 57% of the 665 games he started in a big league career that spanned from 1942-1965. Marichal was one of two pitchers with 100 or more starts who began their career after 1955 who finished more than half their starts-Bob Gibson was the other. Marichal completed 53% of the 457 games he started, more than any other pitcher of that cohort.

Marichal was part of a group of pitchers whose careers were centered in the 1960s including Jim Bunning, Don Drysdale, Gibson, Ferguson Jenkins, Sandy Koufax, Gaylord Perry and a few others who coexisted with the rise of the reliever. These players racked up enormous numbers of innings and complete games, but were increasingly outliers. By the 1960s, only the very best pitchers were expected to pitch complete games. That trend continued, with fewer pitchers bearing that expectation through the 1970s.

Any one of these pitchers could have represented this era, but I chose Marichal for a few reasons. Marichal had a higher percentage of games completed than any of those pitchers and was also the first great player to hail from the Dominican Republic, so his significance goes beyond what he accomplished on the field. Marichal’s pitching motion, including his high leg kick, was one of the most regonizable in baseball history as Marichal mixed speeds, deliveries and pitches to befuddle National League hitters for a generation.

Unfortunately, Marichal is most remembered for the worst moment of a great career, when he clobbered Dodgers catcher John Roseboro over the head with a bad during a game in 1965. That was a singular act of violence, occurring at a complex time for both Roseboro and Marichal, but has come to unfairly define Marichal who, by all other accounts, was a decent and peaceful man.

That terrible incident occurred in the midst of Marichal’s greatest season. In 1965 he went 22-13 with a 2.13 ERA with 24 complete games and 10 shutouts over 295.1 innings for a Giants team that finished second by two games to the Dodgers. Marichal not only lost the Cy Young Award to Sandy Koufax that year, but did not even receive a single vote in the balloting. Marichal threw 20 or more complete games in a season five times, including a leage leading 30 in 1968.

Marichal’s 243-142 career win-loss record reflects both his excellent pitching and playing most of his career for pretty good solid Giants teams led by Willie Mays. Those 243 career wins are one fewer than Marichal’s total number of complete games.

Marichal pitched from 1960-1975, so his entire career was spent during the long era of the relief pitcher. During his first years with the Giants, the top relief pitcher on his team was Stu Miller, who was part of what might be called the Hoyt Wilhelm cohort of relievers. Miller was a fine pitcher who saved over 150 games but who will likely always be best remembered for being blown off the mound by the wind at Candlestick Park during the 1961 All-Star Game. In Marichal’s last big league start in April of 1975, ironically with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Mike Marshall, who became the first reliever to win the Cy Young Award the previous year, got the save.

During the final years of Marichal’s career, pitcher usage looked quite a bit like what it has been in the 21st century, but there were some key differences. Pitchers were not expected to throw complete games, but they were expected to get their team into the 6th or 7th inning. A four inning outing was considered a poor outing, and pitch counts were not much of a factor in deciding when to pull a pitcher.

One of the most significant differences between the Marichal’s era and today is that well into the 1980s, teams frequently carried ten, and sometimes even nine, pitchers. They very rarely had even an eleven man pitching staff. This meant that pitchers were expected to pitch when they were a little tired, and teams did not have a functionally infinite of fresh arms in the bullpen for almost every game. One of the overlooked impacts of this was that teams often carried six or seven position players on the bench, allowing for much more pinch-running, pinch-hitting and platooning. As pitching staffs grew, that aspect of baseball strategy all but disappeared.

When Marichal and Spahn faced off against each other on that chilly night at the ‘Stick, they each pitched what would now be three good starts worth of innings for most pitchers. The two aces combined for 40 complete games in 1963, 12 more than the total for all of MLB in 2024. Marichal pitched for 12 more seasons after that 1963, but by the time he retired, modern bullpens had changed the game. No starter in the almost half century since Marichal’s final season pitched thirty complete games and pitchers only surpassed the 20 complete game mark 29 times, most recently in 1986.