The Evolution of Pitcher Usage - Mike Marshall

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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The 1974 World Series was quickly overshadowed by the fall classic one year later which is still remembered as one of the greatest World Series ever. However, the 1974 matchup between the Oakland A's and the Los Angeles Dodgers was also great baseball with a lot of drama. The A's won in five games, but the series felt closer than that. Over the course of that World Series, the Dodgers only scored five fewer runs than the A's. Furthermore, not only were four of the five games decided by one run but each of those games was had a final score of three to two.

In game two, the only one the Dodgers won, Los Angeles was leading 3-0 going into the 9th inning as future Hall of Famer Don Sutton was throwing a shutout. However, Sutton allowed the first two runners that inning to reach base so manager Walter Austin turned to the bullpen.

Joe Rudi greeted the new Dodgers pitcher with a single to drive in two runs. Then with the dangerous Gene Teance at the plate and the tying run on first base A's manager Alvin Dark sent Herb Washington, a pinch running specialist who had stolen 51 bases while never coming to the plate once in 1974, to run for Rudi. Tenace quickly struck out and then with pinch-hitter Angel Manguel, a largely forgotten but key player on those A's teams, at the plate representing the winning run, the Dodgers pitcher picked off Washington. Manguel struck out a few pitchers later and that was the ball game.

The Dodgers reliever in that ninth inning was coming off one of the most extraordinary seasons of any pitcher in baseball history. Mike Marshall had a 15 -12 record with 21 saves and over 200 innings pitched, all out of the bullpen, in 1974. Most spectacularly, he appeared in 106 of the Dodgers 162 games just a smidge below two-thirds of their games and still the record for most games by a pitcher in one season.

Marshall set another record finishing 83 games, just over half, of the Dodgers games. A few years later he finished 84 games while pitching for the Minnesota Twins. Marshall still has the first and second most games finished in a single season. In that 1974 World Series, Marshall pitched in every game, giving up only one run over nine innings.

The 1970s was the height of the fireman era. Firemen were not saved for the ninth inning like closers, but were brought in to get their team out of a jam at more or less any time in the game. That role was seen as so important that this was the first time that relievers of any kind were broadly recognized and, in some cases, became stars. During that decade, three relievers, Mashall in 1974, Sparky Lyle in 1977 and Bruce Sutter in 1979 won Cy Young Awards. Additionally, Hall of Famers Goose Gossage and Rollie Fingers emerged as stars, and key players on World Series winners during the 1970s.

One reason these kinds of pitchers were appreciated more than in previous eras is because they pitched so many innings out of the bullpen. Marshall’s 208.1 innings in 1974 and 179 the previous season are still the two most innings pitched in a season by a pitcher who did not start a game. Moreover, of the 71 seasons in which a pitcher threw 125 innings without a single start, 29 were in the 1970s and 50 occurred between 1965-1985. No pitcher has accomplished that feat since Duane Ward in 1990.

The long 1970s were also the only time when relief pitchers were recognized as hugely valuable players while some starting pitchers were still finishing many of the games they started. For example in Marshall’s ground-breaking 1974 season, nine pitchers, all in the American League, completed 20 or more games. Three years later when Sparkly Lyle won the American League Cy Young Award, his Yankees teammate Mike Torrez completed 15 games, while Jim Palmer and Nolan Ryan each completed 22 games.

Marshall pitched from 1968-1981 and in addition to producing some of the best and most notable seasons for a relief pitcher, was known as a bit of an oddball. That was partially beacuse he was very serious about the science of pitching and ended up getting Ph.D. in exercise physiology from Michigan State. Naturally, some of his ideas about pitching and arm health were considered unusual and contrary to conventional baseball wisdom.

Marshall first became widely known to baseball fans because he was featured prominently in Jim Bouton’s seminal book Ball Four. Marshall, shared Bouton’s offbeat sense of humor, irreverence, fascination with pitching and was probably Bouton’s closest friend on those 1969 Seattle Pilots. In 1983, Bouton’s ex-wife, Bobbie and Marshall’s ex-wife Nancy published a book Home Games about the experience of being married to, and then divorced from, big league ballplayers.

Marshall was not the best reliever of his era-Gossage probably was. However the way Marshall was used and his extraordinary durability, informed by his own theories about how pitcher usage and arm health, are exteme examples of pitcher usage during the first decade when relievers were finally broadly recognized, valued and sought after by teams.