FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN

Thanks to 2020, many expect 2021 to be the year of innings limits.

After the coronavirus pandemic wiped out the 2020 minor league season and cut Major League Baseball’s season to 60 games, there has been plenty of time spent this spring wondering how teams will fill the many innings that need to be pitched as the game returns to a 162-game season.

For many years, the conventional wisdom in baseball has revolved around the idea of limiting innings as a means of preventing injuries. Increases in workload from one year to the next were restrained by a percentage increase. If that approach is carried into 2021, we will see a lot of pitchers, but none of whom will throw all that much. Lance Lynn led the major leagues with 84 innings in 2020. Even with the postseason included, no pitcher threw 100 innings last year.

How, then, does one remedy the notion of moving from one 60-game season shortened by a pandemic to a 162-game season without much concern for the increase in innings that pitchers will see across the board in 2021? The answer seems quite simple. With the advanced science, technology and biometric data individual to each player and his arm—and available to teams—the industry is beginning to shift to letting pitchers pitch while focusing more on monitoring than on fixed rules.

Conventional wisdom may lead