I’ve been a fan of the Dodgers’ Kenta Maeda for a long time. I followed his career closely in Japan, where he was a great pitcher at the top of the class just behind Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka. I definitely thought he was good enough to be a successful major league pitcher.
I also liked Maeda because he was a small right-hander, and I was a small right-handed player in my playing days, now oh so long ago. Like Tim Lincecum, Maeda was small, but he could pitch, and I felt there ought to be a place his talents in MLB.
From the beginning MLB teams were suspicious of Meda because of his size. The Dodgers signed him on a deal that guaranteed him only $25 million over eight years, but was chock full of incentives if he could prove he could be a successful MLB starter.
Last season, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts decided pretty quickly that Maeda’s innings had to be strictly limited. While at the time I thought that this might reflect some latent MLB prejudice against small right-handers, on further analysis, I was probably wrong.
Roberts is literally the product of an American Marine and a Japanese woman his father met while serving in Japan. (I, and probably lots of other baseball afficionados, had assumed that the Dodgers’ manager was the son of Panamanian ball player Dave Roberts, who was playing in Japan the year and the year before the now manager was born.) The Dodgers’ manager was a below average sized major leaguer in his own day.
Instead, Roberts decided quickly and probably accurately that it would be tough for a pitcher Maeda’s size to start every fifth game. In fact, this has been a problem for all Japanese pitchers moving to MLB, including those with MLB-sized bodies like Darvish, Tanaka and Hisashi Iwakuma (it’s been a problem for a lot of American-born pitchers too.) In Japan, starters typically start only once a week, because so many games are washed out during the wet Japanese summer months.
This season, Maeda has been the victim of the new home run trend, and he’s been in and out of the Dodgers’ talent-packed starting rotation. He’s become basically a spot starter (and spot reliever), starting when the team doesn’t have an extra game off to rest the other starters.
Maeda has been remarkably successful in this role. Through June 9, pitching as part of the regular five-man rotation, Maeda had a 4.95 ERA. Since then he’s made five starts on average eight days apart, and he’s allowed more than one run in a start only once, on a day when he had only four full days’ rest since his previous start.
I’ve been following MLB since 1978, which is pretty much the entire era of five-man pitching staffs. Many is the time I’ve seen teams try to use 4+-man rotations, basically skipping the fifth man every time there was an extra day off that allowed the other four starters their normal rest.
This strategy has almost never worked. The fifth starter was routinely skipped because he really wasn’t an adequate starter at all. The fifth starter, who wasn’t any good to begin with, tended to be even worse when he didn’t pitch regularly. Also, one of the other four adequate or better starters tended to get hurt at some point in the season, which rendered the strategy completely ineffective.
This season, the Dodgers are so deep with talent that they have the starters, the bullpen, and the pitcher in Maeda to make this strategy work well for the first time I can remember. Maeda is a veteran pitcher who can be still be effective starting every eight to 12 games, plus the occasional one or so inning relief appearance in between, who may well benefit from starting half as often as the typical MLB starter.
Maeda has also been willing to give the team whatever it needs, even though the infrequent starts hit him directly in the pocketbook because of his incentive-laden contract. Apparently, Maeda is mature enough to realize that he’s making more in the U.S. than he would have made if he’d stayed in Japan. Plus, the reasonable likelihood of a World Series check and ring probably do a great deal to assuage any hurt feelings Maeda might otherwise have.
I’m a strong believer that managers need to be extremely flexible in terms of using the actual players they have on their rosters, with their specific skill sets and specific weaknesses, in order to tease out as many regular season wins as they possibly can in any given season. Managers’ jobs are too tenuous not to do every single thing within their power to win ball games.
Managers often aren’t flexible in large part because the players demand consistency in their roles (and the players are now well better paid than the managers), and because there are certain well-established notions about how managers should use their players, built up over generations, and known to the sportswriters who cover the games like professionals. It’s the reason that teams without great closers generally do not elect to use bullpens-by-committee based on match-ups, even though this would make a great deal of sense if you don’t have a true closer.
Roberts may well end up sending in Maeda for every fifth start if somebody else in the starting rotation gets hurt. I’m just trying to point out that using Maeda on a less regular basis seems to be working very well for the Dodgers and that Maeda might be exactly the pitcher to make such a strategy work. The 2017 Dodgers are currently on a pace to win 113 games. It’s hard to find fault with that.