Earlier this week, I wrote about the lasting power of bullpen roles and how the age of analytics hasn’t yet led to the expected dissolution of these roles. In writing this article, I failed to mention one area where the use of analytics has most certainly had an effect on the bullpen: reliever workloads. That’s what I want to talk about today because the Yankees’ bullpen finds itself in a very precarious state going into this season.
It’s no surprise that starters are pitching less and less. In an earlier article that I wrote this offseason, I mentioned that, on average, the innings pitched by starting pitchers per game has been falling for the last few years, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.