The next five months will be an advertisement for the virtues of quality, young pitching — a shrinking pool in this current version of Major League Baseball. General managers will bemoan how other general managers are too reluctant to trade their young pitching. Team executives will grumble about the cost of free-agent pitching and the risks associated with it. Managers will approach postseason games with quicker hooks than ever for their ineffective starters, preferring to deploy bullpens filled with one-inning pitchers.
It all makes a pitcher such as Aaron Nola look even more valuable.
No one will apply an “ace” label to Nola because that is reserved for the rarest of pitcher; one could argue there are fewer than a dozen current aces in the game.