Just to underscore our Peerless Leader's astute commentary...

 

While watching the end of the Mets' latest fiasco yesterday, I heard a great bit of commentary from Ron Darling. 

(This is the sort of thing you get when you hire actually smart and funny people to do your TV color commentary, as opposed to whatever sycophant Brian Cashman favors.)

Darling was watching a Mets journeyman, Yohan Ramírez, turn a 5-4 lead into a 9-5 deficit in the 8th. Ramírez was in his second inning of work. He had pitched a 1-2-3 frame in the seventh, but when he got into trouble in the next inning, the Mets had no one to replace him.

Their bullpen, it seemed, was already fried, just over a week into the season. Much like ours.

Darling sounded a theme he has harped on before, speaking to Gary Cohen:

"You know, Gary, this is really the repercussions of baseball deciding to have starting pitching go less and less and less time.

"You have 13 pitchers on the staff and you never had so little..."

Amen.

And I would just add that, beyond the practical ramifications—player after player after player who is being paid good money, spending their best years in surgery or rehab—there is the way that baseball is killing the spirit of the game.

In baseball, the starting pitcher is the hero.

He is the guy who starts each play, and if he shuts down the other team, they cannot win. Baseball has been reducing the starter's role for decades—though for a long time, they substituted the heroic closer.

Now, nobody's heroic. You might as well have the robots throw the ball. 

Everybody is a 2-5 innings guy who throws everything hard—just like every batter is a .230 hitter with some pop.  

Teams like the Yankees—indeed, almost all teams—are doing more than killing arms. They're killing the game.