by Matt Barr

Complete games

David Pinto has a fascinating graph showing the trend in complete games per start by starting pitchers in baseball history. As he writes, "If you look at the linear regression line, we should have hit zero complete games a couple of years ago."

My question: Absent a physical reason for this trend, e.g. pitchers having less stamina now than 100 years ago (not true), or pitching becoming progressively more physically difficult (to an extent, it is, but is this the answer?), this trend should be accompanied by a decline in offense. Why remove your starter earlier and earlier if you're not gaining some on-field advantage in preventing runs? Yet offense waxes and wanes seemingly without correlation with how many innings starters tend to go. Why?

I would guess higher salaries invested in pitchers make clubs more cautious with their arms, but the trend is not seemingly influenced by the onset of free agency and multimillion dollar guaranteed contracts. Oddly, the number of complete games per start briefly and slightly went up when the free agency era began, and its decline since hasn't been any more or less drastic than the 70 years before.

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