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NEW FOR 1897: THE FOUR-MAN PITCHING ROTATION!

For the last 10-15 years, the standard operating procedure of all the baseball leagues in existence has been for their teams to use a rotation of three pitchers. This made sense for several reasons:

• Pitching previously hadn’t put significant demands on the pitchers’ bodies.
• The 22-man roster limit meant teams weren’t keen on employing more than a handful of hurlers.
• The three-game series had become the standard across nearly all existing leagues.

However, as the number of games per season slowly increased across the leagues of the United States, so did the gradual demands on pitchers. For instance, the APBL started play in 1871 with a 90-game schedule, then switched to a 112-game schedule in 1884, and moved to its current 132-game schedule in 1890. While the underhanded soft-tossers of the inaugural season didn’t have any issues starting 45 games in their two-man rotations, the changes of 1884 that let pitchers throw as hard as they wanted to, and overhanded, meant that the starters of the 1890s were facing much more physical strain in having to start 40-45 games each.

There was also another problem: young pitcher angst. The fact that each team only had three regular pitchers, as opposed to eight position players, meant there were far fewer opportunities for prospects to develop. Many starters in the professional leagues didn’t get much of a chance to feature in a rotation until they were in their mid-20s, except for the very best prospects. Compare them to the best young position players, who would often get a chance to start at the highest level shortly after exiting their teenage years, and sometimes even before. Missouri’s Knud Van Steen is the best current example, as he started nearly twenty games at shortstop for the Bluebirds in the MWBL last year, and he did it as an 18-year-old the same year he was signed out of high school.

With these two problems in mind, a proposal was raised at the 1896 American Baseball Association offseason meetings: have every team switch to a four-man rotation. The idea was the pitchers would start every four days, and if there happened to be an off day in the middle of the rotation then pitcher #4 would be skipped. This would lessen the strain on pitchers’ arms over the course of a season while also giving more opportunities to younger hurlers.

The proposal was deemed reasonable enough, and the teams of the APBL and MWBA decided that the four-man rotation would be in use starting in 1897 (NOTE: in real life the four-man rotation was widely adopted starting around the turn of the 20th Century). The other two professional leagues, the Southeastern & Atlantic League and the Canadian Baseball League, quickly followed suit since their leagues had schedules nearly as long as the primary two.

The semi-professional leagues decided to hold off for the time being. Their seasons were 20-25 games shorter and they had less space on their reserve rosters, so the pitchers of leagues like the NYL weren’t physically punished as much and roster spots for them were more scarce.

Nonetheless, the four-man rotation was in, and it would probably be just a matter of time before it would be used everywhere.