Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has downplayed the possibility of the league implementing minimum inning requirements for starting pitchers. Instead, he suggested that the league could incentivize teams to have their starters work deeper into games by altering transaction rules.
"Just too blunt an instrument to fix this problem," Manfred said during a recent podcast appearance with Chris O'Gorman's Questions for Cancer Research website, as spotted by The Athletic. "I do see both problems as pretty serious. I think the injury issue, our physicians have studied this carefully [and] they continue to believe that the focus on velocity and spin rate is a specific cause of the increase of injuries."
That said, Manfred conceded, the starting pitcher has always been the face of the game, particularly citing marketing and even who broadcasts focus on. That's when he introduced his idea about transactions.
"One of the things that happens today, guy pitches three days in a row, he gets outrighted, they bring somebody else in to give him some rest, as opposed to him staying on the roster the whole time," Manfred said. "I think we need to create incentives through things like roster rules, transaction rules for clubs to develop pitchers who go deeper in the game. But I don't think it can be prescriptive: 'You have to go six innings.' I think it has to be a series of rules that create incentive for the clubs to develop pitchers of a certain type."
MLB's innings-per-start rate has declined over the years, from 6.3 per pop in 1984 to 5.9 in 2004 to 5.2 in 2024. As Manfred noted, the league views starting pitchers as a narrative and promotional hook -- it's understandable, then, why the league would prefer teams deploy their starters in a more traditional manner rather than turning to the bullpen to chain together four to five innings of largely anonymous relievers.
An innings requirement has been one of the ideas bandied about over the years as a "solution" to this perceived problem. Another proposed idea, the "Double Hook" concept that ties each team's DH slot to their starting pitcher's presence, was experimented with in the independent Atlantic League. Manfred, for his part, suggested that the league would rather focus on altering the roster rules that allow clubs to treat their pitching staffs as interchangeable pieces.
MLB's current Collective Bargaining Agreement with the MLB Players Association expires after the 2026 season. It's too early to know for sure, but it seems reasonable to think this topic will come up as part of those negotiations -- especially if starters' roles continue to decline over the ensuing two seasons.