I’ve been one of Josh Tomlin‘s biggest supporters throughout his career, but there’s no defending him now. He’s on a terrible streak and he’s costing the Indians games—everyone can agree on that right now. He’s been so bad that Mike Clevinger is likely to replace him the rotation, at least for a short period of time, while Tomlin works out his issues.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about right now.
Tomlin has been a player Indians fans love to hate for a long time, and as the team has turned into contenders and the bandwagon fans are piling on, they’re also piling on with the Tomlin hate.
But while Tomlin is the guy receiving this negative attention right now, it really isn’t about him. It’s about a misunderstanding of how pitching staffs work.
There are 30 teams in MLB and five starters on each staff, which means the league needs 150 starting pitchers at any given time. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t 150 pitchers who deserve to be pitching the majors. Not even close to 150, in fact.
So while fans complain about Tomlin and his recent implosion, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that every team is dealing with the same problems.
To get an idea of how terrible the average fifth starter is, let’s break down the top 150 starters in MLB. The table below shows the 150 pitchers with the most innings thrown as a starter, ranked by ERA. It’s a crude way of ranking them, but it gets the point across.
As you can see, fifth starters are absolutely, unequivocally horrendous.
If we split up these 150 starters equally, every team would have at least one pitcher with an ERA over 5.00, and a few would have two. And as bad as Tomlin has been lately, there are still 48 others starters with a worse ERA—FORTY EIGHT!
Again, this isn’t meant to be a defense of Tomlin. He’s terrible right now. But it’s worth looking at the big picture before panicking.
Take a glance in that fifth starter column. The Orioles have four pitchers in there. Boston as two. Toronto and Detroit each have one. Even Texas, which looks like the most complete team in the AL, has Derek Holland at 4.92 and A.J. Griffin, just one spot ahead of Tomlin. Basically every contender has serious issues with their starting rotation.
So while there are plenty of reasons to worry about the Indians every fifth day right now, you can comfort yourself by understanding that every other fan base in the AL—literally every other fan base—feels exactly the same way.
if you said the 5th starter would be 11-8, you’d be happy. the problem is will he win another game this season?
I’m not overly worried about Tomlin because he is our fifth starter, we can replace him with Clevinger, we don’t have sky-high expectations for him, and I can remember earlier this season when he was awesome. I am worried about our fourth starter (Salazar, who is terrible right now), our third starter (Bauer, who is starting to fade down the stretch), and our second starter (Carrasco, who in the four-start stretch prior to his latest, and admittedly stellar, start, had an ERA north of four). That leave Kluber as the only starter I trust. According to ESPN, he the projected winner for the Cy Young again, which is nice, but we won’t go very far into the playoffs with only one reliable pitcher, no matter how good of a roll he’s on.
Can’t agree anymore. I was there in Goodyear, Arizona when he won his last start to earn the 5th starter position. I feel for him, but I have zero confidence winning a game that he pitching in right now. Zero. Wish Cody Anderson did something.
On this date in Indians history…
One year ago today, Cody Anderson made his last appearance of three appearances in August, and had an ERA for the month at 7.24 (his ERA so far this year is very similar at 7.15). He then went on to have a magical run in September, with an ERA of 1.38 over those last 6 starts.
It’s “Magical September Cody Anderson” Time!