Controversy surrounding José Caballero’s pre-pitch routine struck twice in the Bronx this week, with the first time prompting the benches to clear and the second causing unnecessary confusion. In the eighth inning of the Yankees’ 8-5 win over the Pirates on Monday night, Caballero did what he usually does — he dug into the batter’s box and didn’t look up at the pitcher until there were eight seconds left on the pitch timer. The idea is to disrupt the pitcher’s rhythm. Pittsburgh reliever Dennis Santana took exception to Caballero’s tactic — which, again, he has done many, many times for the last four seasons — and yelled at him after getting him to ground into a double play. The benches emptied, and the Pirates complained to MLB about it.
Turns out, the griping worked. After the game, the league told the umpires to more strictly enforce the rules requiring batters to engage with the pitcher with no fewer than eight seconds left on the clock. Instead of warning the batter, and then calling an automatic strike for a repeat violation, the umpires were directed to assess a strike to Caballero for attempting to deceive the pitcher, no matter how much time was left on the pitch timer. Both Caballero and the Yankees claim the league did not notify them about the change. As crew chief Adrian Johnson told a pool reporter after, “He’s been warned all season. We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him. That’s what it is. It’s a violation.” Along with Johnson’s poor phrasing, the sudden change in enforcement is quite jarring and, in my opinion, inappropriate. If what the Yankees said is true — that the league didn’t tell them about the change — then I think this is an overstep by MLB to single out a player. Caballero accused the umpires and the league of “picking on” him. But even if MLB did give the Yankees and Caballero the heads up, I think the escalated enforcement is an incorrect interpretation of the rule. I love that Caballero uses the pitch clock to his advantage; pitchers can hold the ball and run down the clock to zero, so why shouldn’t batters be allowed to wait their full allotted time before engaging with the pitcher? Moreover, I also don’t know how Caballero is deceiving the pitcher by doing something he does so frequently. He’s certainly trying to annoy the opposing pitcher, but that’s not deception — that’s good gamesmanship.
Anyway, that’s the last you’ll read about Caballero in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about Esmerlyn Valdez’s heater, Gunnar Henderson’s woes against fastballs, how to fix the Angels, and whether anyone will break Jesse Orosco’s record for games pitched. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
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Esmerlyn Valdez just hit another homer [in Monday’s game against the Yankees]. Just how excited can I be? He reminds me of Nick Kurtz last year – maybe not the same batted ball profile, but in terms of the excitement and total breakout. — Noah
The easiest way to answer this question is to say that you can be as excited as you want to be. I assume you’re a Pirates fan, and you’re asking this question because you don’t want to get your hopes up for no reason, but for even a non-partisan observer, what Valdez is doing right now is extremely exciting. Entering Friday’s series opener against the Cubs, he was slashing .292/.382/.717 with 13 home runs, a 188 wRC+, and 1.8 WAR in just 131 plate appearances spread across 34 games. Those are staggering numbers for any player over a 34-game stretch, but especially for a 22-year-old rookie ascending to stardom on the best Pirates team in a decade.
And those are just the numbers. It’s even more exhilarating to watch him hit. Bending his knees and assuming the fundamental ready position, Valdez stands slightly open in the right-handed batter’s box. A line running perpendicular from the tip of his big left toe would cut his back one in half. With his eyes locked on the pitcher, he smoothly bounces his bat off his back shoulder to remain in rhythm as he waits. His whole setup is reminiscent of A-Rod. Then, when the pitch comes, he unleashes a vicious hack that generates enough force to astonish spectators all on its own, even when the only thing he connects with is the air in front of him.
From an entertainment standpoint, that’s a good thing, because Valdez is one of those sluggers who comes up empty a lot. For all the damage he’s doing — he’s running a ridiculous .425 isolated slugging — he’s striking out in 38.2% of his plate appearances. That’s more than three percentage points higher than Kyle Schwarber’s mark; the Phillies slugger has the highest strikeout rate among qualifiers. More concerning is that Valdez is whiffing 35.2% of the time when he swings at pitches in the zone. That’s the highest whiff rate among players with at least 100 swings on in-zone pitches this season, and 1.7 percentage points above the next guy, Munetaka Murakami.
Those strikeouts are concerning, to be sure, but there are three reasons to believe that Valdez will be able to weather the whiffs enough to be a productive player moving forward. The first, of course, is his power. He offsets his strikeouts by getting the most out of his batted balls. He’s not going to keep slugging .700 or BABIPing .392, but he hits the ball very hard and optimizes his contact. We’re talking about incredibly small samples, but he has pulled 11 of the 29 fly balls he’s hit so far in the majors, and homered on six of those 11. The thing is, he’s not depending on his pull-side power; he also uses the opposite field when lifting the ball, with 11 fly balls going to right field and five of those leaving the park. It’s true that he has enough power to go yard to the deepest parts of the park, but it’s certainly easier to do so toward the lines.
He is also making the most of his contact by not pulling the balls he doesn’t put in the air. Twenty-three of his 30 combined groundballs and line drives have been hit up the middle or to the opposite field, and on those batted balls, he’s batting .609 with an .826 slugging percentage. On his seven combined pulled grounders and line drives, he’s batting .286 and slugging 429. Again, the sample sizes are minuscule, so it’s hard to tell from the data alone if this is intentional or happenstance. Luckily, though, the Pirates were in New York this week for a three-game series against the Yankees, so I asked Valdez about it. Through an interpreter, he said that his basic approach before every pitch is to hit the ball up the middle, and then when he gets a pitch that he thinks he can do damage against, he reacts to it and adjusts in real time, turning on the pitch and connecting with the bottom half of the ball to launch it to the pull side or letting it travel and driving it the other way.
The second reason to believe in Valdez is his plate discipline. Despite all the strikeouts, he has an advanced feel for the strike zone. He’s chasing just 23.7% of the pitches he sees outside the zone; the league-average chase rate is 30.3%. That selectivity is what Eric Longenhagen highlighted in his report on Valdez in early June:
Valdez has excellent plate discipline and shows no splits of suspicion that might indicate he’s simply passive. He’s a selective hitter; he doesn’t expand a ton with two strikes or against breaking balls, and he also attacks pitches in the heart of the plate. This helps weaponize Valdez’s dangerous all-fields power against pitches in the lower two thirds of the strike zone. He has enough juice to go deep to the opposite field gap, and when he isn’t crushing mistake breaking balls, he’s hooking a lot of them down the third base line for potential doubles.
Eric also noted that — and this is the third reason to believe — Valdez cut his strikeout rate in the minor leagues for two consecutive seasons (from 30.6% in 2024 to 24.6% last year to 21.5% this season) before his call-up. Considering he is only 22 and has made fewer than 150 trips to the plate in the majors, it’s reasonable to expect his strikeout rate to go down as he gains experience against big league pitching.
Bottom line: You should definitely be excited about Valdez, and I think you should have hope in him, too.
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I’ve enjoyed the mailbag since you began it. Thanks!
I recently read a statistic about Gunnar Henderson’s dismal performance against four-seam fastballs this year. A brief look at Statcast data shows he generated about seven extra runs against four-seamers last year, and has already been about eight runs below average this year. He’s whiffing more and making worse contact. I think it could be interesting to dig into what’s gone wrong — is he late? That would be surprising for a healthy young player (I think?). I’d definitely be interested in reading more about it if it strikes your curiosity.
Thanks for the mailing,
Eastman
Davy Andrews: Hi Eastman! First of all, you have a cool name, and as someone who had the responsibility of naming a human earlier this year, I’m curious how you ended up with it. If you feel inclined to share, please tell Matt to tell me. Second, at the risk of starting our relationship with a criticism, I want to note that your question actually contained one misstatement, but that’s OK because it made the question even more interesting. Henderson is indeed struggling against four-seamers like never before, but he’s actually whiffing against them less than ever. He’s at 19%, the first time he’s ever been below 22%. That sure is weird, right? Henderson is making more contact than ever against four-seamers, but the results have never been worse. (I answered this question back on Monday, so the numbers here might have changed some since then, but the overall analysis remains the same.)
There may be some bad luck going on, as his .290 xwOBA against four-seamers is 50 points above his actual wOBA of .240, but it doesn’t seem like it’s all bad luck. That’s his worst career xwOBA against four-seamers by nearly 80 points, and his hard-hit rate, though still excellent at 51%, is his lowest against the pitch by more than seven points.
Clearly, Henderson is not hitting four-seamers as hard as he used to. Weirdly, he’s also seeing four-seamers 28% of the time, and that’s the lowest mark of his career, too. Also weirdly, he’s not struggling against other fastballs like sinkers and cutters. It’s just four-seamers. Let’s do as you suggested and get into the bat tracking aspects.
First, Henderson’s bat speed against four-seamers has dropped in each of the past two years. It was 75.7 mph in 2024, 74.4 mph in 2025, and is 73.7 mph in 2026. Those are still high numbers, but they’re also fairly big drops. You know why that’s not weird? Because his bat speed has dropped across the board. It’s dropped against literally every pitch type this year, after doing the exact same thing last year.
Over the past two years, Henderson’s bat speed has dropped from the 96th percentile to the 76th. I feel confident that you know how numbers work, so you know that the 76th percentile is still way above the league average, but I can’t stress to you how big a drop that is. Henderson had elite bat speed. He was in the top 10 among qualified players in each of the past three seasons. He’s now 41st. That’s still great, but a drop that big, two full ticks of bat speed, is a huge, huge deal. And despite the improved contact rate on four-seamers, it doesn’t seem to be the case that Henderson is trading power for contact. His overall zone contact rate has dropped this year, as has his squared-up rate. He’s just swinging softer, and because he’s also making worse swing decisions, he’s walking less, striking out more, and hitting the ball, on average, 1.6 mph softer than he did last year and 2.3 mph softer than he did the year before. It’s a disastrous turn of events, to the point where this Rookie of the Year who finished fourth in the MVP voting just two years ago is now a below-average hitter.
The four-seamer may just be the canary in the coal mine here. Henderson can’t catch up to it like he once did, and at some point, pitchers are going to realize it and start throwing it a lot more. Regardless, I honestly don’t know what’s going on in the big picture. I don’t think Henderson is hurt. Back in May, Jarrett Seidler ventured a hypothesis at Baseball Prospectus. He noticed that Henderson’s pull fly ball rate had skyrocketed – and indeed it has not yet come down; his Pull Air rate was 15% last year and is now just under 25% – and figured that Henderson had gone too far down the path of lifter-puller swing optimization. I think Jarrett is one of the sharpest analysts out there, and I would be really curious to see if he still thinks this is the culprit a couple months later. If this is just an approach thing, then the Orioles have been remiss in letting it linger. But this deep into the season, knowing that Henderson’s bat speed has been dropping for two years now, I have to imagine that even if it’s part of the problem, something deeper is going on with his swing.
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Hi team,
If you were hired as the general manager of the Los Angeles Angels tomorrow, how would you operate within the Arte Moreno Box? You face a hard cap at the luxury tax threshold, a mandate to always be in win-now mode, a veto on trading expiring superstars for prospect hauls, and an owner historically reluctant to invest in foundational player development. Since a traditional multi-year teardown is explicitly forbidden, what market inefficiencies or strategic loopholes can you exploit? Is there a current MLB model you could successfully copy to build a sustainable winner under these exact constraints?
Thanks,
P
Michael Baumann: It’s a tough job, to be sure. I’m told that if you’re in a management position, the more time you spend managing down (guiding and assisting your subordinates), as opposed to managing up (protecting your boss’s feelings and running interference so your team can work) the better. I don’t know this from personal experience, because I avoid professional responsibility like the plague, but it’s something I’ve heard.
My impression of Perry Minasian’s time running the Angels is that he spent a lot of time managing up. Probably more than any other GM in baseball. The best thing for the Angels right now might be for interim GM John Mozeliak to approach the job like he’s already a dead man walking, and do what he can without getting fired before the trade deadline.
I would love to tell you that I’d be able to walk into the dining room on Arte Moreno’s yacht and tell the bossman some hard truths about the state of the franchise. But presumably Minasian tried that, and even if he didn’t, there’s been no shortage of public reporting about the effect of Moreno’s idiosyncrasies on the team.
But this isn’t the only team with an owner that needs to be managed up to. It’s the common thread you’ll find in most of the more dysfunctional teams in the league: the Mets, the Giants, the Rockies, the White Sox (at least until a couple months ago). So it’s not a unique problem. You just have to pick your battles.
I think you did a good job of detailing the Arte Moreno problem, so I’ll just restate those criteria quickly: Hard cap at the luxury tax, no teardowns, no trading superstars, reluctance to invest in player development infrastructure.
It really shouldn’t be too hard to build a respectable team under those conditions. The luxury tax threshold is $244 million this year, less than a little under $20 million for the pre-arb bonus pool and player benefits. And say what you will about Arte — he’s been happy to spend in the $200 million neighborhood as often as not. I know a lot of my analysis involves calling owners cheap and saying the solution to everything is spending more money, but $200 million still buys you a lot of baseball team.
“No trading superstars” isn’t that big a problem; the Shohei Ohtani situation in 2023 was a nightmare, but it was unique. Who else do the Angels even have, anyway? Mike Trout has a full no-trade clause and no desire to leave. Zach Neto still has three years of team control left; I’d just as soon hang on to him. Everyone else is expendable.
With a competitive payroll and little trade value on the big league roster, I wouldn’t even want to do a teardown. It wouldn’t really do the Angels much good.
The one sticking point is the scouting and player development issue. That, more than anything else, is the Angels’ problem. They can’t develop talent as well as their competitors, which means they’re not only missing out on the next generation of superstars, they’re having to pay $10 million on the open market for their 2-WAR bang-average roster filler, when other teams can get those players internally for less.
If there’s any way to move Moreno on this, I’d try to find it. Because if you spend $1 million on scouts and data nerds, it’ll be worth it if you find or develop even one good player every five years. Spend a few million upgrading your complex in Tempe, and it’ll pay for itself by the end of the decade. You want to know how the Rays and Brewers compete with fewer resources than the Angels? It’s this.
I’d do whatever it takes to convince Arte to invest in infrastructure. Charts, tables, slide decks, midnight harassment, Candygram, the whole nine yards. Take it out of the big league payroll, I don’t care. I’d rather invest in the ability to grow my own big leaguers for the next decade than pay for another decline-phase Jorge Soler every couple years. It takes patience and vision, but it’s the only way the Angels will win anything within their owner’s lifetime.
If so empowered, I wouldn’t only steal the best and brightest minds from around the league, but I’d also try to find people the other 29 teams are overlooking. No Ivy League MBAs allowed; I’d recruit analysts from state schools and HBCUs. If you’re looking for the next Theo Epstein or Andrew Friedman in the same place the last one came from, you’ll only ever find a poor imitation.
Why is this so important? Because if the Angels continue to compete with their most cost-effective avenue to success closed off, they’re left with… basically what Minasian did. I’ll give him credit: He tried stuff. A fair number of challenge trades. Extreme college-heavy drafts. The Hail Mary deadline of 2023, when he went all-in on the minute chance that the Angels could finally get Ohtani to the playoffs.
All of these are low-percentage plays, but Minasian understood that he wasn’t going to win by playing the game the same way as his competitors. Absent that homegrown talent pipeline and ability to develop players at the big league level, I don’t see a better path to victory.
The one thing I would do is concentrate as much of my free agent spending as possible on top-tier players. Moreno has never been afraid to pull the trigger on a big free agent, and “90% of the Dodger lifestyle with 15% of the hassle” is a pretty attractive sales pitch.
Now, signing Josh Hamilton, C.J. Wilson, Albert Pujols, and Anthony Rendon (I’m sure I’m forgetting a couple guys, but you get the gist) didn’t exactly work out. But the mistake badly run teams keep making is this: The more you spread your free agent money around, the less likely you are to end up with a star.
In the 2023 offseason, $40 million a year would buy you Aaron Judge. Or, it could buy you Brandon Nimmo and José Abreu. The next year: $30 million a year gets you Blake Snell, or Rhys Hoskins and Kyle Gibson. I could go on. Just pay the money for the Cadillac free agents, and figure out the rest later. Like I said, $200 million a year buys a lot of ballplayer.
The Angels’ GM gig is definitely one of the hardest out there, and you definitely don’t want to work for an owner who wants to meddle as much as Moreno does. But blaming “the owner” does oversimplify the problem somewhat. It’s one specific quirk of the owner — the refusal to invest in player development and amateur player acquisition — that’s really killing this team, and has put it in such a big hole. The other stuff you can work around.
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Hello –
I have a question about my go-to Winfield Game start word: Jesse Orosco. Jesse’s 1,252 games pitched is the most all time. I see this record as unbreakable, at least for decades, and I’m interested in your thoughts.
The current active leaders, as I write this, are Kenley Jansen (20th place at 963), Aroldis Chapman (30th place at 897), and Craig Kimbrel (36th place at 881). Each is 38 years old, and I don’t think they’ll do it. I think the only “active” player in his 20s in the top 1,000 (i.e., more than Johan Santana) may be Emmanuel Clase, and that’s not going to happen. The most likely among active players might be Tanner Scott, who is 31 years old and in 485th place at 487 games.
My sense — and please correct me if I’m wrong — is that pitcher health and longevity is declining. And the three-batter rule is going to limit opportunities to pitch an absurd number of games in a season. Is Jesse’s record unbreakable until these trends reverse? What combination of pitcher type and change in circumstances do you see resulting in the record being broken?
Ryan in Maryland
As I’ve often said when evaluating the prospects of various controversial candidates for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, “forever” and “never” are very long times. I think that’s generally true for the record book as well. I’m pretty certain Cy Young’s record of 511 wins will never be broken because pitchers just don’t handle the kind of workloads they did 125 years ago. I don’t see anyone on the horizon likely to break Orosco’s record, but my level of certitude for that one is lower, in part because it takes less skill — facing three batters maybe three times a week in victory or defeat rather than pitching well enough and remaining durable enough to rack up 25 wins per year for over two decades — and in part because it wouldn’t take nearly as much to undo the three-batter rule, which was introduced in 2020, as it would to redefine a starting pitcher’s qualification to earn a win.
Still, I’m not holding my breath in anticipation of somebody breaking Orosco’s record because the game has changed in ways that work against it. Studies like this one confirm the impression that pitcher injuries are on the rise, and it’s not hard to see that longevity ain’t what it used to be. Consider the decreasing volume of innings thrown by pitchers in their age-38 seasons or older this millennium:
We see some localized ups and downs, but overall the trend is crystal clear, and the graph looks very similar if we shift to games pitched:
The diminishing number of elder statesmen has had its impact on the active leaderboards. Using the Baseball Reference Stathead tool, here’s a look at the active leaders in games pitched across four-year intervals starting in 2003, chosen to capture Orosco’s final season; I’ve included 2026, to shoehorn it in:
| 2003 Leaders | G | Age | 2007 Leaders | G | Age | 2011 Leaders | G | Age | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jesse Orosco | 1234 | 46 | Mike Stanton | 1178 | 40 | Mariano Rivera | 1042 | 41 | ||
| Dan Plesac | 1064 | 41 | Jose Mesa | 1022 | 41 | Arthur Rhodes | 900 | 41 | ||
| John Franco | 1036 | 42 | Mike Timlin | 1011 | 41 | LaTroy Hawkins | 823 | 38 | ||
| Mike Stanton | 885 | 36 | Roberto Hernandez | 1010 | 42 | Kyle Farnsworth | 776 | 35 | ||
| Mark Guthrie | 765 | 37 | Todd Jones | 937 | 39 | Francisco Cordero | 753 | 36 | ||
| Roberto Hernandez | 762 | 38 | Mike Myers | 883 | 38 | Guillermo Mota | 717 | 37 | ||
| Jose Mesa | 762 | 37 | Trevor Hoffman | 882 | 39 | Octavio Dotel | 695 | 37 | ||
| Steve Reed | 738 | 38 | Tom Gordon | 853 | 39 | Trever Miller | 694 | 38 | ||
| Mike Timlin | 736 | 37 | Bob Wickman | 835 | 38 | Jason Isringhausen | 674 | 38 | ||
| Jeff Nelson | 714 | 36 | David Weathers | 824 | 37 | Dennys Reyes | 673 | 34 | ||
| Average | 869.6 | 38.8 | Average | 943.5 | 39.4 | Average | 774.7 | 37.5 | ||
| 2015 Leaders | G | Age | 2019 Leaders | G | Age | 2023 Leaders | G | Age | ||
| LaTroy Hawkins | 1042 | 42 | Fernando Rodney | 951 | 42 | Kenley Jansen | 817 | 35 | ||
| Francisco Rodríguez | 859 | 33 | Joe Smith | 782 | 35 | David Robertson | 793 | 38 | ||
| Chad Qualls | 781 | 36 | Tyler Clippard | 751 | 34 | Bryan Shaw | 791 | 35 | ||
| Joe Nathan | 777 | 40 | Joakim Soria | 710 | 35 | Craig Kimbrel | 780 | 35 | ||
| Jeremy Affeldt | 774 | 36 | Sergio Romo | 708 | 36 | Aroldis Chapman | 728 | 35 | ||
| Javier López | 771 | 37 | Oliver Pérez | 670 | 37 | Adam Ottavino | 664 | 37 | ||
| Matt Thornton | 730 | 38 | David Robertson | 661 | 34 | Jake Diekman | 662 | 36 | ||
| Fernando Rodney | 700 | 38 | Luke Gregerson | 646 | 35 | Jesse Chavez | 607 | 39 | ||
| Rafael Betancourt | 680 | 40 | Matt Albers | 616 | 36 | Aaron Loup | 591 | 35 | ||
| Jason Frasor | 679 | 37 | Tony Sipp | 616 | 35 | Zack Greinke | 586 | 39 | ||
| Average | 779.3 | 37.7 | Average | 711.1 | 35.9 | Average | 701.9 | 36.4 | ||
| 2026 Leaders | G | Age | ||||||||
| Kenley Jansen | 963 | 38 | ||||||||
| Aroldis Chapman | 897 | 38 | ||||||||
| Craig Kimbrel | 881 | 38 | ||||||||
| Raisel Iglesias | 634 | 36 | ||||||||
| Luis García | 618 | 39 | ||||||||
| Taylor Rogers | 608 | 35 | ||||||||
| Blake Treinen | 560 | 38 | ||||||||
| Justin Verlander | 556 | 43 | ||||||||
| Wandy Peralta | 546 | 34 | ||||||||
| Edwin Díaz | 527 | 32 | ||||||||
| Average | 679.0 | 37.1 |
Note the dwindling number of pitchers in their 40s, as indicated by the yellow cells. You can also see the way the average ages and games pitched from those quadriennial top 10s has decreased over time. It’s not a uniform decline, but if you alternate columns to compare 2003 to 2011, or 2007 to 2015, and so on, there’s no mistaking the trend. One of the alarming things to note is that where the older lists are basically all relievers, Zack Greinke and Justin Verlander crack the more recent top 10s because there just aren’t that many active relievers with even 600 appearances anymore — and there’s a gap of over 200 games pitched between Kimbrel and Raisel Iglesias.
The three-batter rule is a factor here. Orosco had 398 appearances where he faced just one or two batters, third all-time behind fellow southpaws Mike Myers (478) and Javier López (421). Those appearances are really padding his total relative to other pitchers high on the all-time leaderboard:
| Pitcher | Games | 1-2 Batters | 3+ Batters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jesse Orosco | 1252 | 398 | 854 |
| Mike Stanton | 1178 | 288 | 890 |
| John Franco | 1119 | 115 | 1004 |
| Mariano Rivera | 1115 | 49 | 1066 |
| Dennis Eckersley | 1071 | 83 | 988 |
| Hoyt Wilhelm | 1070 | 75 | 995 |
| Dan Plesac | 1064 | 326 | 738 |
| Mike Timlin | 1058 | 114 | 944 |
| Kent Tekulve | 1050 | 130 | 920 |
| LaTroy Hawkins | 1042 | 97 | 945 |
| Trevor Hoffman | 1035 | 59 | 976 |
| Jose Mesa | 1022 | 87 | 935 |
| Lee Smith | 1022 | 78 | 944 |
| Roberto Hernandez | 1010 | 73 | 937 |
| Mike Jackson | 1005 | 129 | 876 |
| Rich Gossage | 1002 | 103 | 899 |
| Lindy McDaniel | 987 | 97 | 890 |
| Todd Jones | 982 | 72 | 910 |
| David Weathers | 964 | 88 | 876 |
| Kenley Jansen | 963 | 54 | 909 |
| Fernando Rodney | 951 | 67 | 884 |
| Francisco Rodríguez | 948 | 55 | 893 |
| Rollie Fingers | 944 | 105 | 839 |
| Gene Garber | 931 | 95 | 836 |
| Eddie Guardado | 908 | 173 | 735 |
That table is sortable; note that Jansen — the only active pitcher in the top 25 — already has more appearances facing three or more batters than Orosco has, and he’s only in his age-38 season.
The three-batter rule is also cutting down the number of pitchers racking up tons of appearances, though the upper end of the scale hasn’t changed much in the past decade. No reliever has made 85 appearances since 2011 (Jonny Venters), and there have been only four pitcher-seasons with 80 or more appearances since the introduction of the rule (Tyler Rogers in 2021 and ’25, Bryan Shaw in ’21, and Tony Santillan in ’25) compared to 15 from 2012–19 before the rule was put into place.
As with the pitch clock speeding up games and cutting into what many feel was far too much dead time, the three-batter rule has played its part in improving the game’s pace. Right now, I don’t see Major League Baseball turning back; I think it would take a return to much higher scoring levels for MLB to consider throwing pitchers a bone and bring back the one-batter reliever, lefty or otherwise. Of course, they could always mess with the baseball to tweak scoring levels instead.
* This article was originally published here
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