You need to cover about 1450 innings. If each of the 9 starters averages 130, then your 4 relievers would need to cover 70 each. It’s probably more accurate to expect the 3×3 pitchers to cover 120-140. And like in your article, you’d probably also expect to pull another 4 up from the minors to cover injuries, etc. Of course, doing that will results in you needing about 13 pitchers, but you would definitely have the opportunity to get some young guys like Junis and Skoglund some spot appearances without worrying about them needing to cover a full 6 inning appearance and wrecking the entire pen for a week if things go south.

Let’s say the Royals had developed Eibner as both a reliever and a position player. As an outfielder 4th outfielder, he provides a more competent bat for pinch hitting for the pitchers, with the ability to pitch, and then switch to outfield on later innings if needed. And in an emergency situation, you could then have a prepared player or three or four who could pitch in a pinch.

If you did this, and could find two Merrifield/Zobrist type superutility guys, you would have the flexibility to do this.

If you could do it successfully, you would probably have some great market inefficiencies to exploit, but not for very long. It would be so unusual, you wouldn’t get the typical free ride and be able to fly under the radar for long, because every team would closely monitor your results and see how well their scouting departments could replicate your results. Lots of teams chasing that many pitchers would really shift the market, possibly driving up costs because you would be leaving some value on the table by having great pitchers of years past only pitching 130 IP/yr, although you wouldn’t have a great idea of how many injuries you would prevent. The league would probably need to increase minor league rosters to support the extra pitchers as well.

So a game would start, and you’d hope your starter could go 3 even if he had to pitch to a couple more than once. Then your next would do the same, and repeat with the third. If you really needed to, you could throw a reliever in to finish any of the 3 spots, or you could immediately bring in number 2 or 3, and leave the main pen for the end of the game.

Some thoughts on this:

–Your 9 main pitchers would hopefully pitch around 130-150 innings each. Hopefully, they will be more effective because opponents, especially your division foes would see each guy about 6-8 AB/season instead of 12. Your non-division opponents would see them 2 or 3 ABs instead of 4.

–Hopefully this would keep them healthier, and hopefully they would be able to pitch with more power, and without getting as tired as a starter.

–Hopefully, it would be easier to find these guys as opposed to starters who can go 6 IP/start and 200+ IP/year because almost all of the ABs would be first through the order instead of 1/3 first, 1/3 second, 1/3 third.

–Of course, sending 3 pitchers out there, you do have a chance that one of the 3 will be in a portion of the summer where they aren’t pitching well.

–Eventually, this should play really well in the post season. With the post season played with only 3 days in a row twice in the whole month, you are setup to run with a 2×3 with three guys who are used to pitching long going to the bullpen, to prepare your bullpen for the postseason run, and with the extra rest, and their ability to pitch long, you could be ready to win a war of attrition. If really necessary, you could pitch those 3 for 9 innings on top of the 3 main pitchers for the game plus 4-6 from the main bullpen guys.

The biggest issue would be really long games, you might need 1 or 2 bullpen arms that can go long during the regular season, the risk of reduced flexibility in the bullpen, and on double hitter days, you only get to bring up 1 guy, he’d probably need to pitch like a normal starter and get you 7 innings because you only have 4 guys available in the bullpen due to the other pitchers probably not having sufficient rest to have 2 days off before and after.