A pitcher hasn’t pitched 250 innings in 14 years. That's wild.

today's game is different than yesterday's game.

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f Skenes pitched that many innings with his current strikeout rate

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just have an elite relievers strike out rate over the most innings pitched in a major league season in 14 years. thats all

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To add some perspective, in 1973, Nolan Ryan broke the single-season strikeout record with 383 strikeouts while pitching 326 innings and still did not lead the major leagues and innings pitched.

If Skenes pitched that many innings with his current strikeout rate, he’d end up with 587 strikeouts.

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What was Nolan Ryan's K rate in the majors when he was Skenes' age?

Oh yeah, he pitched 7 whole minor league innings that year.

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That's wild.

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It will never happen ever again. That was then, this is now. And I don't romanticize what was, for everyone who survived like Ryan, there were four others who ended up on the junk heap. Ryan should not be held up as the standard, he was an absolute freak of nature.

The basic problem is the nature of the game has irrevocably changed. Back when people threw all those innings, every single solitary second of a game from the opening pitch of the first inning to the last pitch of the ninth inning was not a "game moment." As in winning and losing was riding on literally every action taken in the game.

There was a certain rhythm to the game, ebbs and flows, the pitchers may have been throwing a jillion pitches but they also would pace themselves, even Ryan. It wasn't balls to the wall, pedal to the metal all-out on every freaking pitch.

It is now, with little middle infielders like Altuve (not picking on him, he's a representative example that popped into my mind to amplify the point) capable of driving the ball 450 on any pitch. So teams want an arm out there capable of going balls to the wall, pedal to the metal all-out with every pitch.

Plus there's the fact that these people are business investments as much as they are athletes and competitors these days.

Is this a product of youth league and travel ball adding up?

These kids that play year round and ONLY play baseball I figure an arm could gas out at some point

And it's not gonna change, in fact it's going swiftly in the opposite direction.

It's a bullpen game now, going 6 innings which is still considered the bare minimum for a quality start is now almost an anomaly for starting pitchers if they are in the neighborhood of 100 pitches.

And the unwritten rule is now that pitchers can't throw more than 30 innings more than they did the year before or you are putting them in jeopardy.

So Skeenes for example pitched 122 innings for LSU last year so if that holds, and the sabergeeks will be watching, once he reaches a combined 152 innings minors and majors he will be shut down around 152 innings, which if he stays healthy will be in late August tor early September.