Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports
COVID-19 has accelerated pre-existing tendencies more so than it has established new ones. Which you probably know, because you’ve read something in the last few months about retail, or work culture, or housing insecurity, or any of the myriad other sectors of which this is true. And it fits for baseball, too—in several areas, but perhaps none so much so as starting pitching.
The average length of a start has been dropping steadily for about a century. (After a brief period of stability that lasted from the start of the modern era in 1901 to around 1920, when relief pitching started to become a real factor, it’s been downhill ever since.