Starting pitcher

In baseball (hardball or softball), a starting pitcher or starter is the first pitcher in the game for each team. A pitcher is credited with a game started if they throw the first pitch to the opponent's first batter of a game. Starting pitchers are expected to pitch for a significant portion of the game, although their ability to do this depends on many factors, including effectiveness, stamina, health, and strategy.

A starting pitcher in professional baseball usually rests three, four, or five days after pitching a game before pitching in another. Therefore, most professional baseball teams have four, five or six starting pitchers on their rosters. These pitchers, and the sequence in which they pitch, is known as the

At the youth level, such as in Little League Baseball, pitch counts are usually capped at a certain point as well as required rest before a pitcher can pitch again.^[2]

In the

In the early decades of baseball, it was not uncommon for a starting pitcher to pitch 300 innings or more, over the course of a season. In addition, there are accounts of starting pitchers pitching on consecutive days, or even in both games of a doubleheader. It is believed that these feats were only possible because pitchers in the early years of the game, unlike modern starters, rarely threw the ball with maximum effort.

A starting pitcher who can be counted on to consistently throw many innings is known as a workhorse. An example of a modern-day workhorse pitcher was Roy Halladay, who was the active leader in both complete games thrown and shutouts before his retirement in 2013.^[4]

A pitcher that normally isn't a regular member of a team's starting rotation that situationally starts a game is commonly referred to as a "spot starter."^{[citation needed]} Pitchers that make spot starts are often relief pitchers mainly long-relief pitchers out of the bullpen that are tasked to pitch multiple innings or a starting pitcher that is promoted from a club's minor league team to make sporadic starts. Spot starts typically occur because of emergency instances like a sudden injury to a scheduled starting pitcher in the rotation, or if there are multiple doubleheaders requiring a tight workload.^[5][6]

Statistics

A starting pitcher must complete five innings of work in order to qualify for a "

• sinker is similar to that of the two-seamer, though sinkers tend to break earlier than two-seamers. The cut fastball
  (cutter) is similar to the two-seam fastball in velocity, but breaks to the opposite side of a pitcher's throwing arm (i.e., a right-handed pitcher will have it break right-to-left).
• Hard breaking balls: The most prominent of the hard
  slider. A slider is a pitch that breaks sharply in the direction of the pitcher's arm travel (left to right for a left-handed pitcher). It travels slower than a fastball (usually in the 80s), but faster than the slower breaking balls. The other hard breaking ball, the split-finger fastball
  (splitter), mimics the fastball. The splitter breaks late in its flight path and downwards from the point of release, with a little bit of tailing action. The split-finger is usually thrown in the low to upper 80s, although some travel upwards of 90 mph.
• Soft breaking balls: The most common soft breaking ball is the eponymous
  12–6. A right hander with slightly more lateral break will have a curveball breaking in a 1–7 manner or with more lateral movement in a 2–8 manner. A left hander that throws a curveball with more lateral break will either have an 11–5 or 10–4 curveball. Curveballs travel from the low 60s to mid 80s in speed. The other soft breaking ball is the screwball, which is essentially a reverse curveball, as it breaks in the opposite direction of the pitcher's arm travel. The screwball is a fairly rare pitch in modern baseball, due in part to a widespread belief that it causes damage to the arm. However, a 2014 New York Times investigation concluded that this belief is unfounded, and that the screwball causes no more injury than any other pitch.^[7]
• Other off-speed pitches: Two other major off-speed pitches are used by pitchers today, one far more so than others. The changeup, which has variants such as the circle changeup, the vulcan changeup or the palmball, is a slow pitch that is thrown with the same arm motion and arm velocity of a fastball, but with a much different grip that keeps the ball from achieving the same speed; usually the changeup is 10–20 mph slower than the pitcher's fastballs. This visual distortion from a fast arm swing and a slower pitch is used to disrupt the hitter's timing. The other major off-speed pitch is the knuckleball. The knuckleball is a very difficult pitch to master, both for the pitcher (due to its unique grip and delivery manner) and for his catcher (due to the pitch being thoroughly unpredictable in its travel).

See also

• Setup man
• Middle reliever
• Closer
• Left-handed specialist
• Long reliever
• List of World Series starting pitchers

Notes