Piggy-backing is a practice employed primarily in the low minors where teams will pair 8 starting pitchers into 4 tandems that alternate starting and relieving duties from one start to the next. The games are usually split into 5 and 4 inning increments.
The idea behind it involves limiting pitch counts while helping to gradually stretch out innings limits without putting an inordinate amount of stress on arms and shoulders. More and more research is showing that most of what damage an arm incurs seems to happen in the late innings when pitchers are already tired. Piggy-backing limits how often pitchers reach dangerous 90 and 100 pitch exhaustion thresholds.
Jon Niese and Dillon Gee aren’t young or inexperienced, but both have significant injury histories, and both have struggled in the late innings in 2015, particularly the third time through an opposing lineup. I can’t think of a better way to keep both these guys in the rotation while improving their performance and preserving their arms.
Jon Niese will often seem to cruise through 4 or 5 innings and then out of the blue he implodes with a runner or two on base. His batting average against (BAA) in the 6th inning is .433. Simply put, piggy-backing him with Gee would allow the Mets to avoid a situation where the opposition is hitting .433. You’d bring Gee in for innings 6 through 9. On the following week, flip-flop start assignments and let Gee begin the game.
And it’s not like Dillon Gee has been great in the late innings either. Innings 1 through 3 the opposition has hit .200 against Gee, while in innings 4 – 6 they’ve hit him at .365. Gee has been hit to the tune of .409 and .400 in innings 5 and 6 respectively, so he’s good for about 4 innings but when that third time in the order comes around he tends to fall apart. Also, Gee has pitched past the sixth inning twice this year and only once has he pitched past the 7th. His 8th inning ERA is 13.50.
Opponents are hitting .390 against Niese on their 3rd PA in game, .364 on their 4th (with a 1.189 OPS!). On pitches 1 – 25 Niese’s BAA is .234, on pitches 25 – 50 it rises to .276, on pitches 51 – 75 it jumps to .339 and on pitches 76 – 100 it is .343. Opponents are hitting .500 against Niese when he is over 100 pitches.
Dillon Gee also struggles the more times a batter sees him, with batters hitting .367 against him their third in-game PA, and a whopping .667 on their 4th. His BAA through about 4 innings isn’t bad, but after about the 50 pitch mark he struggles. His BAA for pitches 50 – 75 is .368, for pitches 76 – 100 the opposition is hitting .462 against him.
Now you do have to also consider that moving from 4 days rest to 5 will be an adjustment, and pitchers tend to be creatures of habit. Matt Harvey’s ERA goes from a really good 2.33 on 4 days rest to an unreal .115 on 5 days, and back to a a still tremendous .225 on 6 or more days rest. Which tells me he’s simply great all the time and was only slightly off with his fastball command on one of his starts where he had that extra day (his Yankee stadium start I believe), but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his stat line. deGrom on the other hand has a 1.39 ERA on 4 days rest and a 5.19 ERA on 5 days. deGrom does seem to do better with 4 days rest.
And to be fair, most starters are used to 4 days of rest because they’ve been doing it throughout their careers. It’s hard enough to know you can only effect the outcome of a game every 5 days, let alone every 6, especially for a competitor like Harvey. The team would also lose quite a few quality starts from its better pitchers if they’re stretched out in a 6 man rotation.
Ultimately this may have less to do with keeping Gee and Niese in the rotation (to boost trade value) and more to do with limiting Harvey’s innings. He is currently on pace to pitch somewhere north of 220 innings and that’s not going to fly in his post-Tommy John year.
If the Mets are dead set on limiting Harvey’s innings by going to a 6 man rotation, then bring up Matz, but they should nevertheless move ahead with piggy-backing Gee and Niese based on the merits of limiting their late inning exposure, preserving the bullpen every fifth day, and reducing injury risk … It’s a no-brainer.
