Major League Baseball misses the days when starting pitchers would regularly pitch deep into games, but the league isn’t going to use an innings requirement of five or six innings, or any other number, to get back there.
“Just too blunt an instrument to fix this problem,” commissioner Rob Manfred recently told interviewer Chris O’Gorman, who runs the website Questions for Cancer Research. “I don’t think it can be prescriptive: ‘You have to go six innings.’ I think it has to be a series of rules that create incentive for the clubs to develop pitchers of a certain type.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Manfred also told O’Gorman that player salary deferrals “can become problematic,” and that an offseason lockout is not as significant as missing games, which has never happened in his time leading the owners’ negotiations with players.
Two concerns have lingered around starting pitching. The first is the most serious: injury prevention. As pitchers throw harder and harder, Tommy John elbow ligament replacement surgery and other serious procedures have become too common.
MLB has recently concluded an approximately year-long study on that topic, encompassing interviews with over 200 people throughout different levels of the sport. The league presented some of the findings to medical, on-field and front office staff at the Winter Meetings last week in Dallas.
“The injury issue, our physicians have studied this carefully: They continue to believe that the focus on velocity and spin rate is a significant cause in the increase in injuries,” Manfred said.
The second is an aesthetic concern, a belief that heavyweight pitching matchups drive attention to the game, and that baseball is more enjoyable when those pitchers stay on the mound longer on a given night.
“Marketing the game, just think about a broadcast, right: the name, or the face that you see the most in a broadcast is the starting pitcher,” Manfred said. “And the matchups of great starting pitchers historically have been important in terms of the marketing game. And I do think we need to get back to that.
“To me, this needs to be addressed in a more subtle way, I think maybe through rules surrounding transactions,” Manfred continued. “That is, how often pitchers come on and off the roster. One of the things that happens today, guy pitches three days in a row, he gets outrighted, they bring somebody else in to give him some rest, as opposed to him staying on the roster the whole time. I think we need to create incentives through things like roster rules, transaction rules for clubs to develop pitchers who go deeper in the game.”
The commissioner’s office and the Major League Baseball Players Association this year had a public back-and-forth about the league’s handling of pitcher injuries.
Salary deferrals more concerning ‘the bigger the numbers get’
The commissioner also warned that clubs can go too far when deferring salaries.
Deferrals have been a hot topic in the sport this winter because the world champion Los Angeles Dodgers have continued to sign players to deals that put off some of their payment until years down the road. They owe more than $1 billion in delayed payments to seven players from 2028-46, including stars such as Shohei Ohtani — who accounts for about two-thirds of the owed money — Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman.
“Deferrals at some point can become problematic,” Manfred told O’Gorman. “Historically, we did have one franchise, Arizona, that got itself into financial difficulties as a result of excessive deferrals. We’ve strengthened our rules in terms of the funding of deferred compensation in order to avoid that kind of problem. But, you know, look, obviously the bigger the numbers get, the bigger the concern.”
According to the Arizona Republic, the Arizona Diamondbacks had $254 million in deferred salaries in 2004 when Jerry Colangelo was forced out by other Diamondbacks investors.
No matter how many years into the future salary is to be paid out, a team cannot hold on to all the money it defers for very long. Within a year and a half of the given season, the “present value” of the money has to be put aside.
“That assures that the money’s going to be there for the player to get paid,” Manfred said. “It doesn’t solve all of the ownership-side issues in terms of, you go to sell the club, you’re selling a club with a big mortgage on its future.”
Manfred’s concern appears to be centered on encouraging best practices among his owners. The Dodgers, however, are in a particularly strong position financially, with the second-highest franchise value in the sport according to Forbes’ most recent list, at $5.5 billion. Ohtani’s stardom has brought in new revenues from Japan.
Fans of rival teams complain the Dodgers are using deferrals to exacerbate the gap between the wealthiest teams in the sport and those in smaller markets. The Dodgers stand to profit from deferrals because they (and any team) can keep returns from the investments of the deferred salary.
Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman has called the conversation around his team’s deferrals “kind of a lazy narrative.”
The rules about deferrals in baseball are collectively bargained between players and owners, which means any change to that system would likely wait until the next round of negotiations. The current agreement expires in December 2026.
It’s unclear if Manfred and the owners intend to push more aggressively for changes to deferrals than they have in the past. They attempted to eliminate deferrals during the last round of bargaining, which the MLBPA opposed, but the topic didn’t draw a lot of attention back then.
Offseason lockout ‘sort of the norm’
Asked generally about labor relations in the Questions for Cancer Research interview, Manfred described an offseason lockout as a lesser issue compared to the potential of regular-season games being canceled.
“I think our relationship with the MLBPA is a solid working relationship,” Manfred said. “I know people like to focus on a three-month lockout in 2022. The fact of the matter is, we didn’t miss any games, and that’s what really matters at the end of the day. Offseason lockouts are offseason lockouts, you know? It’s sort of the norm in professional sports.
“I do think that there are a lot of positives going on in the game right now. I think our attendance is very strong, and that’s always a great thing for us. It shows that the game is popular. And I think that the positive things that are going on always motivates the parties to find a solution to the economic issues that face the game.”
Manfred noted that in all the labor deals he’s overseen, as both commissioner and previously as the lead negotiator under his predecessor Bud Selig, “we’ve never missed a game, and I hope to keep that record intact in my last go round.”
Asked if the ongoing rise of franchise values makes avoiding a work stoppage any more important come 2026, Manfred said he does not have that outlook.
“We sell competition,” Manfred said. “I think that (as) the numbers get bigger, I’m not sure the stakes are higher.”
(To photo of Manfred: Mike Carlson / MLB Photos via Getty Images)