There were only 29 all of last year. Many teams didn’t have any.
Well, I have ten zillion problems with MLB and that’s one of them. What can I tell ya. I think they’ve been screwing up some aspects of stat counting since Henry Chadwick invented them.
29 in the NL, and 50 complete games overall, with the Red Sox, Rangers, Pirates and Indians having zero. The Phillies had the most with 5.
MLB has been heading this way for a long time and it would be interesting to see what would happen if pitching staffs were limited in number.
To be fair, Cleveland got no-hit 3 times last year, and the Rangers twice - so they at least get a participation trophy.
Fenway is a great place to see a baseball game, unless you’re seated around the Pesky Pole, which carries the risk of a stiff neck afterwards.
I’m not getting the idea of a “prison-like” aspect, particularly as the wall doesn’t carry over into center and right field.
I suspect that the main thing “wrong” with Fenway Park from Yankees’ fans perspective is that the Red Sox play in it. 
In the long run, teams would have to let pitchers pitch more, of course. You would see a strong movement towards not only a few more complete games, but more relief pitchers capable of throwing more than twenty pitches so they can go 2, 3 innings.
The problem is that you’d have to do this very gradually.
Anyway, I’d like to discuss the Cincinnati Reds. They are now 3-22, which, it will surprise no one to hear, is one of the worst 25-game starts in the history of the sport and is just one game better than the 1988 Orioles. The Reds truly challenge my facility with adjectives; words like “hapless,” “pathetic” and “embarassing” don’t quite seem to be up to the descriptive challenge here:
- They’re already 14.5 games out of first.
- Their record isn’t really bad luck; their projected W/L is 5-19.
- The Reds have, by a comfortable margin , the worst offense in the league (almost half a run a game worse than anyone else) and BY FAR the worst pitching/defense in the league (more than a run a game worse than anyone else)
- According the Baseball Reference, the Reds are below league average at every position except left field, where Tommy Pham’s .247 average and 4 homers apparently makes him just a tiny bit better than average.
The Reds have now lost 8 games in a row; just a month into the season, that is only their second worst losing streak this year. They are batting .201 as a team. Their best starting pitcher so far has been someone named Nick Lodolo, who is 1-2 with a terrible ERA, and he’s on the IL. They have been blown out nine times in 25 games. Six different MLB pitchers have won more games than the Reds; one of them, Adam Cimber, is a relief pitcher who has only pitched twelve innings.
I’d love to tell you the Reds are a young team going through a rough patch, but they’re not. Half their starters are over 30 and the team doesn’t have any really young players AT ALL; the youngest player to take an at bat, Jonathan India, is 25. Oh, and he’s on the IL, too. The starting rotation is young, so that’s good, but they are all atrocious, so that’s not.
I could go on and on about this team. They are just disgraceful. Their COO insulted the fans live on air. This oldest pro baseball team, steeped in history and glory, is just a terrible joke.
I’ve been to so many stadiums, Fenway was the second worst Major League Park. Though to be fair I was sitting in Right Field.
Shea was just a dump without excuse. The first time I went to Shea it was only 12 years old and already run down. At least Fenway has the excuse of being venerable. Shea always looked incomplete and of course the jets blasting over every 5-10 minutes didn’t help. The new Citi Field is really nice, this is not an anti-Met thing.
Looking on the bright side, their farm system is mediocre too! Oh wait… 
Heh. Craig Calcaterra (who used to write for HardballTalk) wrote in today’s edition of his “Cup of Coffee” newsletter:
I too went to games at Shea as a kid, but I thought the commercial airliners seemingly 100 feet above the field was pretty cool. Startling as hell the first time.
Why on earth did the Reds trade Sonny Gray. I just looked at the pitching numbers…yowch.
I was seated along the first base line (I’ve only been there once). I did some walking around as well, though not in the upper deck, from where the view might have been different. 'Prison" may be too strong, but from the main seating area I did feel like I was at the bottom of a bowl.
Not at all a Yankee fan, by the way.
Fenway really wasn’t great, yeah. It looks neat on TV; in person it’s extremely unimpressive.
But I have seen several worse, and Olympic Stadium in Montreal was disgracefully bad. I’ve said this before and will again; I am the most passionate baseball fan I have ever known, but if I’d lived across the street from Olympic Stadium I wouldn’t have walked over to watch games. I saw two games there, one when I was a child and to be honest wasn’t very impressed then, and one in 2003 and I was appalled in 2003.
The old Exhibition Stadium was also EXTREMELY bad, though not as dark and depressing as Olympic. Oakland is bad, as is Tampa Bay. I would rank Fenway as better than any of those.
I actually don’t know WHY the Reds gave up this year, but that really is what happened; they gave up. I think they likely tried to trade Joey Votto too but that Votto exercised his no-trade.
The Reds in 2021 were a decent team and their roster was not obviously all that much worse than teams that made the playoffs. They weren’t all that expensive, either. To take a big step forward they needed a better bullpen, which is one of the CHEAPEST improvements you can make. And they just decided to torpedo themselves despite not really having a base of youth to take over.
I’m not personally opposed to the notiong of “Tanking” in that it makes perfect sense to accept being bad for a few years to be a winner later, the way the Astros and Cubs did, or the Blue Jays to a lesser extent have done in 2018-2019, or a dozen or more other examples, but this is just awful. Awful.
Looking at Baseball Reference: as of today, the league-wide ERA is 3.78; the Reds’ team ERA is, at 6.86 – it’s not only the worst in MLB, but fully 3 runs per game over the average, and more than 1 1/2 runs above the next-worst staff (Washington, at 5.03).
Oops, thanks for the correction. Still, complete games used to the norm and now they’re rare.
My understanding is that there are two primary reasons for the modern scarcity of the complete game:
- Managers and pitching coaches increasingly limit pitch counts for many pitchers, as statistics have demonstrated that there’s a correlation between high pitch counts and arm injuries, particularly for younger pitchers.
- Statistics have also shown that batters have a higher batting average each subsequent time that they face a particular pitcher during a game. Thus, in letting your starter go through the batting order for the third or fourth time, it becomes substantially more likely that he’ll start giving up hits.
I’d suspect that limitations to the size of a pitching staff would be more likely to lead to middle relievers pitching longer, and that it’d have only a minor effect on how long starters stay in games.
This is what I wrote about Olympic Stadium after I saw my first and only game there:
“Unfortunately, it was hands-down the worst ballpark I’d ever visited. Olympic was a vast expanse of interstellar concrete, an unfinished mausoleum, and even the efforts of 20,000+ fans to do the wave could not make it homey or interesting or even barely adequate.”
Agreed that Exhibition Stadium, peculiar as it was, was not nearly as bad.
It would almost certainly increase offense, though, without the need to ban shifts or move the mound or shrink the strike-zone or monkey with the ball.
Nobody’s gonna talk about how the Mets came back from down 6 going into the ninth inning to defeat the Phillies on the road?
Okay, I’ll bite. The Mets had lost 330 straight games when entering the ninth down six runs.
Wonder what would have happened if a Phillies batter had bunted for a hit or stolen a base in the bottom of the eighth with the team up 7-1 and then no miracle Mets rally happened in the ninth. Would Buck Showalter and a bunch of pundits have wailed about the Phillies piling on?