Hoffman’s career save record could actually last a while. I’m not sure Rivera will be able to break it, and the only person with enough saves to do it in the foreseeable future is Wagner. The only other active pitchers with 300 saves are Hernandez, Mesa and Percival, and none of them is going to do it.
I’ve heard some people suggest C.C. Sabathia could do it.
I agree that the Saves season record has a decent chance of falling within the next 1-20 years. It just depends on whether or not a good team likes to bring in a reliever all the time; it’s probably the least ability-dependent major record. The reliever has to be good, but it’s mostly about the team giving him enough opportunities.
As for 300 wins, that’s easily doable (in terms of all of major league baseball combined), even in this day and age. All you need is 15 wins per season over 20 years, or maybe 18 wins over 17 years. It might be a while 'til we see the next one, but it’s certainly going to happen, unless the structure of baseball changes radically.
I tend to agree with this, but converting to a four-man rotation will require a sizeable commitment from a team at all levels of development; it’s certainly not an overnight decision.
One interesting side-effect of putting a team’s entire minor-league system on a four-man rotation is that the highest-rated prospects will be more quickly categorized. To put it glibly, the better prospects will get to the majors faster with more seasoning, while the weaker ones will more quickly wash out, so a club doesn’t have to waste as much time on them (or worse, make the decision to promote them on scant real data). Teams then won’t be guessing as much regarding their future starters’ major-league potential.
Something that has amazed me about MLB pitching over the past 20 years is how many “highly touted” prospects fail at the major-league level. I don’t have hard numbers on this–so I may be wrong about its prevalence–but getting prospects to pitch more frequently in the minors (i.e. before transaction rules pretty much require them to be placed on the 40-man or 25-man roster) would certainly make the decision to call up a prospect more objective.
On the other hand, if you had pitchers who could give you 125 or even 110 innings every four or five days, you could get the whole boring season wrapped up by mid-June. It’d leave the entire summer free for Canadian Football League action.
I can’t wait to see a freakishly powerful fastball, but I don’t want it to be the result of surgery, steroids or whatever. I just want to see an astonishing physical specimen get up on the mound, all seven-foot-six of 'im, with an arm five feet long rippling with sinewy, untearable muscle and impeccable rotator cuffs, and I wanna see him rear back with the slowest motion you can imagine and then stride halfway to the plate and deliver the pill in there at about 150 mph. Someday my freak will come, and what’ll that do to the record books?
(Yes, I’ve read about Sidd Finch…)
The gulf between the majors and AAA is huge. Much bigger than the gulf between A and AA or AA and AAA. Prospects don’t pan out because they can’t handle big league hitters. The only way to find out if they can is to make them pitch to big league hitters.
Is that even an official record, much less a major one? Does MLB keep a record of how fast a pitched ball goes?
But how is this sort of enhancement different than using steroids (pre-ban)? Other than “shadiness”?
Is this really true? I’m skeptical
The gulf between the majors and AAA pretty much HAS to be the biggest talent gulf because there’s no level above it. The run from Rookie ball to AAA is one that player go through in, on average, 5-7 years, and there’s a lot of overlap - players often start out in A ball when they really belong in AAA, or are kept in AA when they belong in AAA, or are kept in AAA when really they belong in A ball because they’re a high draft pick the GM’s embarassed to give up on. The differences from level to level are not huge.
But once they reach the majors, there’s nowhere else to go. The average MLB regular still develops for 3 to 5 years and remains at that level of performance for some time, but he can’t be promoted from the Major Leagues to the Upper Major Leagues. So if you put an A team against an AA team, you’re basically facing one team off with another team that has 1-2 years of minor league development on them. Face an AAA team against a major league team and the AAA team is facing a team that not only has five to eight years of development on them, but features more ballplayers at their absolute athletic peak (since more are in their late 20s, which is about where ballplayers peak) AND from a league where a higher percentage of players are actually at the appropriate talent level.
OK, I’ll buy this.
Nobody’s breaking the record for career shutouts: Walter Johnson at 110. Most pitchers would be happy to have 110 complete games, much less 110 shutouts.
The current major league leader in complete games is Roy Halladay, with 6. So I’d say at this point 110 complete games may be unreachable for anyone coming into the majors now; Halladay is arguably the hardiest of all pitchers in their peak today qand at age 30 he has just 30 CG. The only pitchers with that many complete games are Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux (MAddux has 109, but I’ll count him) and they started pitching in the 80s. Clemens once pitched 18 CG in one season, which would be unheard of today.
110 shutouts? Fantasy.
But one record I think could be broken is career STARTS. The record is 815, by Cy Young. You’d have to pitch 25 years and stay healthy to break it but it could be done. Clemens iand MAddux are over 700 and he’s missed some time to injury; Nolan Ryan came up not far short at 773. Surprisingly, to me anyway, most of the Top 10 are modern pitchers:
Cy Young, 815
Nolan Ryan, 773
Don Sutton, 756
Phil Niekro, 716
Steve Carlton, 709
Roger Clemens, 706
Greg Maddux, 702
Tommy John, 700
Gaylord Perry, 690
Pud Galvin, 689
Mosdt of the next ten are modern hurlers too. I think someone who started young and stayed healthy and was a genuinely great pitcher, like Clemens or Carlton or Maddux, could pull it off.
As surgical techniques and medical knowledge improve, more pitchers will be able to pitch well into their 40s.
Johnny Vander Meer’s two consecutive no hitters.
All someone has to do is pitch three! 