Starters vs Relievers, How Do You Decide?

 The Guardians are approaching a situation where they may have to make a decision about where the balance is between winning this year and developing starting pitching for the future.  They are trying to decide how to have enough depth in their AAA starting pitching to fill in where needed on the major league team yet still have a strong bullpen both to start the season and when needed during the year.

One argument is that you need to have a lot of starting pitching depth stashed in the minors as the Guardians used 12 starting pitchers last year.  However, if you dig into the numbers it is not as simple as that.  If you take 5 starters and divide 162 starts between them you come up, roughly 32 starts between them with 2 starts left over.  Last year here is how the breakdown of games started looked.

Bieber 31 of 33 possible starts

McKenzie 30 of 33 possible starts

Quantrill 32 of 32 possible starts

Plesac 24 of 32 possible starts

Civale 20 of 32 possible starts

So, for the first 3 guys in the rotation they 'missed' a combined 5 starts.  For Plesac, he missed 8 starts and Civale missed 12 starts.   In total, our starting pitching missed 25 starts during the year.

Not all of those starts were 'missed' due to injury. In fact, missed is the wrong word as some were due to rainouts or to rescheduling of rainouts where they needed a spot starter for a double header to keep guys on their appropriate rest (or an extra day) in the rotation.  But let's look at how we covered those 25 starts, regardless of the reason.

Gaddis - 2 starts (2 total appearances)

Curry - 2 starts (2)

Morgan - 1 start 50)

Morris - 5 starts (7)

Pilkington - 11 starts (15)

Shaw - 2 starts (60)

McCarthy - 2 starts (15)

So, yes, you need depth starters to cover a number of starts.  However, I think you could envision Pilkington, Logan Allen (who likely is going to be rostered this coming winter) and even Peyton Battenfield to cover these starts.

Curry and Gaddis (limitations of useable major league pitches) and Morris (health issues) are much better suited to being relievers, albeit multi-inning relievers.   Truth be told, so is Battenfield but someone has to be used as a spot starter.   Use these guys in the roles they project to have long-term.

Guardians, you made this bed by not signing any QUALITY depth starters as minor league free agents.  You also created this by not signing or trading for any relievers who could backfill if a reliever got hurt.    So don't exacerbate that by burning a development year of Gaddis, Curry and Morris just to hold them in reserve if you happen to need a spot starter or an injury replacement.  Use them for what they are good at: relieving and then, this coming winter, get enough relievers and starting depth in so you don't repeat this situation next year.