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Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
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the problem concerns teams that use a parade of relievers who enter the game from the sixth inning onward and throw the hell out of the ball, knowing they’ll probably max out at one inning at a time.
the whole problem is that OMGs are a renewable resource, with no real constraints on supply.
It also yields rosters that are grossly imbalanced relative to the amount of value that these relievers generate. According to FanGraphs, relief pitchers accounted for only about 9 percent of the value (in wins above replacement) that all position players and pitchers created last year. And yet, they occupy about 25 percent of roster slots.
And to a larger degree than you probably realize, these OMGs bear responsibility for the ever-increasing rate of strikeouts in baseball
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The bold is the gist of the article. Nate Silver doesn't like that pitching has evolved and that MLB has changed the way it uses pitchers in order to get the most production out of them.
Starters have less success the third time through the order, so let's have them pitch the third time through less. This requires more relievers. Silver wants starters to pitch deeper into games thus almost guaranteeing starters face the order for the third time more. Relievers have the most success (gaged by strikeout rate) when they pitch five or fewer batters (ideally this works out to be one inning) and have less success the more batters they face. Silver wants relievers to pitch to more batters, into their times of less success. And in order to accomplish this he thinks forcing an (data based but still) arbitrary limit on the number of pitchers a team can have on their roster.
The whole point behind his argument is to basically force pitchers to not be as effective by forcing them to pitch into situations where they statistically do worse. This is the exact same thing as forcing a pitcher who obviously sucks after seeing just one batter into pitching to two more batters because of... minutes on a clock. It's arbitrarily handicapping pitchers so that batters have a better chance of getting hits and scoring runs.
The better thing is to let baseball evolve and adjust to changes like OMGs and shifts. OMGs hard to score off of? Then change your strategy. Shifts hard to hit against? Then change your strategy. That's what sports are; adjusting to changes in order to come out victorious. Not hampering the opponent because you can't figure out how to best them.