The Seattle Mariners are the only MLB franchise never to have appeared in a World Series. Since their founding in 1977, every other team in baseball has won a pennant, including their expansion sibling Toronto Blue Jays and four teams that were created in the 1990s.

Seattle had never been closer to a World Series than in 2025. The three previous times the Mariners had been in the American League Championship Series, they never got past two wins. The 2025 team not only won a third ALCS game, but was up 3-1 in the top of the fifth inning of Game 7 in Toronto and had George Kirby on the mound.

Kirby had somewhat of a down year in 2025 compared to his stellar 2023 and 2024 seasons, but his numbers weren’t all that terrible in a year when a shoulder injury sidelined him until mid-May. Toronto had bested him with three home runs in Game 3, but Kirby was finding a groove in the deciding game, having only given up one run on just 65 pitches through four innings. 

After a bumpy first in front of a raucous Rogers Centre, he’d retired 12 of 14 batters and kept the Blue Jays out of scoring position. In the past, a pitcher with Kirby’s pedigree in this situation wouldn’t have left this game. In a win-or-go-home game, there is nothing to trust besides what is on the field.

Mariners manager Dan Wilson instead went to his bullpen for the bottom of the fifth, pulling Kirby and replacing him with starter Bryan Woo. Woo had an All-Star season, but a late injury had relegated him to a relief role in the ALCS, and he didn’t have time to get comfortable. In the seventh, he put on the two baserunners that scored on George Springer’s home run, and the Mariners lost 4-3.

Last week, Jay Jaffe of FanGraphs reported that the average start in the 2025 postseason is 4.35 innings, down a 16.1% decrease from the regular season, which was 5.19 innings. In 2015, the 5.81 regular season innings average was just a 5.2% increase of the postseason’s 5.51. 

Over the course of a decade, starting pitching’s stock has plummeted, especially in the playoffs. For a position that is so central to the game and as valuable as ever, organizations have dramatically changed its concept. Several factors are to blame: analytics, pitcher health, youth baseball and more have all created a very real problem, which is that baseball has reached a point where the Mariners believe they made the right decision. 

“We thought it was a good spot for [Woo], a good, clean inning,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said after Game 7. “He came in and threw the ball extremely well, and I thought he handled the lineup very well.”

That was it. No comment on pulling Kirby, who didn’t even appear on the podium, or acknowledgement that Woo was in a role beyond his depth. Nothing on Eduard Bazardo, the reliever who gave up Springer’s home run, about how he was probably being overused between throwing nearly 80 regular season innings and appearing in nine playoff games out of the Mariners’ 12. Nothing except a pat to himself on the back and a franchise coming up on its semi-centennial without a pennant.

“The game’s evolved so much, and it’s gotten so analytical where it’s almost where we’re just playing a numbers game as opposed to playing the sport,” former MLB pitcher and St. John’s alumnus Craig Hansen said. 

“And the way I see it, when I played, the starting pitchers didn’t want to come out of the game, it was their game to win or lose. But now with how training has been going and basically every single reliever is throwing over 97 [miles per hour], everyone’s now considered a weapon. I don’t think that guys throwing 97 just automatically makes them a better pitcher than someone that’s throwing 92.”

According to Baseball Savant, the average fastball velocity for every team’s pitching staff in 2025 was either faster or the same as it was in 2016, with the exception of the Yankees, who had Aroldis Chapman that season with his average fastball at 101.1 miles per hour. Organizations tend to prioritize speed because it’s seen as the most surefire way to retire hitters, but that mentality can be dangerous.

Hansen, who co-founded Pro Pitch Labs in Garden City, used an exercise he watched Manny Ramirez do in Boston where he moved up in the batting cage to help collegiate batters combat velocity. Facing intense speed repeatedly, he said, made in-game fastballs for the batters feel almost 15 miles per hour slower.

The commodification of velocity has led to a few undesirable outcomes in MLB. First, there’s no guarantee it works. Names in the top 10 of average fastball velocity in 2025 like Jacob Misiorowski, Ryan Helsley and Mason Montgomery didn’t have outstanding seasons.

Second, more speed puts more stress on the arm, which is why only three starters in 2025 eclipsed 200 innings as opposed to 28 in 2015. But most importantly, that stress on the arm combined with rising velocities in off-speed and breaking pitches has led to injuries up and down the sport.

MLB released a report on pitcher injuries in December of last year, a study of over 200 people in and out of baseball. The study found, among other things, that major league pitchers spent about 15,000 combined days on the then-disabled list with injuries in 2014; the combined days on the injured list in 2024 was about 30,000. An oversimplification would be to say that in today’s game, 100 pitchers spend a calendar year unable to pitch. 

“You’re forcing individuals to do things they physically can’t just to get the metrics the right way,” Long Island Ducks pitching coach Bobby Blevins said. “And you’re kind of creating robots as part of the system. Like a sweeper. It works for 30 pitches of bullpen, but you’ve never trained for that in your life. And all of a sudden you’re going to try it at 24-26 years old because it’s getting great metrics, but now your ligaments are starting to deteriorate because you’re not used to it.”

It’s not just an issue at the professional level, either. MLB’s report also said that velocity is higher than ever at the amateur level, and so are UCL surgeries, especially with college and high school players. But Hansen has seen it spread even to the lowest levels.

“We see these kids come in with elbow injuries, shoulder injuries, and it’s like, dude, you’re 12. What is going on here?”

If baseball is to move away from this unfavorable path, there will have to be changes in the way pitchers approach hitters—the way starting pitching is being marginalized has affected how hitters play the game. Emphasis on speed has led to a “three true outcomes” game, which means primarily strikeouts, walks and home runs, because hitters are now modeling swings to hit speed. Over time, this has resulted in fewer batted balls in play. Seven qualified batters hit over .300 in 2025, there were 20 such players in 2015.

Blevins believes that eventually, the mentality regarding starting pitching will reverse, and the game will become less sterile.

“I think if you bring back the sinker and changeup, I think you’re going to start seeing a lot more innings eaten, and focusing on the bottom of the zone, pitching from the down to up rather than up to down,” he said. “Letting your movement and location be your go-getter instead of getting strikeouts and a lower [earned run average] to be your payday. I think if they paid for innings pitched and reliability, that would be the first step in the right direction.

“There’s so much more to pitching than just velocity and spin rate. There’s just so much more that’s right in front of you, and it’s a feel and understanding to the game that your mind adapts to.”

At times on the Red Sox, Hansen was teammates with the late, great Tim Wakefield, a knuckleballer who pitched 17 years in Boston and remained effective well into his 40s. Wakefield retired after 2011, shortly before the “weapons” explosion baseball is dealing with at present.

The closest thing MLB has to Wakefield right now is probably Kyle Hendricks, who has never thrown over 90 miles per hour consistently but has notched a 10-plus year career. He threw 164.2 innings with the Angels in 2025, proving there are still alternative ways to be successful.

Hansen wondered if young pitchers with similar archetypes are going to survive the overarching mentality of baseball.

“Do I think someone can do it? Yes,” he said. “Do I think they’re going to be allowed to? Probably not, and that’s very sad. I played with a guy by the name of Charlie Zink in the minor leagues for the Red Sox, and he could throw a knuckleball. I felt like he could’ve did well and well enough, but they had a restriction on knuckleballers on the staff. I guess that just seemed unorthodox, like if no one else is going to do it, we’re not going to do it.”

Perhaps organizations are already starting to take a different approach to the starting pitcher. Over the past decade and a half, the Dodgers have bought heavily into pitching analytics and organizations eager to copy their success have followed their lead.

This year, however, Los Angeles has let Yoshinobu Yamamoto go the distance in two consecutive postseason starts, pitching the first two complete games in the playoffs since Justin Verlander in 2017. The Dodgers are also letting Blake Snell go deep into games against his reputation of early exits. Perhaps, once again, they see something baseball does not.

“There’s so many cameras out there that it’s almost like a cancellation generation,” Blevins said. “[Baseball is] trying to find something wrong in somebody instead of the good, and being yourself at the end of the day is what I really preach. It doesn’t have to look picture-perfect, it doesn’t have to be by the book. You could throw four curveballs in a row. Just be you.”