The independent minor leagues are baseball’s laboratories.
Pitch clocks? The robot umpires coming to the major leagues this year? The home run derby used to settle ties, as seen in last year’s All-Star Game? All first tested in an independent league.
Some concepts are hits. Some are flops.
The experiment to watch this year is almost spiritual in nature: Can professional baseball make starting pitching great again?
Baseball’s obsession with velocity has dampened the soul of the sport. The marquee pitching matchup is an endangered species. The oohs and aahs over a 100-mph pitch have been replaced by yawns.
The potential solution, or at least a piece of one, is evident in this job description:
The United Shore Professional Baseball League (USPBL), an independent league based in Michigan, is recruiting for the position of “primary starting pitcher.”
The language is intentional. In today’s major leagues, a starting pitcher generally is selected, trained and deployed to throw as hard as he can for as long as he can. Five innings is perfectly acceptable, with a parade of harder-throwing reinforcements in the bullpen.
What the USPBL plans for a primary starting pitcher: “Build the ability to pitch deep into games.”
That used to be self-evident for a starting pitcher, but no longer. Yoshinobu Yamamoto turned into Sandy Koufax last October, with back-to-back complete games during the Dodgers’ championship run.
However, in the regular season, the Dodgers did not throw a complete game, and neither did 12 other teams. The Dodgers’ starters averaged 4.85 innings per game; no team averaged even six innings.
In 2025, three major league pitchers threw 200 innings. In 2010, 45 did.
“Being able to get more Mark Buehrles or Cliff Lees back into the fold would be good for the game,” said Justin Orenduff, a 2004 Dodgers first-round draft pick and now the USPBL executive director of baseball strategy and development.
Buehrle, a five-time All-Star, and Lee, a four-time All-Star, each featured precision rather than power.
Lee, twice a Game 1 World Series starter, did not average 92 mph on his fastball but pitched 200 innings eight times. Buerhle, whose average fastball did not top 90 mph, pitched 200 innings for 14 consecutive years.
Neither might be drafted today. Major league teams crave velocity, and young pitchers train to boost it. The number of players throwing at least 95 mph at the Perfect Game national showcase increased sevenfold from 2014 to 2024, according to a report from Major League Baseball.
The average MLB fastball rose from 91 mph in 2008 to 94 mph in 2024, the report said.
“Velocity is the No. 1 predictor of success,” Billy Eppler, then the Angels’ general manager, told me in 2018.
Velocity also is associated with an increased risk of injury. Teams have implemented well-intentioned measures — pitch counts, innings limits, more rest between appearances — that have not mitigated the risks and might well have led to more injuries.
Chicago Cubs starting pitcher Shota Imanaga prepares to pitch in the bullpen
(Ashley Landis / Associated Press)
Kyle Boddy, the founder of Driveline, the seminal program for velocity training, said a hard-throwing pitcher is not going to manage his velocity on an inflexible pitch count.
“If he goes 60 or 70 pitches, he’s going to sit 100,” Boddy told Baseball America. “He’s not stupid. And if we tell him, ‘There’s no limits on you,’ but we keep taking him out after 70 pitches every time, he’s going to realize what’s going on.
“If he can’t control the volume, the one lever he can control is the intensity. I personally think that’s worse for his arm, going max effort for shorter stints.”
That ultimately works against developing starting pitchers capable of delivering six innings, the MLB report said.
“Modern workload management strategies — ostensibly intended to prevent overuse, protect pitcher health, and maximize pitcher effectiveness — may actually increase injury risk by allowing and even incentivizing pitchers to throw with maximum effort on every pitch,” the report said, “rather than requiring pitchers to conserve energy and pace themselves in an effort to pitch through longer outings.”
Not only does throwing harder increase the risk of injury, the MLB report said, but the resulting parade of strikeouts runs “counter to contact-oriented approaches that create more balls in play and result in the type of on-field action that fans want to see.”
In the independent Atlantic League, the league has run several years of testing on a “double hook” rule: when a team removes its starting pitcher, it loses its designated hitter. That would incentivize a major league team to use its starter for six or seven innings instead of four or five, but it would not solve the underlying problem: What if the starting pitcher cannot work six or seven innings?
That is where Orenduff and the USPBL come in.
Dillon Chapa from the Westside Woolly Mammoths gets set to pitch in a USPBL game last season.
(Courtesy of the USPBL)
Every general manager says he would love a rotation of five 200-inning starters, if only he could find them. They cannot offer on-the-job training in the majors, lest their team find itself at a competitive disadvantage.
In an independent league, Orenduff need not worry about that. Tough matchup with the bases loaded in the fourth inning? Third time through the order in the sixth inning? Pitch through it.
“It’s not going to be that quick pull,” he said.
This is not about leaving a starting pitcher out there to get crushed just to pitch through it. This is about shaking off the shackles of those one-size-fits-all limitations.
“You basically want to start by showing fans and the industry, for example, that 100 pitches is just a number,” he said. “It’s completely arbitrary.
“Some guys may be able to go 110, 120. We want to be able to show that the game can still produce players that are successful on the mound, most importantly, but are capable of going beyond the fifth inning and beyond 100 pitches if the expectation and the leadership and the structure are there to support it.”
The USPBL will have pretty much the same technology as major league teams do, to measure spin rates and recovery rates and every other rate. If you can maintain command and velocity, if you can get outs without max effort on every pitch, and if you can bounce back between innings and between starts, you may be able to be that primary starting pitcher.
Frankly, Orenduff says, all the velocity in the world cannot help your team if you cannot pitch.
“That has to be a metric too: sustainability and availability,” he said.
He conducted a study evaluating each team’s top three pitching draft picks since 2013. With the caveats that some pitchers were traded and some prospects still are developing, Orenduff found that three in four of those top drafted pitchers never have pitched for the major league team that drafted them, at a combined cost to the 30 MLB teams of $800 million in signing bonuses.
“We just have to have some sort of proof we can help more players have longer careers by being a little more flexible in how we frame things for them,” Orenduff said.
Here’s hoping the USPBL can discover some training methods that major league teams can use. Better that than listening to a major league manager with a 13-man pitching staff say after a game that he ran out of pitchers, as we too often hear. Can you imagine what Tommy Lasorda would have to say about that?