By the end of the Twins’ 17-6 implosion against the Brewers on Friday night at Target Field, both teams had a position player pitching.
This is not the way the game was meant to be played. But it is the way managers run pitching staffs in this era. So both the Twins’ Jonah Bride and Milwaukee’s Jake Bauers, position players by trade, were on the mound in the ninth inning, getting hit hard as batters on both teams padded their stats. Bride gave up five runs and Bauers four.
“Not something that I want to see. I don’t want our position players pitching,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We do it when we have to do it. When we’re forced to do it.
“Jonah is a very good teammate and is willing to contribute by helping out our bullpen. But that’s obviously not the sign you’re looking for when your position players are being entered into the game. You want to avoid that at all costs. We can’t allow ourselves to be put in that type of spot, where we have to do it.”
Bride must be a very good teammate, as he has now been called on to pitch four times over the past 15 games, a stretch in which the Twins are 3-12. They have given up double-digit runs four times during that stretch, and they nearly made it five with Saturday’s 9-0 loss.
In each of the four games Bride has pitched, the Twins have given up at least 14 runs. His major league ERA sits at 15.00 — 10 earned runs over six innings pitched, all this month, on 14 hits, three walks, two hit batsmen and two strikeouts, all from pitching this month.
Position players pitching is nothing new, but it especially seems to be more common nowadays, given the roster rules Major League Baseball has had in place since 2022. Teams can carry only 13 pitchers on their 26-player roster, and position players are only allowed to pitch in the first nine innings of a game when a team is down (or up) by at least six runs. (The rule changes were initially meant to begin in 2020, but COVID changed all that.)
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts might have pushed position players pitching to a new level a couple of weeks ago. On June 10, he brought in infielder Kiké Hernandez with two outs in the sixth inning and Los Angeles trailing San Diego 9-0. Hernandez ended up pitching the final 2 ⅓ innings, getting eight outs on 36 pitches.