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As this period progresses, the pre-existing trend begins to expand: the staff become more amateurs after being placed in a role. Whether elite starters like Michael King and Chris Sale are used as closers in pitching days, iterman reliever Ray Kerr is deployed as an 11-12 batter, matchup-based starter, or leverage relievers Grant Taylor and Didier Fuentes are going multiple times through the order, the roles are clearly becoming a little more tumultuous.
Within this trend we are also starting to see starter conversions pick up the season more fully. If pitchers like Taylor and Kerr Can you have the length, why not? Some of the most successful pitchers of the past have spent their first few years as leveraged relievers, from Seth Lugo to Clay Holmes to King himself. Sale also broke as a big reliever before becoming a future Hall-of-Fame starter.
In the past these conversion projects tended to be limited to “starter repertoire” pitchers, guys who could throw four or more quality pitches in a changeup. But this is not even true, for two reasons. First, there were some of the best starting pitchers in baseball always starting bottles never changes (or similar dialectic words) or. Presumptive AL Cy Young winner Cam Schlittler literally never threw a pitch in the majors, and presumptive NL winner Jacob Misiorowski threw a grand total of 28 all-time. Even if you want to throw your start to change things, that’s much easier to learn because of the proliferation of kick change and split offers. Clay Holmes didn’t throw a single changeup as a reliever in 2021 through 2024, learned to catch a changeup while transitioning to the rotation, and was one of the first pitches at first base the last two years.
Within that framework, I thought it would be a fun time to go through three of the candidates for my relief-to-starter conversion of the 2027 season. I chose to skip the 2026 rookies like Fuentes, Kendry Rojas, and Hagen Smith who were used as a relief, but significant starters set expectations before the season, and also cheered some types of old relievers like Jeff Hoffman, David Bednar, and Luke Weaver, who seem very unlikely to be converted in this career, even if they are really interesting candidates in a vacuum. The last two names are briefly worth mentioning: Louis Varland and Mason Miller both threw starting tackles and have a history of past starts with no obvious health or workload issues, but they were arguably the two best closers in baseball this year, and teams are not moving their superstar closer to the rotation lightly.