Robert Gasser, Earl Weaver, and the Misguided Abandonment of an Old Baseball Custom

It's not just the fact that Robert Gasser led all Triple-A hurlers in strikeouts last season that makes him a fascinating pitcher going into the coming campaign. He's shown interesting stuff, including anywhere from five to seven different pitches and the ability to scatter his offerings across a spectrum wider than home plate without compromising his command. However, his low arm slot does minimize the vertical movement separation he can achieve, so sustaining his strikeout rate in the big leagues could require major adjustments.

As a lefty with some traits that make him inherently vulnerable to righty batters, Gasser faces some hurdles in matriculating to an MLB starting rotation. In a much earlier age of baseball history, there would have been a simple, clear solution to that problem. In fact, former Baltimore Orioles manager and Hall of Famer Earl Weaver famously made use of what amounts to an apprenticeship program for his young pitchers. When they came up, rookie hurlers were stashed in long relief. Weaver only brought them forward to the rotation if and when they earned his trust.

"Not only is this first year a learning process for the pitcher, it's a learning process for the manager," Weaver and ghostwriter Terry Pluto wrote in the seminal 1984 memoir-***-manager's handbook, Weaver on Strategy. "The manager doesn't know what the pitcher can do in the majors. He has an idea and makes judgments about his talent, but a manager must see the pitcher in game conditions."

Weaver would, therefore, bring along young pitchers by having them work regularly but briefly, at first, and then promote those who proved themselves capable of the harder but more glamorous and remunerative work of starting. He could boast several success stories in doing so, including Dennis Martinez, Scott McGregor, and Mike Flanagan--the last of whom won a Cy Young Award for the team, after matriculating to the rotation.

The Brewers have done some very stripped-down version of this in the recent past, of course, with Craig Counsell's Crew utilizing Brandon Woodruff and Corbin Burnes as relievers during their playoff push in 2018. Those were limited, need-based assignments, though. They weren't actual apprenticeships, or proactive moves designed to help those hurlers mature into more complete ones.

There's a reason for that--or rather, tens of millions of them. The Weaver Way hasn't necessarily become any less viable a developmental strategy since the zenith of the dynasty he oversaw. It's no longer regularly used anywhere in MLB, though. Free agency (and modern baseball teams' approach to service time and team control) has rendered it obsolete.

I don't think it needs to be that way, or even should be. The parallel is imperfect, but consider the Packers and their run of incredible quarterback play. It's too soon to know whether Jordan Love will be anywhere near as good (from a career perspective) as Brett Favre or Aaron Rodgers were, but his first season running the show in Green Bay was a roaring success. Love benefited (in ways hard to measure or make objectively clear, but equally hard to refute) from spending three years on the sidelines, watching Rodgers, getting reps in practice, and learning how NFL offenses work from outside the heat and peril of the spotlight.

Stashing Love for so long, just as they stashed Rodgers for three years behind an aging Favre, was a luxury the Packers could only afford because of the greatness of the incumbent their young guns were each replacing. That's one reason why few NFL teams emulate that approach, but another is that the Packers essentially sacrificed their years of cheap team control over both Rodgers and Love, in order to develop them and time out their ascension to the starting role. The easiest way to win in the NFL is to have a star-caliber QB on a rookie deal, taking up much less of the salary cap than the same player on a deal influenced (if not quite determined) by the free-market cost of that talent.

If you get it wrong (or even only half-right), then, that strategy is a costly and losing way to do business. If you get it right, though, it might be a surer way to end up with consistently strong play at the most important position on the field than any other out there. It's a more expensive way to win, but a better one, too. Baseball teams, who aren't even burdened by the same strictures that the salary cap inflicts on NFL franchises, could be doing the same thing with more of their players. They consistently choose not to.

We ought to press for that to change, not only because developing players at the big-league level is effective (and because it's time to start discouraging cost-optimizing strategies elected at the expense of more expensive ones more aggressively), but because there's something rewarding about it beyond the sheer success or failure of it. One of the most important distinguishing characteristics that makes advanced animal species so is neoteny--the wide gap between a juvenile and adult version of a species. Growing, learning, and changing is what makes us human, and it's what makes the human condition so interesting. It's fun to see players get much, much better at the highest level of a pro sport, even if it means that they're not as good when we first encounter them as they could be.

This is why we love tracking prospects so much. It's become a much less available source of satisfaction on the field in MLB, though, because of the trend away from calling players up when they prove good enough to be in the big leagues. Instead, most teams now wait until a player is good enough to be an average or better everyday player, and we are denied the pleasure of seeing them improve significantly from their rookie and sophomore seasons to their fifth or sixth.

If the Brewers enjoy fairly good health in 2024, they might not need Gasser as a starter, save for a few spot appearances. With Burnes, Freddy Peralta, Wade Miley, Colin Rea, and Joe Ross, they have the skeleton of a strong rotation in place already, and they hope to have a fully healthy Aaron Ashby work as a starter this spring. Rather than stash Gasser in Nashville for another year, though, the Brewers could install him as the second lefty in their bullpen, with a much greater capacity to work multiple innings than Hoby Milner has. 

Gasser can probably best learn the lessons he still needs (and make the changes he still needs to make) by being asked to face big-league hitters, and working on a daily basis with Chris Hook. He's set to turn 25 at the end of May, so it's not as though he's outrageously young or an arm in need to delicate handling, and he already has a full season's worth of starts and innings at Triple A to his name. Although you won't hear coaches say it very often anymore, even people within the game realize that some players can best finish their development into good big-leaguers by hanging on the fringes of the roster and playing a small role for the first couple years of their careers. Because teams view that as a waste of players' cheapest, most flexible portion of team control, though, no one tries it with any regularity. The Brewers should break with the new tradition and prepare Gasser to be a valuable, versatile big-league apprentice in 2024.