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The fifth inning was a struggle. A single, then a double play. A walk, a stolen base, another walk. The Rays’ Garrett Cleavinger survived it, and got another two outs in the sixth. For his wobbly effort that night at Tropicana Field, Cleavinger got a win.

The guy who pitched most of the game, starter Jacob Waguespack, got an assignment to the Durham Bulls. He worked four innings, allowed no earned runs, and left with a lead that the bullpen held in a 2-1 victory over the Giants. But as every fan knows, Waguespack could not receive credit for a win because he started and did not pitch five innings.

That’s the rule.

“It’s one of those things that’s been around for so long, but maybe it doesn’t fit the way the game is being played now,” said Rays reliever Colin Poche, who had 12 victories last season, tied for 10th in the American League. “It is interesting to think about. If you’re the pitcher who threw more innings than anybody else that game, you’re probably more deserving of it. And it’s gotta go to somebody, right?”

Cleavinger, for his part, said he would have gladly let it go to the starter in that April 12 game. Waguespack got 12 outs, after all, and Cleavinger got five. Both left with a lead; only their entry points in the game were different. The official scorer awarded Cleavinger.


Jacob Waguespack allowed no runs in a four-inning start versus the Giants earlier this month but left without credit for the Rays’ win that day. (Kim Klement Neitzel / USA Today)

“If they changed the rule to four (innings),” Cleavinger said, “I don’t think anybody’s gonna gripe too much about it.”

Let’s be clear: there’s no momentum to alter the requirements for pitcher victories. The win, we know, is the squarest stat in baseball, and new material won’t turn Up With People into Usher. But it could get with the times, don’t you think?

“If someone from Major League Baseball asked me about it, I would say I wouldn’t touch it,” said John Labombarda of the Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of MLB. “You do your team a disservice if you pitch less than five innings.”

Labombarda said he’d be much more interested in lowering the innings threshold to qualify for the ERA title. Only 44 pitchers worked the required 162 innings last season, down from 81 pitchers in 2013.

A more reasonable number for the ERA title, perhaps, would be 150 innings — an average of five innings for 30 starts. But for individual wins, the five-inning minimum for starters seems firmly locked in place. And starters seem just fine with that.

“Of course,” the Rays’ Aaron Civale said. “I did not do my job well enough as a starter if I’m not surviving through five.”

Teammate Zach Eflin, who tied for the AL wins lead last season, with 16, agreed. Eflin said he would not want any victories that don’t last at least five innings — and ideally more.

“Completely fine with that,” Eflin said. “It’s our job as starters to pitch as deep as we can to make sure the bullpen’s as healthy as possible for October baseball. Me going five innings means that four relievers have to pitch if they’re one-inning guys.”

That is the prevailing ethos among major-league starters, even today. They accept the responsibility of logging innings and, in turn, they are generally rewarded with higher salaries and better job security than relievers.

But usage patterns have clearly changed in this era of power pitching, when starters unleash their best stuff all game and teams try to show caution with young arms. The Yankees’ Luis Gil, 25, had Tommy John surgery two years ago and has just now returned to the rotation. His first two starts were team wins, but went down as no-decisions because he was pulled in the fifth.

The rulebook did not specify a five-inning minimum for starters’ victories until 1950. Before then, league executives often had competing definitions for the win, and corollaries applied haphazardly. A study by Frank Vaccaro in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal found more than 200 games from 1918 through 1949 in which a starter was awarded a victory without pitching five innings.

In the 1930s and ’40s, dozens of wins went to starters who left a game early because of an injury. Lefty Grove, for example, was forced from a game with numbness in his arm after four shutout innings on July 14, 1938. He still got a win, and it counts among his career total of precisely 300.

Yet in Grove’s World Series debut, for the A’s in 1929 against the Cubs at Wrigley Field, he relieved starter George Earnshaw in the fifth inning and pitched the rest of the game. Earnshaw got the win.

It’s all sort of silly, in a way. Victories are always listed on stat sheets, but rarely define modern greatness. Each of the last three seasons has included just one 20-game winner — Julio Urías in 2021, Kyle Wright in 2022 and Spencer Strider in 2023 — and none of those pitchers got a first-place vote for the Cy Young Award.

And when a reliever snatches a win from a starter, good luck convincing an arbitrator that it mattered.

“As relievers, it doesn’t earn you anything — and it’s a double-edged sword, because we get ridiculed for losses,” said Tampa Bay’s Shawn Armstrong, a 10-year veteran with an 8-6 career record. “It’s more leverage index, your strikeouts, your xFIP, your WOBA. We know the data that matters. But a win in the big leagues is a win in the big leagues.”

Armstrong got his first in 2017, for Cleveland in a game at Texas. The next spring training, Armstrong was pitching for Seattle and met a fan who had attended that game and saved his tickets. He gave them to Armstrong.

“He’s like, ‘I figured they’d mean way more to you,’” said Armstrong, who was touched by the gesture. “Every reliever can attest, when you get a win, it may not mean much to (your salary), but for us it means something, because it means the team won.”

That is all that really matters, especially to the Rays, who pioneered the use of the opener in 2018 and gleefully defy tradition to win on a budget. As the game evolves, shouldn’t recognition for a bedrock stat evolve with it?

Let’s make the starter eligible for a win as long as he collects the most outs for his team that day. That makes sense, right? Kevin Cash, the Rays’ manager, pondered the notion for a moment.

“If they said, ‘Hey, we want to pick who we felt did best over a three-inning stretch,’ I’d be like, ‘OK, yeah, I think there’s some fairness to that,’” Cash said, smiling. “But I don’t know, man. We’ve (messed) up pitching so much anyway. Whatever!”

Gimme Five

Five bits of ballpark wisdom

Alex Wood on the mounds of MLB

When Alex Wood started for the Athletics on Thursday in the Bronx, it left him with only one current ballpark he has not pitched in. Wood, 33, has worked everywhere except Comerica Park in Detroit, but he’s familiar with that mound, too.

“Detroit is probably one of the worst, fattest mounds,” he said. “You don’t even have to get on it. You can just see it.”

Wood has become an expert on mounds in his 12-year major-league career, and he can’t understand why they’re different from town to town. The inconsistency, he said, cannot be good for keeping pitchers healthy.

“I’ve been talking about it for years. You would think one company would just produce a mound that’s the exact same across all of baseball and then all the grounds crew would have to do would basically be to take care of the rubber and the landing holes,” Wood said. “But I wouldn’t say there’s one mound that’s the same as the next, generally speaking.”

Specifically speaking, here are five of Wood’s insights on some notable mounds of MLB:

1. Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles), Petco Park (San Diego), Yankee Stadium (New York): “Those three, for sure, are some of the best — the clay they use, the way the mound stays together, you don’t get big holes in the rubber or on the landing spot, just the way that it’s taken care of by the grounds crew.”

2. Oracle Park (San Francisco): “I generally like that mound, but it’s so cold and windy pretty much the whole year that once some of the hole gets dug out (next to) the rubber, you have old clay that’s like concrete. You’re rolling right over the front of that lip, and I’ve had times where I’ll get a bruise on the inside of my foot because the old clay has gotten so hard and concrete-like.”

3. Citi Field (New York), LoanDepot Park (Miami): “Miami and Citi Field are definitely some of the tallest mounds in baseball. Whether the slope is the same or not — the slope could be the same, but mounds can be built up higher or lower.”

4. Truist Park and Turner Field (Atlanta): “The mound was pretty solid at Turner Field in ’13 and ’14, and then when they announced the new stadium, it went (bad). But at Truist, it’s a horrible mound, one of the flattest in baseball. It was so hard last year that when I threw in a day game, I literally was sliding; my cleat wasn’t even going into the dirt. The fact that anyone could say that mound is up to regulations, it’s crazy to me.”

5. Rogers Centre (Toronto): “I haven’t thrown there a ton — I’ve only had two starts there. I think it’s a fine mound. It’s like umpires, if you don’t remember some of the umpires you’ve had, it probably means they’ve done a pretty good job. It’s the same thing with mounds.”

Style points

The story behind an athletic aesthetic

Freddy Peralta’s tattoo

The Brewers are missing a former MVP winner, Christian Yelich, with a lower back strain. They traded a former Cy Young Award winner, Corbin Burnes, to Baltimore before the season. But as they hold onto first place in the NL Central, they’re apparently following Freddy Peralta’s philosophy.

Peralta, who is 2-0 with a 3.18 ERA through five starts, has a tattoo on the inside of his right forearm with a silhouette of three characters from “The Lion King” — Simba, Timon and Pumbaa — below the words “Hakuna Matata,” a song from the movie. Below the characters is the familiar lyric explaining its title: “it means no worries.”


A look at Peralta’s arm tattoo. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)

Peralta, 27, was born two years after the movie’s release, in 1994. But he finds meaning in the message.

“Sometimes I have to think like that,” he said. “Don’t (feel) a lot of pressure, just let the ball roll, enjoy the moment, everything’s gonna be all right. Sometimes I worry too much, most of the time not about myself, about other people, and it’s not good sometimes. It just helps me a lot, mentally.”

Off the Grid

A historical detour from the Immaculate Grid

Rick Wise — Phillies/No-hitter

For folks who love baseball trivia, Rick Wise is our kind of guy. His first career victory, at age 18, came in the nightcap of a 1964 doubleheader — following Jim Bunning’s perfect game. He started an All-Star Game, was traded twice for Hall of Fame pitchers (Steve Carlton in 1972 and Dennis Eckersley in 1978) and earned the victory for Boston in the famous sixth game of the 1975 World Series.

Wise qualified for the Phillies’ no-hitter square in Sunday’s Grid, courtesy of his famous two-way performance on June 23, 1971, when he blanked the Cincinnati Reds while also smashing two home runs.

But a more obscure game, later that season, is just as fascinating. At Veterans Stadium that Sept. 18, Wise pitched all 12 innings of a 4-3 victory over the Cubs. This was not unusual for the time; while no pitcher has worked 12 innings in a game since Charlie Hough in 1986, eight different pitchers did it in 1971.

Here’s what’s crazy: After giving up a leadoff homer in the second inning, Wise did not allow another baserunner until a two-out single in the 12th by Ron Santo. That’s a hidden perfect game, and by retiring 32 consecutive batters, Wise was just four shy of Harvey Haddix’s single-game record.

“They got a two-run homer in the first and a leadoff homer in the second to lead 3-0, and (pitching coach) Ray Ripplemyer comes out and says, ‘Well, let’s see, you better stay away from the middle of the plate or you’re not gonna be out here much longer,’” Wise said when we spoke a few years ago.

“He was certainly right. So I changed speeds a little better after that home run in the second, and it was 10 2/3 perfect innings. Then I drove in the winning run off Phil Regan in the bottom of the 12th. I hit a double in the ninth and they didn’t score me, so I had to pitch three more innings!”

Wise’s walk-off single capped an inning that included the only sacrifice bunt of Greg “The Bull” Luzinski’s career. Wise would finish the season with a career-high 272 1/3 innings, and asked for a $50,000 salary for 1972. The Phillies refused and traded him to St. Louis that spring for a Cardinals pitcher who was also holding out.

That pitcher, of course, was Carlton, who forged a path to Cooperstown with four Cy Young Awards, 329 victories and 4,136 strikeouts. But the great left-hander would not have qualified for Wise’s square on Saturday’s Grid. For all of his achievements, Carlton never pitched a no-hitter.

Classic Clip

The Motorola SportsTrax

Once upon a time, young readers, we had to wait for MLB scoring updates. For something close to live information, you’d catch Headline News on TV or listen for the sports report on an all-news radio station — at 15 and 45 past the hour, let’s say.

Then came SportsTrax by Motorola. It will surely sound prehistoric to Gen Z fans. But trust me: in the mid-1990s, it was hard to believe such advanced technology could possibly exist.

SportsTrax was a handheld device, a little smaller than an Altoids box, that delivered only real-time baseball scores. (It also clipped to your belt!) There was no video, obviously. But each time you’d click on a button, the screen would give an in-progress report on a different game: teams, score, inning, outs, baserunners.

Oh, it couldn’t tell you the specific pitcher or hitter. The count? No chance. The details could come later. Simply being able to follow along from anywhere, in real-time — without a TV or radio — was revolutionary to our primitive minds.

Here’s Cito Gaston showing off an early, Blue Jays-specific prototype. What a time to be alive.

(Top photo of Luis Gil: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)



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