Are Pitchers Getting More Rest Between Starts?

Pitcher health and load management have become more important than ever in recent years as the incidence of arm injuries has risen. The reasons for that spike in injuries are complex and probably due to a host of factors. That said, the heightened emphasis on velocity and spin is a leading candidate for the cause of these injuries.

In an effort to preserve pitchers’ health, teams have been restricting the number of pitches thrown during starts. In 2025, of all 4860 games started, just 11.6% of the time did a starting pitcher throw at least 100 pitches. In 2015, 38.3% of starts featured 100+ pitches from the starting pitcher.

Another option for the load management of pitchers is to provide more time between starts. This post aims to compare that typical rest between starts for pitchers in 2025 versus those from a roughly a decade ago, in 2015. In order to limit data to only those pitchers who pitched a “full” season, only those individuals who made at least 28 starts in either 2015 or 2025 are included below. A threshold at 28 is semi-arbitrary, but generally captures the frequency of appearance necessary to qualify for an ERA title (28 starts of 5 IP on average makes for 165 IP).

One point to note is that the days between starts have been made date inclusive here; e.g., a pitcher who threw on 10/2/2015 and again on 10/4/2015, as Mark Buehrle did in an effort to reach 200 IP for the season (unfortunately he wasn’t able to do so and thus ended his 200+ IP streak at 14 seasons, still an incredible feat), is said to have 2 days of rest, not one.

A second caveat is the timelines in either season. In 2025, games started earlier, in late March, and also ended earlier in late-September. In 2015, games only got going in early April but also finished in early October. There are some caveats in either season relating to pre-“official Opening Day” starts, namely Yoshinobo Yamamoto qualifying in the 2025 data, but having started the season in mid-March in Japan. This data is minimal though and no starts have been excluded, despite some outliers. All said, the 2015 season was 182 days versus 2025 being 185 days, so do note that the length makes for a not exact apples-to-apples comparison of length of season.

With data for all starts from the qualifying starters, some summary statistics can be collected.

A couple points are worth noting here. First, fewer pitchers made 28+ starts in 2025 than in 2015; it’s getting tougher and tougher seemingly to pitch a full season relatively uninterrupted. Additionally, pitchers in 2025 are in fact getting more rest on average between starts: 0.2 days on average. This different, it should be noted, is statistically significant when comparing the two groups with a standard t-test. Finally, the median days rest is in fact a day greater now in 2025 than in 2015, suggesting that managers and decision makers are successfully baking in extra days for their starters in 2025 relative to a decade ago.

How does this data compare, though, when considering pitchers who made the exact same number of starts? The chart below depicts those differences.

Across the board, among pitchers who threw 28+ starts, those in 2025 were getting slightly more rest between turns in the rotation. In raw terms, this variance was most pronounced among pitchers who made 29 starts where 2025 pitchers have ~0.32 more days between starts than those in 2015.

Below, this data has been presented as a table to offer additional data.

For those curious about whether the number of pitchers making any given number of starts varied across these two timeframes, the table above offers some insight. Below, though, that data is shared visually.

It’s clear here that the “32+ start” pitcher is becoming rarer; 36 pitchers made 32 or more starts in 2015 and just 22 made as many starts in 2025, a 39% decrease. This suggests the increased value and use of spot starters, bullpen days, and skipped turns through the rotation in today’s game. The modal number of starts in 2015 was 32 and was 31 in 2015.

When even finer-grained data is examined, at the individual player level, one can see that those “leaders” in fewest time between starts on average most often come from 2015, but that there are some exceptions.

All 10 pitchers in the top 10 for “least average rest” here threw in 2015, but a couple pitchers appeared in the top 15 from 2025: Will Warren and Robbie Ray. Among all those starters listed above, getting a full week off was a rarity; only Chris Archer in 2015 had 10 days off for a single stretch. More often, those starters did not get even a full week for the entirety of the regular season, quite the task.

Pitcher injuries are one of the foremost problems with baseball today. In 2025 alone, many pitchers have gone down with Tommy John (and the internal brace variety); Gerrit Cole, Jordan Montgomery, and Tanner Houck are just some of those more notable players to undergo surgery, but there are many more whose careers are interrupted in the best case and derailed in the worst. Every fan should hope for the preservation of these athletes’ health and allowing for more rest between starts may well be one lever teams have to keep their best players on the field for longer. It will be interesting to continue to observe how pitcher rest patterns trend going forward; while today’s starters are getting a bit of a respite relative to their peers from a decade ago, it’s clearly not doing enough to keep pitchers healthy more generally.