Pitchers I Forgot Threw As Many Innings As They Did

This all began with Chris Reitsma. I noticed earlier that it's Chris Reitsma's birthday, and that got me thinking about the worst members of the Mariner bullpen over the years.* That spurred me to visit Baseball-Reference to check out all the recent Mariner teams, and that, in turn, caused me to notice that each team over the past several years has featured at least one pitcher who threw way more innings than I thought. A list is presented below.

2010: This year, there were two guys who fit. David Pauley threw 90.2 innings, while Luke French threw 87.2. Between them, they made 28 starts and won nine games, which is nine times as many as Ian Snell and Ryan Rowland-Smith combined. In my head, both Pauley and French were limited to only occasional work, which is probably because the bulk of their playing time came in the second half and by that point I was unflinchingly drunk and passed out.

2009: Last year, we had Chris Jakubauskas, who somehow wound up with 93 innings of work. I didn't just forget that Chris Jakubauskas pitched that often; I forgot about Chris Jakubauskas.

2008: I'm not sure which individual stands out the most, but Miguel Batista, R.A. Dickey, and Roy Corcoran combined to throw 300 innings while striking out just four more batters than they walked. Remember 2008? Remember how Roy Corcoran was one of the team's bright spots? Those were dark, dark days.

2007: For me, the guy is Horacio Ramirez. I'll probably never forget about Horacio Ramirez, but I did forget that he was allowed to throw 98 innings, over 20 starts, of some of the absolute worst baseball I've ever seen in my life. All you really need to know about Horacio Ramirez's 2007 is that he threw 98 innings over 20 starts.

2006: The 2006 Seattle Mariners had a pretty stable starting rotation. They also had Jake Woods, who threw 105 innings of combined starting and relief. I remember joking about how Jake Woods had an awesome tan, and it's only now dawned on me that he had an awesome tan because he was on the field all the damn time.

2005: Everybody remembers 2005 as the year that King Felix came up and made his Major League debut. What far fewer remember is that the man Felix displaced from the starting rotation was one Aaron Sele, who to that point had thrown 116 terrible innings. Felix struck out 24 more batters than Sele over nine fewer starts.

2004: 2004 was the year of Rich Aurilia. It was the year of Scott Spiezio, and a fading Bret Boone, and a fading John Olerud. It was the year of Justin Leone and Bucky Jacobsen. And it was the year that Ron Villone threw 117 innings over ten starts and 56 appearances. To this day I'm not sure why Villone got so much action on that team. At the All-Star break, the Mariners were 32-54, and Villone had a 2.87 ERA. He was a veteran lefty who would've been easy to move. Instead he lasted the season, and come winter time was re-signed to a two-year contract.

It's almost 2011. May this season's innings go to the pitchers we want to get them.

* in 2007, Reitsma allowed 37 hits over 23.2 innings of relief. It's the third-worst hit rate in Mariners history, behind 1977 Bob Galasso and - in first place, with a H/9 of 16.7 - 1995 Bill Krueger. I had no idea that Krueger was a member of the '95 Mariners, but from the looks of things he was one of the guys responsible for the giant hole out of which the team had to climb. Over a 13-year Major League career, Baseball-Reference tells me Krueger never pitched in the playoffs, and that's the way I likes it.

All this historical searching also led me to run across the forgotten Shigetoshi Hasegawa, who posted a 1.48 ERA in 2003 over 73 innings. He was an All Star. In 2003, Shigetoshi Hasegawa was an All Star. In the All Star Game, he pitched two-thirds of an inning and allowed four runs.