Bailey Ober's Success Is a Throwback to a Bygone Era

On Tuesday night at Target Field, Bailey Ober threw a complete shutout on just 89 pitches against the Miami Marlins. It was a rarity in its own right — Twins starters don't complete a game very often — but the efficiency of his performance was almost unheard of in these times. The only starter in Twins history to throw a shutout on fewer pitches, per Aaron Gleeman, was Bill Krueger (85) back in 1992. 

It was around that time, the first of Greg Maddux's four consecutive Cy Young seasons, that the term "Maddux" was being coined in reference to a shutout recorded on a double-digit pitch total. The Hall of Famer would also gain repute for his ability to dominate with relatively sub-par velocity. 

Coincidentally, earlier in the day on Tuesday I happened to be dinking around on Baseball Reference and looking through Carlos Silva's 2005 game log. The backstory is that I've been piecing together a list of my most vivid personal memory from each of the past 25 Twins seasons, and for '05 it was Silva's 74-pitch shutout against the Brewers in May. 

This was the pinnacle outing from Silva's career — a perfect encapsulation of the strike-throwing groundballer at his best — and the epitome of Twins pitching philosophy from that era. Silva debuted in the majors in 2002, the same year as Rick Anderson became Minnesota's pitching coach, and two years later he was acquired by the Twins alongside Punto in the Eric Milton trade. 

Silva's stylistic alignment to Anderson's "pitch-to-contact" prototype undoubtedly played a role in the Twins targeting him. And sure enough, the right-hander mostly served as a proof point for the wisdom of such an approach at the time. With the exception of his ugly 2006 campaign, Silva was mostly a reliable, ultra-efficient innings eater with above-average ERAs for the Twins.

That 2005 season was his best: he posted a 3.44 ERA (130 ERA+) in 188 ⅓ innings while issuing just nine walks all year. Silva achieved this success with a 9.5% strikeout rate (3.4 K/9) — just 71 strikeouts in 27 starts. The lowest strikeout rate in baseball today belongs to Adrian Houser at 12.2%.

To look back through his game log now is almost incomprehensible up against the context of modern-day pitching. Deep counts just really didn't exist against Carlos Silva. He threw it over the plate and said, "Come get it," knowing that the movement on his middling 90ish-MPH fastball and oft-used changeup would succeed in inducing weak contact most of the time. As a result, his pitch counts were shockingly low.

In 2005, Silva completed seven or more innings in 21 of his 27 starts, but surpassed 100 pitches in an outing only twice all year. You contrast that with the current environment, where starters rarely venture into the seventh or eighth because their pitch counts have already piled up on longer, strikeout-chasing ABs, and it feels like almost a different game.

And in many respects, it was. Baseball has changed in fundamental ways over the past 21 years. A pitcher like Silva probably could not succeed in 2026, and would likely be unable to even tread water.

Ober is doing it though. Granted, his traits are not as extreme as Silva or some of the other standard-bearers from the pitch-to-contact era like Brad Radke and Nick Blackburn, but Ober leverages similar ingredients in his recipe. Throw strikes, hit your spots, induce ground balls, lean on the offspeeds. "The lost art of pitching," as Ober calls it.

Ober's 35.5% GB rate is not conventionally high but it's the highest of his career. He's attacking the fringes of the zone with the highest called-strike rate of his career (17.3%). And he's throwing more (better) changeups than ever before: 36.2% of the time, with a .167 batting average allowed. 

The economical pitch usage enables Ober to routinely pitch deeper into games than other starters, which has ancillary positive effects on the bullpen. The Twins as a team have had three complete games thrown over the past three seasons and Ober was behind all of them. This year, he's gotten through at least six innings in five of his past six starts, and he's on pace to reach 200 innings.

A throwback, indeed. Time will tell if Ober can keep rolling like this, especially given the quality of the defense backing up all this contact — he definitely has his skeptics — but it's already gone on long enough that it's difficult to characterize his success is a total fluke.  

As long as he can stay on track, I'm just going to enjoy the ride and bask in the nostalgia.