I set to thinking about this after watching my Mets spend much of November and December in a modestly lunatic attempt to trade Noah Syndergaard, one of the National League’s best starting pitchers. They appear to have failed at this self-mutilation. Now that they have retained two true aces — Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom, the Cy Young Award winner — why not stretch them out and push them to go deeper into games? What is the point in allowing an ace to pitch six innings before turning the ball over to a committee of anonymous relievers?

Game 4 of the 2018 World Series presented something of a nadir when Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts, a bright fellow no doubt, pulled his starting pitcher after he had yielded a single hit through six and a third innings and was ahead, 4-0. The Dodgers ended up marching six relievers into that game, lost, 9-6, and exited the World Series the next day.

Mazzone pulled out a few of his remaining hairs.

“The greatest teacher for a pitcher is starts,” he says. “Pitch and pitch and pitch. Let a pitcher find himself.

“The problem is that so many pitching coaches and managers are yes-men and don’t want to challenge their front offices.”

There’s a sizable mound of statistical evidence to back such assertions. At risk of giving the quadratic dudes a seizure, I turned to Baseball Reference and selected 40 pitchers from the past half-century, men who ran the gamut from solid to superb. These are the sort of pitchers you’d expect to see in the postseason, and my list included Bobby Ojeda, Mike Torrez, Steve Avery, Tom Browning, Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Ferguson Jenkins and Mazzone’s troika of Hall of Famers. I examined their performances across games, from beginning to end.

For most good pitchers, their worst inning was the first. Once they found a rhythm and once pitches began to crackle, they became progressively more difficult to hit. Tom Seaver’s career earned run average in the first inning was 3.75. His E.R.A. for the last three innings of a game, that dreaded third and fourth time through the batting order, stood at 2.75.