The Inning Starting Rotation Keeps Running Into
By August, it stopped feeling hypothetical.
Fifth inning. Two on. The pitch count is creeping past 90. Nothing has gone wrong yet — just a ground ball that finds a hole instead of a glove, a foul ball that extends an at-bat, a walk that doesn’t feel dangerous until it stacks on top of the rest.
The starter hasn’t imploded. He’s just run out of runway.
That’s when the night changes shape, not because of damage, but because of timing. The bullpen door opens, and the game starts asking a different question than it should.
It happened often enough that it stopped feeling situational. The starting rotation was handing the ball to the bullpen before the sixth inning.
The problem wasn’t the bullpen. It was how early the starter had to hand the game over.
Houston’s bullpen held up better than most. They were asked to protect thin margins and usually did. But those early handoffs narrowed the bullpen, forcing arms like Josh Hader and Bryan Abreu into games they shouldn’t have needed to appear in at all.
That strain showed up in moments like the Yankees series, when Hader was asked to cover multiple innings to hold a game together — not because the bullpen failed, but because the offence never created space for pitching to breathe. The game was saved. The usage lingered. Hader reported soreness afterwards and didn’t pitch again.
Hader arrived with a usage history built around restraint — rarely pitching three days in a row in San Diego, even in the NLDS against the Dodgers. Houston learned quickly how thin that margin gets when restraint disappears. When leverage arrives too early, even elite arms start solving problems they were never meant to see.
Houston rarely lets that inning drift. It’s almost always someone built to absorb damage, not erase it — the way Bryan King has been deployed. He isn’t there to shorten games. He’s there because someone has to stand in the middle of them.
This is why length upstream keeps coming up in the conversation.
Someone like Mike Burrows matters here in a way the box score won’t capture. Not because he’s dominant, but because a quiet sixth changes the entire night. Strike one. Contact. Inning over. The bullpen arrives when it’s designed to, not when it has to.
There were nights last season when the bullpen never stirred early. The absence was noticeable. Those games felt calmer, even when the score stayed close, because the sixth arrived without a decision attached to it.
What they’re missing isn’t another closer. It’s another absorber. A right-handed arm Stuff+ darling to survive contact, enough command to avoid free baserunners, and enough trust to enter before the game tilts.
When the bullpen doesn’t appear, it’s usually because someone upstream absorbed it. That’s what Framber Valdez did for years. Not by dominating every start, but by carrying the game past the point where choices start piling up. Seven innings without drama. The seventh arrived before anyone had to warm up. A habit, more than a performance.
Framber’s leaving doesn’t just remove a name from the rotation. It removes the one place the night used to stay quiet.
You can never have enough pitching, right, Dana?