One of the reasons sports journalism gets disrespected so much is that it is standard operating procedure to simply repeat evidence-free and even counter-factual assertions about things and no one cares. Case in point: the “no one will ever reach 300 wins again” meme, which gets repeated three or four times a year by people who should know better….

The last four 300 game winners all pitched in five man rotations and in the era of bullpen specialization. Only Greg Maddux had more than 36 starts in any one season. A five man rotation may cut down on wins per season, but in reducing workloads it may very well lengthen careers.  To cite these factors as bars to another pitcher winning 300 games is simply and unexcusably ignorant.

– Craig Calcaterra, HardballTalk.

Amen. Making sweeping predictions about the rest of baseball’s future is one of my biggest pet peeves, especially when they involve plateau’s as eminently reachable as 300 wins. As Craig points out, we’ve seen several people in the last decade pointed to as the last 300-game winner. When will people learn to stop saying that?

And I’ll add to Craig’s point that the five-man rotation doesn’t necessarily prevent a pitcher from reaching 300 games: the five-man rotation is hardly set in stone for the rest of baseball’s history.

It certainly seems, right now, like pitching top starters on four days’ rest is the best way to maximize their efforts while keeping them healthy for the long haul, but who knows what we’ll learn in the next 20 years? The next 40 years?

The game is constantly evolving, and so it’s not unreasonable to expect someone to come up with some way to reshuffle pitching staffs so that the top starters pitch more frequently, or that a certain pitcher on the staff is in position to earn more wins. Maybe Rick Peterson’s work in biomechanics will advance to the point that in 15 minutes he’ll be able to know how many pitches a hurler’s arm could handle in a season. Sounds unlikely, but probably Tommy John surgery did once, too.