Although the team will have 4-5 starting pitchers, the actual 5-player starting rotation will make the starting pitchers vulnerable to injury, and the need to sign more pitchers will outweigh the losses. The official website points out that a number of teams have tried to use a six-man starting rotation strategy, allowing them to shoot 1 day off 5, which is closer to the Japanese professional baseball team 1 day off 6 days.

Japanese pitchers also place equal emphasis on endurance rather than the violent pitching of the major leagues. Yushin Yamamoto was injured in his first season in the United States last year due to overburdened pitching, and Shohei Ohtani's "two-knife flow" is a special case, and now it is stipulated that Ohtani will not occupy the pitcher spot (the two-knife stream has an exclusive spot), which makes the Dodgers sure that there will be a six-man starting rotation next year.

In addition, some teams use the Cowshed Wheel Battle (Cowshed Day), which saves 1 starting pitcher on the same day. In 2021, for the first time, the number of "1 to 5" in the major leagues (37%) was higher than "4 to 1" (33%), and this gap widened to 41% to 33% in 2023 and 42% to 32% last year.

Just like the American professional basketball NBA in recent years, there is also a controversy about "star rotation", rest is to take a longer road, the club has to protect its investment, usually the starting pitcher is very valuable, once the injury is absent for a particularly long time, can not be as durable as in the last century. For example, in the major leagues in 1876, the St. Louis Brown team had only one starting pitcher in a single season (64 starts, 63 complete pitches), and then two starting pitchers rotated, which was almost a mess before scientific management.

College baseball also discourages starting pitchers from working too hard, they can rest for more than five days, and it's an honor to be the starting pitcher on Friday. That being the case, it's only a matter of time before the starting rotation in the major leagues keeps up with the times, but it won't happen anytime soon, and it will take time for the entire generation of pitching habits to change.