WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The complete game is nearly completely gone from baseball. Shutouts are vanishing, too.

The numbers are striking.

Go back to 1978, and there were more than 1,000 complete games in the majors. Move to 2003, and the total was about 200. In 2018, though, there were only 42 — the lowest total in the sport’s history, according to Baseball-Reference .com — and just 19 of those were shutouts, the fewest since the 1870s.

Or to put it a different way: Roughly every other game featured a starter who went the distance 40 years ago, whereas about one in every 55 games did last season. Stars of the 1960s and ‘70s such as Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton or Jim Palmer would top 20 complete games in a year. In the ‘90s, Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson would get to 10 or 12 or so.

Last year, no one threw more than two complete games. No one delivered more than one shutout.

“The special, elite guys are still able to achieve it and want to achieve it,” Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo said. “I don’t think we’ll ever see it disappear completely, but it’s definitely becoming a rarity.”

So what happened? Various factors contributed to the decline of dominant, nine-inning performances on the mound, from injury fears to an increased emphasis on accumulating bullpen arms, from the newfangled “opener” strategy of using a reliever to get things underway to protecting young pitchers in such a way that they never build up an ability to stay in until the end of games.

Still, the basic sense around the sport is that it’s not that pitchers are no longer born with shoulders or elbows capable of producing complete games, but that their teams simply won’t let them even try.

“Everyone,” Atlanta Braves right-hander Kevin Gausman summed up, “is obsessed with pitch count now.”