How Do You Spell Releif Part 3

Over the past two blog entries I have talked about relief pitching. The first essay told of my disgust how bullpens are managed today. And in part 2 I went over a quick history of bullpen usage in MLB. This morning in the final part of this series I want to compare usage levels of todays best with yesterdays best and make a final plea to reason.

I have two main gripes with bullpen usage now. The first is how much these guys are used. Simply put closers today are babied. While I'm certain teams will tell you since these guys are now highly paid we need to carefully manage their workload. So my question to those guys is does only having your best relieve pitcher pitch 1 inning 3 to 4 times a week prevent injury? While I'm no doctor I can say with virtual certainty teams are not preventing injury to closers with such limited work loads. Over the past few seasons we've seen injuries to closers with very carefully manged workloads like Billy Wagner, Trevor Hoffman and Brad Lidge. If you go back into history and go to what I call the Golden Age of Relievers those guys pitched much more and most of the successful ones had long careers. The injury rate of relievers in the 70s did not seem to be any worse than today. So if you throw out the injury argument why are those guys only facing 3-4 hitters per game? Yesterday I had some free time and decided to do a little experiment. I choose 5 of the most successful closers of the last 5 years, Mariano Rivera, Francisco Rodriguez, Johnathan Papelbon, Joe Nathan and Jose Valverde. I looked at the average number of batters they faced per appearance. I took numbers for the last 5 years(3 for Papelbon and 4 for Jenks). And then I did the same thing for 5 closers of the golder era. For these guys I picked the 5 year period they were most effective(they had to be 5 consecutive seasons). The 5 guys I selected were Bruce Sutter, Goose Gossage, Dan Quizenberry, Rollie Fingers and Mike Marshall.

Today Average Batters Faced Per Appearance

M. Rivera 4.30

K-Rod 4.46

J. Pabelbon 3.94

J. Nathan 3.92

B. Jenks 4.45

It does not take a genius to figure out that if you are averaging about 4 batters faced per outing you are probably getting 3 outs and allowing 1 baserunner. Which makes sense because these guys WHIPs are around 1

Golden Age

B. Sutter 6.59

G. Goosage 7.02

D. Quizenberry 6.99

R. Fingers 6.65

M. Marshall 7.93

Looking at the above chart shows are very large difference. Also think about the 3 under 7 Sutter, Fingers and especially Quiz were EXTREME groundball pitchers who probably threw alot of double play balls which would suppress the batters faced per appearance a bit. As a group the above averaged facing 7.10 batters per appearance while todays closers faced 4.21. Their average appearance is 41% shorter than the 70s group. The 3 extra batters translates into 1 inning when a team does not have to use a middle of the road reliever. And if a team like the Red Sox have a key part of the game in the 6th or 7th they can bring in J-Pap to preserve the lead or not let the game get away. Let him go 2 or 3 and then they can have Manny Delcarmen finish or Francona can play matchups. If they are up by 2 or 3 runs at that point the chances of surrendering the lead is minute. Make Sense.

The other area that I find illogical is when to use your best bullpen weapon. Only bringing closers in the 9th if your up by 1-3 runs is great if they are on your fantasy team but makes no sense in real life. Like I said earlier the idea should be to win games NOT get your closers saves. Teams can win or lose games during all 9 innings not just the 9th. While planning ahead an inning or two is critical in baseball. Recognizing the key point in a game is also critical. If a manager botches innings 6-8 the closer becomes a non-factor in the 9th. If your closer is really your best reliever shouldn't he be in during the most important parts of the game? Knowing that each game is different. This crap that its important for all members of the bullpen to know exactly what their role is garbage to me. These guys are all highly skilled very competitive people or they wouldn't by Major Leaguers. Their job is simply to get hitters out whether its the 2nd, 5th, 7th or 9th inning. Teams are missing the boat/ Think about this. If you owned a business and had to send one of your salesman out on a critical sales call that can mean big bucks who are you going to send? I would think your best salesperson. Another smaller example is when I write the schedule for the store its no accident my best employees get the most hours while my worst employees get the least amount of hours. Bullpens should be the same way. Out of 30 teams last season only 6 had their save leader throw the most innings. And oddly enough two of those six teams leaders were guys that lost the closers role at some point in the season.

So thats my case. I'm sure its more than most of you have ever thought of managing the bullpen. So can things change? Sure. But we will need one team to rip up the "book" and try something different. You just do things the way they used to be done when it was done correctly. Younger fans who don't know any better and older broadcasters know don't know any better will yell and scream. All it takes is one team. But if there is something we all know about baseball is it does not like change.

This 3 part series was aimed at making everybody think a little. I really hoped you enjoyed it. Comments are very much looked foward to.