TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, August 05, 2004

Hanging Them Out on the Closer Line

An offhand remark by a broadcaster on a game the other night caught my ear: something to the effect that there were only a handful of relievers still closing for the club they wre closing for in 2003.

This seemed to jibe with my own subjective impression. So today I looked at all 30 major league rosters: who was the "named" closer as of April 1st, 2003, and who is closing now.

I also looked at gaps in "save opportunities" -- significant DL stretches of roughly 10 save opportunities -- among the closers who were closing in April of '03. To be kind, I counted Billy Wagner and Armando Benitez, presently on the DL for supposedly short stretches, as their teams' currennt closers.

There are only six major league clubs with the same "named closer" now as at the start of '03: Atlanta (Smoltz), St. Louis (Isringhausen), LA (Gagne), Yankees (Rivera), Orioles (Julio), and Anaheim (Percival). (Of course, that four of these six teams are in first place will only add fuel to the fire for the 'winning teams have dominant closers' theory of the bullpen). I'm not quite counting Bob Wickman, who missed almost all the period in question.

Of these, only Smoltz, Gagne, and Julio spent no time on the DL. Rivera's DL stint was relatively short.

Of the remaining closers, 7 were closers for other teams at the beginning of the '03 season.

Fifteen clubs have had three or more "named closers" during the period.

Seventeen of the current closers were not closing anywhere (even counting Armando Benitez and Billy Wagner, both of whom are on the DL at this writing). Fourteen of these pitchers had fewer than five career saves prior to the '03 season. Out of this group, three -- Trevor Hoffman, Wickman, and Danny Graves -- were previously "established closers" (a somewhat questionable claim for Wickman); Graves had been in the rotation in '03 after closing in '02, Hoffman missed '03 with shoulder surgery.

I'm not going to try to do an analysis of the whys and wherefores of this in the context of the "do you have to have a dominant closer" debate. My intuition is that the Bill James neoconservative belief that a "committee" that throws out its best reliever for a situation when the runners are on base late -- whether or not it's a save situation -- is in fact a better route to victory. I call it "neoconservative" because before the days of the invented closer, the set-up man, the 7th inning man, the left-handed specialist, and the middle-inning slop guy, and certainly before the save rule was invented, most major league teams used a "committee" for the save opportunity and the best reliever for the most intense game situation. But with the Red Sox disaster of '03 we won't be seeing contending teams trying that any time soon.

I will just throw out some possible theories -- discuss quietly amongst yourselves.

(1) closing isn't as hard as some people think
(2) closing is a lot harder than some people think
(3) clubs don't want to pay a lot of money for that closer
(4) closers are being used hard and heavy and are burning their arms out
(5) it's just one of those things.

posted by The Crank 8:49 AM