OPENING Day, 1992, and I’ve got a ticket in what would become my favorite place to sit when attending games in the Giant Concrete Mushroom Fungus, which is in the third deck in the right field stands. Right field is where the action was in the Kingdome. The Mariners had embraced their position in baseball as that of an absurdist theatre piece, a franchise which had learned to laugh at itself and, as such, their response to a magazine declaring a seat at the top of the third deck in right field in the Kingdome to be the worst single seat in all of major league baseball was to paint that particular seat a different color and immediately bestow it something of a cult status. You wanted that seat. If you’re going to sit in the third deck in right field, and be 8½ miles from home plate, you may as well go all-in and be as far away as possible. The seat was in demand, and someone was usually sitting in it even during games the Mariners didn’t sell out – which were most of them, in fact. The Mariners could count on seven sellouts during the season, Opening Day and the six games when the Toronto Blue Jays were in town, for which 40,000 people from Vancouver would come down for the weekend and turn the Kingdome into a de facto home field for the Jays. Otherwise, you had plenty of choices, but I always made it a point to head for the third deck in right. Once you went to enough games, you got to know some of the other section dwellers pretty well, making for some shared experience, and when you sat in that part of the Kingdome, it only seemed like it was a long ways away, because the Kingdome was something of a launchpad, and left handed hitters would whack home runs off the façades of the second and third decks in right pretty frequently during the season. Hitting the ball into the upper decks in left field, however, was a much more impressive poke. That was rarified space for the likes of Mark McGwire. If someone hit one up there, you would have to tip your cap even if it was the opposition doing it. When you sat in the third deck in right, you had a far better chance of getting yourself a souvenir than you may have originally thought.
On Opening Day, we’ve got reasons for some optimism up in the third deck in right. The Mariners are coming off their best season ever and they have some really nice young talent. They’ve got Ken Griffey Jr. in center, coming off a year where he hit .327 and established himself as the best all-around player in the game, they’ve got one of the best hitters in the game at third in Edgar Martinez, they’ve got smooth and slick fielding Omar Vizquel at short. They’ve traded for the power bat of Kevin Mitchell and while the price was steep – three starting pitchers going to the Giants – the front office has earned some trust by winning a few trades in recent years, in particular fleecing the Yankees for starting right fielder Jay Buhner in exchange for Ken Phelps, and also getting an impressive haul of pitchers from the Montreal Expos in exchange for Mark Langston – one of whom is one the mound tonight, a gangly fireballer named Randy Johnson who has the potential to be pretty good.
But there is also cause for concern among the third deck dwellers in right. There is ill will between the fan base and ownership, whose response to the best season in history was to fire the manager, Jim Lefebvre, who made it happen and replace him with Bill Plummer, a move best explained in this conversation I had at the time with a couple of Seattle media members at the time:
“If they fire Lefebvre, who would want this job?”
“I guess Bill Plummer is the front runner.”
“Bill Plummer? That stiff who coached third base?”
“That would be him, yes.”
“If the Mariners hire him as a manager, if means they’re not serious about staying in Seattle. That’s a move to strip the team down and make them as unwatchable as possible.”
Indeed, the franchise’s future is mirky and uncertain. In August of the previous year, owner Jeff Smulyan had outlaid his plan to relocate the franchise to Tampa Bay in a meeting with his creditors at Security Pacific Bank in an effort to stave them off, only to then have an anonymous bank employee steal the notes from the meeting and fax them to the Seattle Times. One of the reasons going to Opening Day in 1992 seems like a good idea is that you’re not really sure there is going to be an Opening Day in 1993.
The Mariners are playing the Texas Rangers to open the 1992 season and the Rangers can’t pitch, which has been a theme with that franchise for the entirety of its existence, and the Mariners jump all over them. Randy Johnson is alternately wild and wonderful, but the offense is giving him plenty of runs and plenty of margin for error. It’s 8-3 in favor of the Mariners going to the top of the 8th inning and when you see such prowess on the first day of the season, you feel as if everything is going to be OK.
And then the bullpen took over.
The top of the 8th lasts for approximately 9 hours. Four Mariners relievers combine to yield 9 runs on 7 hits and 3 walks, and when the fourth of those relievers, the ordained ‘closer’ Mike Schooler, gives up a 3-run bomb to pinch hitter Gino Petralli to give Texas the lead, I start to get the sinking suspicion that everything isn’t going to be OK after all. Sure, it was only one game, but I just knew that this team was going to be bad.
The Rangers won that game 12-10, swept the opening series of the season and the Mariners were in a full-on tailspin for the rest of the year, going 64-98. And Petralli’s 3-run shot was just the tip of the iceberg, as far as woful bullpen performances would go that year: of the seven home runs Mike Schooler would give up in 1992, four of them would be grand slams, which tied the Major League record. He bore the brunt of the scorn and ridicule, but his cohorts among the arson squad which composed the Mariners bullpen were nearly as culpable, inexplicably squandering one lead after another as the season become more and more dire. Like most everything that I dislike about baseball, it can be attributed to having been subjected to a steady stream of Mariners games when I was younger, and since this blog serves as an outlet and an opportunity for me to vent about deep-seated frustrations, I thank all of my readers who, so far, have put up with this 1,200-word act of exorcism.
I hate bullpens.
And in particular, I hate super specialized bullpens of the present day in baseball. I hate endless pitching changes and hyper fixations on match-ups, and I cannot fathom why it is that the conventional wisdom has reached the point that every team in baseball is so dependent and reliant upon their bullpen, and in particular, upon their closer – a position of importance which, quite frankly, shouldn’t be that important. In the regular season, with the dependence upon bullpens, bullpen management makes for boring baseball games. In the postseason, it makes for yet another area of the game where managers can completely screw things up – which is precisely what happened in Tuesday night’s AL Wildcard game in Toronto, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
There have always been relief specialists in baseball, of course, but the game wide fixation on the vital importance of the closer truly started coming into focus in the late 1980s. Like most bad ideas in baseball, this one seemed like a good idea at the time and like most bad ideas in baseball, it came from Tony Larussa, who pared back and crafted a very unique and specific role for pitcher Dennis Eckersley – the role we’ve come to know now as a “closer.” Closers pitch one inning – the 9th – and usually only do so if their team is ahead. They may pitch the top of the 9th of a home game if the score is tied, but rarely enter a game with the score tied on the road. It’s a preposterously pigeon holed little niche, but all games are copy-cat games in nature, and if something seems to work, everyone else is going to do it. And since the A’s were winning games by the truckload in the late 1980s, and Dennis Eckersley had a 0.61 ERA, thus rendering all games seemingly over when you trailed the A’s going into the 9th, by god everyone needed a closer! (Never mind those pesky details like having three frontline ace starters and a deep, powerful lineup and all that.) Certainly, Eckersley was wholly impressive in his time, just as Mariano Rivera would come to be wholly impressive in his time, and this is not to dismiss what they’ve accomplished so much as to question the importance in the first place.
The now-accepted definition of the “save” in baseball first came to pass in 1960, long before this strange infatuation with the importance of the bullpen had developed. In 1960, teams entering the 9th inning of a game had a .947 winning percentage. In 2013, in the era of closers and hyper specialization of bullpens, teams entering the 9th inning had a .945 winning percentage. No discernible difference. Move it back an inning and juxtapose once more: teams entering the 8th inning with a lead in 1960 won .899 of the time. In 2013, they won .897 of the time. (Sorry, I don’t have any more recent stats saved up anywhere.) So, in essence, nothing has changed, save for the endless numbers of trips to the mound by the managers in the late innings. The end results are basically the same, but the ways in which those results are being achieved have changed – ways in which are ultimately migraine-inducing. As baseball has seen the shift towards 12- and 13-man pitching staffs, with all sorts of left-handed specialists and right-handed specialists and the like, all that it’s really done is invent new things to do badly.
And I hate bullpens. I hate them. Nothing is more infuriating to the baseball fan than the blown save. The blown save ruins your day. It ruins your night out at the ballpark. Almost every long losing streak nowadays involves multiple games your team should’ve won in which your bullpen blew the save or blew the lead. Bad bullpens drive you to drink, they drive you to drugs and drive you to seek therapy. And what’s weird about it all is that this has become baseball orthodoxy. As a manager, you must have 7-8 guys in the pen, and you have to use this particular guy in this particular situation. But why is that, exactly? Why are you, as a manager, putting so much faith in a group of players who, on a base level, aren’t very good?
Because the truth is that if relievers were any good as pitchers, they’d be starters. At some point in their careers, all relievers were deemed to be lousy as starters and moved into the pen. Starters need a varied repertoire of pitches, they need to know how to pace themselves and, most importantly, they need to actually pitch with their heads. The NL wildcard game between the Giants and the Mets was a master class, taught by Noah Syndegaard and Madison Bumgarner, in the art of pitching with the head. Syndegaard established the corners early, figured out where the fringes of the umpire’s strike zone were located, and continued working those edges while throwing 98 mph. Bumgarner, meanwhile, went all fastballs the first time through the lineup, pounding the Mets hitters in on the hands, and then he changed to a steady diet of wicked off-speed stuff. Mets hitters were guessing all night, were off balance all night, while the Giants hitters were swinging and missing at basically unhittable pitches that they knew they had to swing at. It was an elegant performance by both of them and it was incredible to watch.
Relievers don’t do any of that. Relievers are in the game for 10-15 pitches at most. They generally have one thing they do well – or one thing that they’re asked to do well, anyway. They’re 1-note players with simplified repertoires. And it’s not so much a case that relievers aren’t very good so much as they are fickle. One year, they’re missing bats and striking everyone out; the next, they’re expendable. The Seattle Mariners’ 2014 bullpen was among the best in baseball. The same group of guys, in 2015, were so bad that every single one of them had been traded or demoted to AAA by season’s end. At the heart of the success of the San Francisco Giants – winners of three World Series since 2010 – lies an incredible stroke of good fortune, which was to stumble upon a core of four relievers who were consistent and who ranged from good to great for six years, which is pretty much unheard of. Here in 2016, that fortune has run out, as the Giants bullpen blew 32 saves this season. 32 saves! That’s several fifths of whiskey’s worth of blown saves. My liver hates the Giants bullpen right now.
There is some actual theory behind the steady stream of relievers. The first time a hitter sees a pitcher during a game is, statistically, the at-bat in which they are likely to do the worst. This has been born out by the numbers of the game forever, as there is a large increase in batting average during the second and third at-bats against a starter. Hence the need for a starter to think through the game and pitch with the head. So instead of having a tiring starter go through the opposing lineup a third time, you start bringing in reinforcements, you bring in fresh arms and that works great.
Until it doesn’t.
And the reason that it doesn’t is that relievers aren’t very good. Basically all forms of bullpen management work until they don’t. You can run 5-6 guys out of your pen, all of whom throw 96 mph and try to just overwhelm the opposition, but eventually hitters start squaring those guys up when they figure out the pitcher’s delivery and figure out they’ve nothing else to throw. Everyone in baseball can hit 96 if it’s flat and they know it’s coming. And relievers get so specialized over time – fixating on doing one thing and one thing only – that they tend to be awful at other aspects of the game. A lot of them can’t field their position worth a damn, nor can they hold runners on worth a damn. If they don’t do that one thing and one thing only well, they’re as good as scrap.
Have I mentioned that I hate bullpens? Bullpens are fucking useless. Bullpens ruin lives. They ruin entire seasons and more. The greatest team you don’t remember were the 1997 Mariners, who set an MLB record for home runs and total bases and had four of the greatest players in the history of the game at their respective positions on the roster in Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez (the one silver lining of that horrible season I mentioned at the start was the #1 pick in the draft, which was A-Rod). That team won only 90 games and was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, even with all that firepower and star power, because their bullpen blew 27 SAVES! Their bullpen was so horrid that, at the trade deadline, the Mariners traded three of their better prospects – outfielder Jose Cruz Jr., catcher Jason Varitek, and pitcher Derek Lowe – to the Blue Jays and Red Sox, respectively, for dead weight late inning relievers Mike Timlin and Heathcliff Slocumb, who weren’t any good and simply poured more gasoline on the fire. (The Varitek-and-Lowe-for-Slocumb trade is, without question, one of the worst trades in baseball in the past 25 years.) In the contemporary era, the worst offender have been the Detroit Tigers, who have as much as wasted a golden generation of great talent due to their complete inability to get anyone out consistently after the 6th inning.
And if you don’t have anyone in the bullpen who is any good, then why are you putting them in the game? This is the part I don’t get. If your bullpen is trash, running those guys out there who fail far too often feels turns the game into a Greek tragedy. I know there is more emphasis on things like pitch count and innings management with starters now, but I’m not entirely sure what that’s accomplishing. Guys don’t go out and through 150 pitches in a start any more, but guys are also generally in better all-around physical condition, thanks to advents in sport science over time. Now, I’m not saying you should burn out your starters and run them into the ground. I just don’t understand why there is this sense of dependence in baseball upon guys who, at a base level, aren’t necessarily very reliable. The deemphasis on the role of the starter seems to me to be less steeped in data and science more steeped into kowtowing to what’s become conventional wisdom which, quite honestly, should probably have never become conventional wisdom in the first place.
And this isn’t to say that every reliever totally sucks, of course. There have been masters of the craft, to be sure. Eckersley was brilliant at what he did. Mariano Rivera was brilliant at what he did, and if you have a guy who is that good at that one particular thing then by all means, use him. But Eckersleys and Riveras don’t grow on trees. If you don’t have a guy like that, then don’t play the game in the manner which requires having a guy like that. Do something else!
And to be more specific here, if you have a guy in your bullpen who actually knows what he is doing, then why on earth are you waiting until you have the lead in the 9th inning to put him in the game? This is the part of bullpen orthodoxy which has never made any sense to me. Every year, you’ll see some bad team at the bottom of the standings who’s got a closer on their roster who is, by most available metrics, a better pitcher than his compadres in the pen, but doesn’t seem to get in many games because his team is losing a lot. What good is that? That’s a waste of talent. Get him in the game! Put him in the game in the 5th, or the 6th, which is when your bad team is likely blowing a lot of leads. Will guys who aren’t very good blow the games later on? Maybe, but your best chance to win is by winning the inning that’s in front of you, a notion which seems obvious, doesn’t it? Am I missing something here?
Hyper specializing and minute bullpen management has just created more opportunities for managers to screw up – and managers already have far too much to do already. And this gets exacerbated in the playoffs, of course, when the situation dramatically changes – the series (and, thus, the season) is short, the stakes raised. This isn’t some July road trip to Kansas City and Minnesota. The situation, and the urgency with which you need to win postseason games, will often require that you do things differently. You can’t succumb to orthodoxy at that point.
The Orioles are going home early, in part, because for some nonsensical reason, they didn’t want to put Zach Britton in the game on Tuesday night in Toronto. Zach Britton is their closer, of course, and he pitched so well in that role this season – an ERA of 0.54 – to actually merit some discussion as a Cy Young candidate. (But only some discussion. No relieve pitcher should ever win the Cy Young, ever.) Orioles manager Buck Showalter never put him in the game – using six different relievers instead over the course of six innings – because it was never a “save” situation.
Wait … what? This is the ultimate “save” situation. You have to save the season! If he’s your best guy, Zach Britton needs to be in that baseball game on Tuesday night – and he certainly has to be in the game in the 11th inning when Ubaldo Jimenez gets in trouble. If he’s that good, he needs to be out there. I give the Indians manager Terry Francona props for not bowing to conventional thinking the other night in Game 1 against the Red Sox. His best guy in the pen is Andrew Miller, and Andrew Miller was in the game in the 5th and the 6th and into the 7th inning, when the game was teetering on possibly getting away from them. Waiting for later doesn’t do you any good.
But managers mess this stuff up horribly in the postseason. “Not a save situation,” was the reason Cards manager Mike Matheny gave when asked why his closer was sitting next to him in the dugout when his season ended in 2014. The Giants have been the benefactors many times over in recent years of managers making dumb decisions with their bullpens, most notably in this instance in 2012, which is one the most soul-killing moments I’ve ever seen in baseball, a moment from which the Cincinnati Reds franchise has never recovered.
And put yourself in Reds manager Dusty Baker’s shoes in that game. Think about the situation. It’s a do-or-die game, you’re already losing the game 2-0 with one out in the top of the 5th, the bases are loaded, your starter can’t get anyone out, and coming up to bat is Buster Posey, the MVP of the National League. This is as high a leverage situation as you’re ever going to find yourself in. You simply must get this guy out. The best guy in your pen is your closer, Aroldis Chapman, who throws about 104 mph, the ultimate strikeout pitcher at a moment when the strikeout would be key. Sure, you want to save him for the 9th inning, but what good is it to wait? Do you put Chapman in the game in the top of the 5th inning? Now, you may have reasons to keep him in the pen – you might trust your starter to induce a double play, you might have a guy in your pen who has been effective against Posey in the past (which, interestingly, Chapman is not), or whatnot – but if you’re managing the Reds, don’t you at least think about this possibility? It may seem like out-of-the-box thinking, but this is what’s required at this time of year.
Have I mentioned that I hate bullpens? We’re up to nearly 4,000 words already in this entry and like hell I’m stopping now. Another thing about bullpens I don’t understand: when your closer goes bad, why do you leave him out there? Look, some stiff reliever comes into the 6th and walks the first two guys, and the manager yanks him - and with good reason, because he’s bad. But a closer does that in the 9th, and you leave him out there even though he’s clearly not got his good stuff, because some days even the best guys don’t have their good stuff. Why is that? I never get that. I see so many of the blown saves occurring because for some reason, this one guy is supposed to finish the game for good or bad or whatnot. DON’T DO THAT!
I wonder where the game is going to evolve from here. The logical move, it would seem, would be for a club to shorten the bullpen and lengthen the bench, stacking it with more specialist hitters in order to counter specialist pitchers. Seeing Miller in the game in the 5th inning for the Tribe brings me back to an idea which seems much more useful to me, which is the idea of developing relief pitchers who aren’t specialized but who are actually good, and are thus able to enter the game at any time and in any sort of situation. The counter to that idea would be that you’d rely too much upon that guy and burn him out, so obviously, the solution would be to develop more than one of them, and if you look at really good relief pitchers from previous eras, that was exactly what they would do. It wasn’t uncommon for the Rich Gossage or Rollie Fingers types to be out there at any point in time that you needed them.
If nothing else, I wish for fewer pitching changes which kill the rhythm and the flow of the game. September baseball is particularly insufferable, when you have expanded rosters. (I believe the Giants had 19 men in their bullpen at one point this September. Good lord.) Why go through this pedantic exercise which, as the numbers show, ultimately isn’t making a significant difference in performance? Set up your bullpen however you want, and you’re still going to win games you lead in the 8th and the 9th inning the same amount of the time, so get away from reliance upon defined roles and specialists who are apt to flub. As spectacular as closers may seem to be, they’re ultimately best known for their spectacular failures. (I hadn’t watched that Gibson home run in years and it still gives me the creeps, but at least I found a video with Vin Scully doing the call, because Vin was the best and The Lose wishes him all the best in his retirement.)
And for god sake, don’t put Mike Schooler in the game, like, ever.
