How do baseball managers pick their own six pack in a liquor store, I wonder? Do they have a designated slot in the cardboard carrier—say, front-left—for the lager, and the ale must be middle-left, and the bottles go ’round in a horseshoe shape until they reach the front-right: the last, the best, the double IPA or the imperial stout, with more firepower than all the other beers in the sixer combined? Don’t even think about putting the best beer middle-right. No sir. The best beer has a job, and its office is front-right.
The professional coaches who oversee “bullpens”, the industry term for a team’s group of relief pitchers, have become intransigent decision-makers by practice. It began in 1969, the year Major League Baseball created the “save” statistic—which, roughly defined, credits a pitcher for recording the final three outs of a game in which his team leads by three or fewer runs. Since then, managers have obsessed about the specific use of their closers, the pitchers tasked with working in such situations.
If a game is tied in the ninth inning, baseball’s version of Hoyle says the away manager should not bring in his closer, because it would deprive him of using the closer in a save situation if his team were to eventually take the lead. If a team leads by one run in the eighth inning but its opponent has multiple men on base, the book play is to leave the closer out, because it’s not yet the ninth inning. The closer is typically a team’s most talented reliever. But because of the almighty save—and the ninth-inning role accompanying it—he doesn’t always play in the circumstances that would demand the most talent.
A quotation attributed to baseball writer Bradford Doolittle puts it best: “[The closer] is the only example in sports of a statistic creating a job.”
In this year’s MLB playoffs, Cleveland Indians manager Terry Francona has given that job some new responsibilities. The latest example was Monday night, when, after his starting pitcher exited the game in the first inning due to injury, he deployed his closer in the seventh. With the Indians leading the host Toronto Blue Jays 4-2 and a Jays runner on first base with zero out, Francona inserted Cody Allen, who saved 32 games in the regular season, to thwart a run-scoring threat. The next four at-bats for Toronto: a fly-ball out, a strikeout, a walk, and a line-drive out to the outfield. Threat averted.
Francona allowed Allen to pitch the first two outs of the eighth inning, as well, which were a groundout and a strikeout. It allowed him to split duties between Allen and the untouchable Andrew Miller for the final four outs: a strikeout, and then a single, two strikeouts, and a groundout in the bottom of the ninth. The Indians won by the same 4-2 score.
Baseball pundits marveled at Francona’s bullpen management after the game, as they have throughout the post-season (and even during the regular season). Monday’s operation was particularly impressive, because his relief pitchers had to work a cumulative eight and a third innings. But all he was doing was putting his players in a position to help the team succeed; ultimately playing his best when he needed them the most, not when an outdated code said he should.
We saw the same instance in a different game earlier these playoffs, when the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Washington Nationals in a decisive game five in the nation’s capital, with the series tied at two games a piece. Instead of waiting for the ninth inning to bring in closer Kenley Jansen, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts inserted him in the seventh, with L.A. up 4-3, a man on first, and zero out. Jansen got out of the inning and pitched into the ninth. When he tired—after tossing 51 pitches—Roberts turned to ace Clayton Kershaw, a starter(!), for the final two outs. Kershaw converted. The Dodgers advanced. The Nationals—whose closer Mark Melancon entered the game only after a parade of five relief pitchers coughed up four runs in the seventh inning—did not.
The Baltimore Orioles suffered the same fate after not deploying their closer in a winner-takes-all game against the Blue Jays. The Orioles, the road team, lost in 11 innings after a game-winning three-run homer. From the sixth inning until the end, the game was tied at two runs a piece. In that time, the Orioles used six pitchers. Not one of them was Zach Britton, who, more impressive than saving 47 games during the regular season, had an earned run average of 0.54. Zach Britton was the best relief pitcher in baseball this year—yet he did not appear in an extra-innings, elimination playoff game.
Why? Fittingly, because Britton didn’t have the chance to statistically “save” the game, despite having multiple opportunities to help save his team’s season.
