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.