Oct 23 2007 12:11 PM
A lot of interesting stuff here, but a few things are glossed over.
(1) He writes of the Red Sox producing an inexpensive closer from their farm system as if its just a matter of choice. It's not, and the Sox sure have overspent in other places (and been willing to).
(2) He asks rhetorically if runs count for more in the ninth inning and leaves it open as if the answer is obvious, when its really worth exploring.
(3) He fails to drive toward the bottom line that you want a Forbes article to find. What is the value of a closer? How much should a team pay? What percentage of their overall budget? What percentage of thier bullpen budget?
(4) Does the usage that investment drives actually diminish the value of the investment?
I still don't think the 1988 A's are as much of a revolutionary moment as the consensus seems to suggest. As Miles Davis used to say, it's evolution, not revolution, baby.
Baseball
Myth Of The Closer
Tom Van Riper, 10.23.07, 11:15 AM ET
The 2007 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies should lay to rest one of the great myths of modern baseball: that a dominant "closer"--a high-priced pitching ace who enters a game in the final inning to nail down a victory--is a must-have for success.
Most major league clubs buy into the myth. The average team shells out $3.9 million a year for a closer, or 30% more than what a typical player makes. Eight closers made more than $6 million this season, led by the $10.5 million the New York teams pay for each of their ninth-inning specialists, Mariano Rivera of the Yankees and the Mets' Billy Wagner.
Most every major league team today designates one reliever as the ninth-inning specialist. The smart ones don't put a big premium on him. And the National League champion Rockies have something way more important--a deep bullpen that consistently keeps the opposition at bay over the final three or four innings. The team stands as Exhibit A for the wisdom of spreading money around the bullpen, rather than sinking most of it into one pitcher.
Rockies closer Brian Fuentes, who makes $3.5 million, sometimes shares ninth-inning duties with Manual Corpas. Fuentes takes just 29% of the team's total bullpen budget, leaving room for the club to invest in the quartet of Corpas, Jorge Julio, LaTroy Hawkins and Jeremy Affeldt. All five pitchers threw more than 50 innings of relief this season while combining for a 3.12 earned-run average. That's about a run per game better than the Yankees, a team that devotes 52% of its bullpen budget to Rivera.
In every one of Colorado's National League playoff games this year, the team built a lead after six innings and went on to win.
The American League champion Red Sox employ a more traditional closer in young fireball Jonathan Papelbon. But the operative word there is "young." By turning to their minor league system for talent rather than shelling out eight figures for an established veteran, Boston got themselves a top closer for $425,000 a year.
Like the Rockies, the money they saved went toward quantity. The four Sox relievers who pitched at least 50 innings this year--Papelbon, Mike Timlin, Hideki Okajima and Kyle Snyder--registered a major league best 2.75 bullpen earned-run average. They earned a combined $4.9 million, less than 13 of baseball's individual closers.
As good as Papelbon is (1.83 ERA, 84 strikeouts in '07), consider that he pitched 59 innings all season, out of nearly 1,500 innings the team played over 162 games. That means the Red Sox played 96% of their baseball while Papelbon snoozed out in the bullpen. He wasn't a bargain--Boston just got what they paid for. Look for the team to make him a starting pitcher down the road, once he accumulates the service time needed to command a big raise.
Of this year's eight playoff teams, the four that spent the most on closers--the Yankees, Angels, Cubs and Phillies--all lost in the first round. Combined, those teams coughed up $28 million, or 48% of their bullpen money, on the position. The four first-round winners--Rockies, Diamondbacks, Indians and Red Sox--spent $10 million, or 36%, on their closers. Those four also had the lowest overall relief ERAs, a result of building quantity along with quality in the pen.
Those veteran closers making millions can thank Tony LaRussa, who ushered in the era of hyper-specialization as manager of the Oakland A's in 1988. That year, LaRussa decided that his best reliever, Dennis Eckersley, would be used strictly to protect ninth-inning leads. Other clubs soon followed suit, and top relievers found themselves racking up more saves (the biggest stat driving their paychecks) while pitching fewer innings.
Yet in the 20 seasons since LaRussa's brainstorm, teams holding late leads have won at about the same rate they did in the 20 seasons before. Since 1988, teams leading after eight innings have won at a .951 clip, according to Baseball-Reference.com and STATS Inc., compared to .948 from 1968 to 1987. That adds up to less than one win per season per team.
How much added value can be expected from a guy who specializes in pitching the last inning, when there's so little room for improvement? Very little, though the perception of the ninth inning as overly important (do runs scored in that inning count more?) has made developing a track record as a last-inning specialist very lucrative.
And of course, that's just fine with the closers, for whom the current paradigm means less work for more money. That's a great gig; perhaps their agents are divvying up profits with LaRussa. Smart teams like the Red Sox and Rockies just don't take the bait.
