Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (48 page)

As to where relief strategy
did
go, when it didn’t go where Firpo Marberry had attempted to lead it, consider this fact. In 1927, every major league pitcher made at least one relief appearance. All of them, everybody appearing in more than six games. There are many seasons in that era, 1925–1940, for which this statement is
almost
true (that is, every pitcher pitched in relief except for one or two men).

You will remember that there were two strands in the early development of relief pitching. From 1925 to World War II, the strand which begins with Three Finger Brown and Chief Bender was the dominant model for the bullpen. There was, in that era, no such thing as a pure reliever, and no such thing as a pure starter. Everybody was a hybrid.

Bob Boone, short of pitching in 1995, tried using Kevin Appier on a four-man rotation. “Pitchers have been starting on a four-day rotation for a hundred years,” Boone said. “Maybe we should go back to basics.” This raises a deceptively difficult question: When did the four-man rotation really start?

That question has no answer. Certain
elements
of the four-man rotation, as Boone suggested, go back to the 1890s. But no major league manager, from 1925 to 1945, used a four-man rotation in the sense that we mean the term now. You couldn’t. The schedule wouldn’t allow it. Teams from 1925 to 1945

a) had many more off days and travel days in the schedule than we do now,

b) had many scheduled doubleheaders, and

c) had many more rainouts than modern teams.

The 1943 Chicago White Sox played 57% of their games in doubleheaders. That’s the record, but teams in this era commonly played 40% or more of their games in doubleheaders. Five-game weekend series were not unusual. Six-game and seven-game series, resulting from rainouts earlier in the year, were not terribly unusual. You can’t run a four-man rotation through a seven-game, four-day series.

I may be beating a dead horse here, but historians who write about the bullpen in the Lou Gehrig era normally focus on Mace Brown, Clint Brown, Jack Russell, and a few other pitchers, leading up to Johnny Murphy. My point is that that is
not
the bullpen of that era; those guys are anomalies. The bullpen of that era is Dizzy Dean, Carl Hubbell, and Lefty Grove. Dizzy Dean in 1934 won 30 games, but he also finished second in the league in saves—behind Carl Hubbell. Lefty Grove saved more games in his career than Mace Brown did.

Managers did not prefer to put their leads into the hands of marginal pitchers. And relievers, in this era, were essentially marginal pitchers. As Rogers Hornsby wrote in
My War with Baseball:

Relief aces began to reappear in significant numbers during World War II. Necessity was the mother of acceptance. Most of the really good pitchers went off to war, and marginal pitchers became the rule, rather than the exception. Managerial thinking changed; the circumstances of the game changed. As to who led the way in changing the thinking of managers, I would cite three men: Joe McCarthy, Leo Durocher, and Bucky Harris.

Joe McCarthy
persuaded Johnny Murphy to accept a place in the bullpen and promised him that he would be paid at the same level as a successful starter.

McCarthy, in the first ten years of his managerial career, used his staff the same way other managers of his time used theirs—everybody starts, everybody relieves. By 1935 McCarthy was under pressure to win in New York. The Yankees, accustomed to some success, won only one pennant in McCarthy’s first five seasons there, 1931–1935. In midseason, 1935, McCarthy divided his staff into starters and relievers. Red Ruffing, from 1936 to the end of his career in 1947, never pitched in relief—the first pitcher in many years to be used in that way.

And at the same time Johnny Murphy became baseball’s first
career
relief ace. He was the first pitcher moved to the bullpen even though he was pitching well.

Murphy was not alone in the Yankee pen; the 1935–1936 Yankee bullpen also was staffed by Pat Malone, Jumbo Brown, and Ted Kleinhans. The 1936 Yankee team is remembered as the first of a series of formidable teams, teams which for four years dominated baseball as no other team ever has. They could equally well be remembered as the first team in baseball history which had a starting staff and a relief corps, and minimal shifting between the roles.

Leo Durocher
went to the bullpen as aggressively as any manager of the 1940s, using about 180 relievers a year in a time when most other managers used about 120. “Perhaps the manager who led the way in constant and frequent substitutions to take advantage of every break,” reported
Baseball Magazine
in March 1948, “was—and again probably will be—Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Leo always played percentage. If a left-handed hitter was coming up in a tight situation Leo never hesitated, regardless of how well a right-handed pitcher was working. Out came the right-hander and in went a southpaw, to get what slight edge there might be.”

Leo also made a historically important decision when he moved Hugh Casey, a big, hard-throwing pitcher, to a full-time relief role. Casey was the first prominent hard-throwing reliever since Marberry. The fact that a superstar manager, Durocher, did this with a team that was always in contention was a factor in the “relief breakthrough” of the late 1940s.

And
Bucky Harris,
after twenty years of trying to act normal, converted Joe Page from a mediocre starter/swing man into a dominating closer.

Harris managed the Yankees in 1947–1948. He made Page a reliever. Casey Stengel inherited Page in the bullpen, and Page had a huge impact on the pennant races in 1947 and 1949. This event, more than any other one thing, brought about general acceptance of the concept of full-time relievers as a positive asset to a team.

Between 1949 and 1952, there was a great rush to the bullpen.

• In 1950 a bespectacled thirty-three-year-old career minor leaguer named Jim Konstanty pitched 74 times for the Philadelphia Phillies, winning 16 games and being named the Most Valuable Player in the National League.
  
• In 1951 the Boston Red Sox took Ellis Kinder, who had won 23 games for them in 1949, and moved him to the bullpen. Kinder went 11–2 with a 2.55 ERA.
  
• In 1952 a Negro League import named Joe Black went 15–4 with a 2.15 ERA, pitching relief for the National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers.
  
• Right behind the Dodgers were the New York Giants, featuring their own rookie relief ace, Hoyt Wilhelm. Wilhelm went 15–3 with a 2.43 ERA. Because Wilhelm pitched a few more innings than Black, he qualified for the NL ERA lead and led the league in ERA.
  
• The third-place team in the National League, the Cardinals, also had
  their
  own rookie relief ace, a guy named Eddie Yuhas. Yuhas went 12–2 with an ERA of 2.73.
  

Like Bucky Harris, Eddie Sawyer declined to follow through on the logic of his success. Having used Jim Konstanty 74 times in relief in 1950, leading a perennial down-and-out team to the National League pennant, Sawyer took Konstanty to the World Series—as a starting pitcher. Konstanty started the first game of the 1950 World Series. And lost.

Anyway, glance at the won-lost records—11–2 for Kinder, 15–4 for Black, 15–3 for Wilhelm, 12–2 for Yuhas. These lopsided won-lost records tell us something, which is that
these pitchers were not routinely used to protect leads
. A pitcher who is used to protect leads has more opportunities to lose a game than he does to win it, and for that reason will often have a losing record. A pitcher who goes 12–2 in relief is being brought to keep the game close.

Within a very few years, the idea of using some pitchers exclusively in relief swept baseball. In 1946 no major league pitcher pitched 50 games in relief, and only one pitcher (Hugh Casey) pitched 40 times in relief. In 1956, ten years later, more than twenty major league pitchers pitched 40 times in relief, and five of those topped the 60 mark. Casey Stengel continued to use his best pitchers to close out his victories until the late 1950s, when he came up with Ryne Duren. Stengel’s relief aces after Joe Page weren’t all that good, guys like Tom Morgan and Bob Grim, and he preferred to use Allie Reynolds and Whitey Ford to close out some of his tight victories. When Ryne Duren came along, Stengel stopped using his best starters in relief, effectively ending the strategy which had begun early in the century with Three Finger Brown and Chief Bender, and which had been, for twenty years, the dominant relief strategy of major league managers.

The conditions of the game which had forced managers to use starters as relievers changed in the 1950s. Air travel reduced the number of scheduled travel days, which reduced the number of scheduled doubleheaders. Better groundskeeping reduced the number of
un
scheduled double-headers. The four-man starting rotation became standard when the schedule allowed it to become standard.

We could summarize the history of relief pitching, at this point, in three stages:

1906–1926 Experimentation with early relief specialists

1927–1946 Bullpens dominated by off-duty starters

1947–1957 Emergence of the first high-profile relievers

The first stage begins with George (Cecil) Ferguson and ends with Firpo Marberry. From 1927 until the end of World War II, the dominant trend was for victories to be closed out by off-duty starting pitchers. And then, very suddenly, the door swung around the other way, full-time relievers began to dominate bullpens, and the strategy of using starters to close out victories went from dominant to essentially extinct within ten years.

We began with the idea that the starter was
supposed
to finish the game whenever possible; that was his assignment. This idea was very powerful in 1900, and in 1910, and in 1920, and in 1930, and in 1940, and in 1950. And in 1960. And, to a large extent, in 1970. It wasn’t dead by 1980. In each generation this idea, this northern star of pitcher usage, was fainter than it had been ten years before, but it was still there.

The idea that a starter was supposed to finish his games atrophied with agonizing slowness, and for each unit of strength that this idea lost, another unit of responsibility was placed on the bullpen. This was the fourth stage in the evolution of relief strategy, the era of ever-expanding responsibilities for the relief ace.

In 1960, when Mike Fornieles pitched 70 times for the Boston Red Sox, this established an American League record for game appearances. The National League (modern) record was still 74 games, by Konstanty. Over the next fifteen years, these records were broken almost annually. Stu Miller pitched 71 games in 1963, a new American League record. Bob Miller pitched 74 games in 1964, tying the National League record, while John Wyatt, Dick Radatz and Hoyt Wilhelm all exceeded the old American League record, with respective totals of 81, 79, and 73. In 1965 Ted Abernathy pushed the National League record to 84 games, while Eddie Fisher extended the American League record to 82. A second National Leaguer, Hal Woodeshick, also pitched 78 games, bettering the old NL mark of 74.

This went on for another decade. Wilbur Wood pitched 88 times in 1968, a new American and Major League record. Wayne Granger upped the ante to 90 (1969), and Mike Marshall to 92 (1973).

And finally, in 1974, Mike Marshall pitched 106 games for the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was shortly after this that John Thorn published his book on relief pitching,
The Relief Pitcher
(1979). “How much can a rescue man pitch?” asked Thorn. “Today we think that Mike Marshall reached—or exceeded—the limit … yet 61 years before Marhsall’s epic feat, observers thought that Otis Crandall was testing the bounds of endurance by becoming the first man to relieve in 30 or more games. As Dave Danforth passed the 40 mark, Firpo Marberry 50, and Clint Brown 60, baseball brahmins each time proclaimed that forces of nature were being tampered with, that arms could not bear up under the strain. The same remarks accompanied the successive fractures of the 70, 80 and 90 game ‘barriers’ by, respectively, Jim Konstanty, John Wyatt, and Wayne Granger.”

John’s a friend, and he knows that I’m not picking on him by quoting back something he was not exactly right about. He had no way of knowing, at that time, that baseball history had planted its pivot foot. The assignment given to top relievers, after thirty years of constant expansion, was about to contract rapidly.

It wasn’t the games; it was the
innings
. Dick Radatz in 1964 pitched 79 games and 157 innings. Wayne Granger in 1969 pitched 90 games and 145 innings. Mike Marshall pitched 106 games and 208 innings. These are the numbers which, in retrospect, look phenomenal to us. Someday some reliever will pitch 110 games in a season—but he’ll pitch 110 games and 85 innings, maybe 65 innings. Marshall pitched 106 games, 2 innings a game.

And, for once, it is absolutely clear who caused baseball history to turn. It was Bruce Sutter.

Bruce Sutter was an amazing pitcher. He threw a split-finger fastball before anyone else did, and better. By June 28, 1977, Sutter had already pitched 37 games, 67 innings, giving up 37 hits and 10 walks. His ERA was 0.67. He had struck out 78 men, and had already recorded 21 saves, moving in on the established major league record of 38. Projected to a full season, he was looking at 87 games, 157 innings, 183 strikeouts, and 49 saves, to go with his 0.67 ERA.

In early season, 1978, he was equally impressive, with an ERA around 1.00 into July. He was more than a good pitcher. Elroy Face was a good pitcher. Johnny Murphy was a good pitcher. Goose Gossage was a great pitcher. Bruce Sutter was a phenomenon. He made the American League All-Star team look like amateurs.

But in both seasons, 1977–1978, he was not the same over the second half. He went on the DL in August 1977. In 1978 he kept pitching, but his ERA skyrocketed over 3.00. Herman Franks was his manager, and Franks hit on a solution. In 1979, he announced, Sutter would be used
only
to protect a lead.