Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (50 page)

Now, most 1990s managers feel that you have to have two left-handers in the bullpen, better yet if you have three or even four; gives you maneuverability. But if the disadvantage of having
no
left-hander is only five runs per season, then why in the world are you using two or three roster spots for five runs a year?

Then look at the other side of the equation: What are the costs of doing this? What does it cost you to try to keep two or three lefties in your bullpen?

First, it costs you two or three roster spots. It costs you, let us say, a pinch hitter and a defensive replacement. Any kind of a decent pinch hitter is worth more than five runs a year.

Second, look at the pitchers who are getting major league jobs out of this deal. I’ve seen countless cases, and I’ll bet you have to, where managers will drag in left-hander after left-hander after left-hander, failure after failure after failure, and expose the team to one bad pitcher after another, simply because they are determined to have left-handers in the bullpen.

Wasn’t Felipe Alou a lot smarter not to worry about it, just to say, in effect, “These are the best pitchers I’ve got, they all happen to be right-handers, so what?”

And because his bullpen was all right-handed, Alou was able to
schedule
the work of his relievers to a much greater extent. The left-handed one-out man—he’s got to pitch when the opportunity arises. If everybody’s right-handed, you can just set up a schedule and rotate them. And he did.

If you ask anybody in baseball about the obsessive use of left-handed spot relievers, he’ll say, “Tony LaRussa does it.” Well, Tony LaRussa is a smart guy, and a great manager. John McGraw was a smart guy and great manager, too, and he didn’t do any of this stuff, so what’s that worth?

A key to understanding why managers do what they do is always to remember that
managers like to control the flow of the action
. Any strategy which gives the manager an opportunity to control the flow of the action, such as bunting, will probably be used more often than would be dictated purely by concerns of maximizing optimal expected outcomes.

But this is percentage baseball run amuck. Like Red Rolfe’s decision to platoon Vic Wertz, it’s percentages promoted ahead of common sense. And as time passes, that will become apparent to more and more managers.

The other 1990s policy, the effort to get as many saves as possible for your relief ace … it may be years before that runs its course, and it probably won’t happen until the save record is pushed up to around 70. It will break up in this way. Someday a manager will find himself in a tough spot in the sixth inning, and he will ask his closer, a young Lee Smith or John Franco, to go out to the bullpen and get loose. The young pitcher will express displeasure with this. He may even refuse to go to the bullpen, because he’s The Closer, and it isn’t a save situation. And the manager will say to him, in exactly these words, “I don’t give a shit about your personal statistics. Go get ready to pitch.”

The logic of it… is it more effective to use your best pitcher only in save situations, or more effective to use him the way Elroy Face was used? I don’t know the answer to that, and I’m not criticizing the policy on that basis. I’m saying that the belief that only The Closer can finish games is a shibboleth, just like the belief that all of your best pitchers had to be starting pitchers was a shibboleth, and sooner or later it will dissolve into the nothingness of which it is made.

The 1990s use of The Closer presents a manager with two ethical questions for which he has no answer. Those two questions are

1) Why should I manage this team in such a way as to maximize one player’s statistics? Why should I care whether my relief ace gets 60 saves or 40 or 25? When did that become my job, to get 50 saves for some overpaid egomaniac?

2) Why should I treat the members of my bullpen unequally on this count? The glory job in relief pitching is getting saves. Why do I give
all
the save opportunities to one pitcher, even though I have other pitchers who are just as good?

A bullpen consists of one guy who’s got the big-money job, and four guys who just want a shot at it. That fact will eventually force a manager to face those two questions—why are you managing this team to maximize one guy’s statistics, and why are you treating your relievers so inequitably?

And once managers are forced to face those two questions, they’ll realize that they have no good answer. The plates will move again. The search for a static equilibrium in relief strategy will go on to its next phase, whatever that might be. Relief strategy has been in constant motion for a hundred years. It is very clear, to me, that we are nowhere near a stopping point.

In 1876, Harry Wright used twenty-one relievers during the season. The National League was new that year, so this established a new record—a record which would stand, surprisingly enough, for thirteen seasons. It was 1889 before any manager used
more
than twenty-one relievers in a season.

That was the last time that record stood still for as long as thirteen seasons. The record for relievers used in a season since then has been broken and reestablished thirty-seven times, about once every three seasons on the average, as the numbers of relievers used have gone constantly upward.

The terms “left” and “right” in politics date to the French National Assembly during the time of the revolution (1789–1795), when the most radical members made it a point to sit at the far left. As new members came in, they were invariably more radical than those already there, so whoever was sitting on the left tended to be pushed toward the right. The right side became known as “The Pillory,” because whoever had been pushed to the right would tend to discover that his next career move was the guillotine.

A low total of games in relief is baseball’s pillory. As each new generation of managers comes in, they push the established managers down the chart. Whoever is at the bottom of the chart, his career is about over.

The record for games in relief has generally, but not uniformly, been held by bad teams. Many times, the team which used the most relievers was just whoever had the poorest starters.

This was a record that many managers broke twice—Fred Lake, in 1909 and again in 1910, Fielder Jones, in 1916 and 1917, Branch Rickey, in 1921 and 1922, Burt Shotton, in 1928 and 1929, Bill Rigney, in 1961 and 1962, and Don Baylor, in 1993 and 1995. No one, however, has set the record three times. A history of the record for games in relief: