A Closer Look at Closer usage

Over at Baseball Think Factory, there's a link to and some discussion of a short piece at Banished to the Pen about trends in the usage of closers in the last 20 years or so.   The writer asserts that while there is some downward trend in the amount of work each closer is doing, bullpen usage overall has not changed significantly in that span.  

Even if front offices and field staffs want to begin using closers longer in games, the data suggests [sic] that pitchers are now conditioned to work three outs and rarely more. Because of that, the next step in reliever usage doesn’t appear to be calling on the Aroldis Chapmans of the world for more than one inning during the majority of the season.

Instead, the real sea change will happen when managers begin using their closers in the highest-leverage situations late in the game—regardless of conventional baseball thinking or contract incentives that reward saves.

While I agree with the first part of his final thoughts, I'm also wondering if perhaps the latter isn't already happening, but I'll get to that later.  Right now I want to nit-pick about methodology. 

Banished used the top 10 pitchers by Saves each year back to 1995, but this seems needlessly limiting and arbitrary to me.  Besides the fact that the Save is kind of a stupid statistic for measuring pitcher effectiveness, the top 10 pitchers each year are not the only ones with the right to be called "Closers".  Both very good and very bad teams can have closers that do not happen to end up in the top 10 in Saves, which are sometimes a result of happenstance and usage patterns more than talent.  (Joe Borowski led the league with 45 Saves in 2007 despite an ERA of 5.07.  Brad Lidge twice amassed 30+ Saves with an ERA over 5.00, once over 7!) 

For example, in 1998, the "top-10 rule" would eliminate Ugueth Urbina, who was (among relievers) 5th in MLB with 3.2 bWAR that year, despite amassing "only" 34 Saves for the lowly Expos, and Mariano Rivera, who amassed only 36 Saves for the Greatest Baseball Team in History.  Any of the best sportsbooks would have told you to put your money on the 1998 Yankees.  

Or for a more recent example, using the top 10 rule for 2015 (actually 11, as there was a 3-way tie for 10th) you'd leave out Greg Holland, David Robertson, Aroldis Chapman, and Drew Storen, the last of which he uses for an example in his own article.

Therefore, I instead chose to set the benchmark at anyone with at least 25 Saves in a season, which gave me well over 400 data points for the 26 seasons, which I averaged by season to look for trends.  Still an arbitrary benchmark, I'll admit, but one that gives us a more reasonable look at the pitchers would could reasonably be called mostly full time closers in the last two decades. 

Here are the annual averages for pitchers with 25+ saves per year*:

Year    IP     IP/App    %GF-25S    %GF -Top10
1995   66.2    1.05      89%          91%
1996   68.7    1.05      88%          88%
1997   69.8    1.03      85%          88%
1998   70.1    1.05      86%          90%
1999   70.4    1.05      86%          89%
2000   70.6    1.06      87%          89%
2001   68.1    1.02      87%          89%
2002   70.8    1.06      88%          92%
2003   71.1    1.05      84%          87%
2004   73.2    1.06      86%          90%
2005   68.6    1.03      87%          88%
2006   67.8    1.04      85%          85%
2007   67.3    1.02      86%          88%
2008   63.3    0.99      84%          89%
2009   64.6    1.00      83%          86%
2010   63.4    1.00      86%          87%
2011   64.6    0.98      82%          86%
2012   66.5    0.99      79%          87%
2013   63.6    0.98      83%          87%
2014   64.7    1.00      82%          84%
2015   62.3    0.98      81%          86%

*For the strike-shortened 1995 season, I prorated the innings total for 162 games instead of 144.  

These columns are, respectively, the averages for the innings pitched per season, the Innings per appearance, the percentage of games finished for the pitchers with at least 25 Saves, and the percentage of games finished for the top 10 Save leaders each year.  Seems like there are some pretty notable trends here, but in case you're a more visual person...graphs!  

While there was a downward trend in the data for the top-10 Saves closers, and there is one in my own data, the writer at Banished implies that  "...closers throwing only six or seven fewer innings per season now," is somehow "not dramatic," a notion with which I respectfully dissent.    

 

And you can see that this is also born out in the data.   Pitchers used primarily as closers averaged only 62 1/3 IP in 2015, compared with somewhere between 69 and 71 IP in 1996-2003.  (Somehow, 1995 still comes off as an anomaly, even with my data correction.) Then there was a peak of 73 IP in 2004, brought about by the fact that there were seven players with over 80IP that year, including Brad Lidge with almost 94. No other year had more than five such pitchers, and most years -including each year since 2005 - had only one or none at all.  

All seven of those 80+ IP relievers were former starters, and as one of the other trends noted in the banished piece points out, with the tendency to groom closers even from college on to be closers, i.e. not to pitch more than 70 or so innings in a year, we may have seen the end of such groups.

But getting back to that downward trend in innings per appearance, that's about a 10% difference in their total innings.  My data, because it includes some closers who may have lost their jobs or gained them during the season, necessarily shows a slightly less pronounced decline, about 8% lower in 2015 than at the peak in 2002 and 2004, but still, there is a difference.  

If you said that a top position player was playing "only 10-15 games" less per year than was expected of him 20 years ago, and implied that this was somehow no big deal, it would be laughable.  Likewise, if a starting pitcher averaged 20-25 fewer innings per year, and yet expected to be paid more money...OK, that's actually happening.  Bad example.   

But in any case, it does seem to me that this is not an insignificant change.  His argument is that we are more likely to see a change in usage not in total innings, but in situational usage, and I'm not certain if we aren't already seeing that:

This chart shows how frequently these pitchers are used to finish games (i.e. the percentage of their appearances that are used to end games, not the percentage of the team's games they finish.) and is for pitchers with at least 25 Saves each year.  However, the data in the table above also include the percentages for top 10-Saves closers, and you can see a slight downward trend there too, from 88-91% in the mid to late 1990's to only 84-86% now.  

In short, it seems that closers are already not being used as exclusively to close games as they once were.  Some of the differences in the numbers between the two data sets may be attributable to how a pitcher may be used differently, getting promoted or demoted from the Closer role in mid-season.  

The 2012 data for example, mark the lowest percentage, just 79% of appearances to finish games, but these data are skewed significantly by two pitchers going in different directions: 

• Santiago Casilla started the 2012 season as the Giants' closer but had five Losses and five Blown Saves by the end of July and lost his job to Sergio Romo.  

• Tyler Clippard started the 2012 season as the main set-up guy in the Nationals' bullpen, but with Drew Storen injured and Brad Lidge washed-up and Henry Rodriguez wild and ineffective (14 walks and a 4.74 ERA in 19IP through May!) Clippard got promoted and stayed there.  

Take their percentages out of the data and you're up to 83% that year instead of 79%.  All of which is to say, you have to have some idea where these numbers come from.  Picking arbitrary benchmarks without understanding their context can lead to some inappropriate conclusions.

My conclusion, for what it's worth, is that teams are already starting to do matchups in high leverage situations, often keeping two or more "closer-type" pitchers in the back of the bullpen, when possible, as the yankees have with Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances, or the Royals' famous three-headed monster of Holland/Davis/Hererra.  There's probably a way to test that hypothesis, the preponderance of teams with two or more pitchers amassing 10+ Saves, or something like that, but I've crunched enough numbers for today. 

My First Game Ever, I Think

I noticed a feature on Geoff Young's blog about the first game he ever attended, and though I have alluded to my analogous experience in this space before, I had never really taken the time and effort to research it in detail.  The truth is I don't know exactly when my First Game Ever (FGE) actually was, and I remembered so few details from the experience that I assumed I could never know the exact date.

I was right, of course.

I can't know the exact date.  But surprisingly, I managed to cobble together enough details that I think I have at least narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities.  I'm pretty sure the game was fairly forgettable, not least because I have essentially forgotten it.  If someone from my team had thrown a shutout or hit two homers, as Gene Tenace memorably did for Geoff Young's FGE, I would probably remember.

These are the few details I do remember about the game and the day itself:

• It was at Yankee Stadium, some time in the mid 1980's.
• I went with the Lodi Boys Club, in a 15-passenger van, and we sat in the bleachers.
• It was boring (forgettable, as I mentioned above)
• My kid brother, about three years younger than me, was there.  Come to think of it, he still is.*
• I got a sunburn.  
• We lost.
• To the Blue Jays.
• Ron Guidry was on the team, but did not pitch.  
• Jesse Barfield was there.

*Younger than me.  Not in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium.

I think I remember Barfield because he was a pretty decent player at the time and because his name had "Barf" in it.  Ten or 11 year old boys remember stuff like that, you know? 

But that recollection isn't as helpful as you would think because Barfield's career (1981-92) spanned most of the part of my childhood I can remember, and he even spent the last four years of his career with the Yankees, so really, who knows?  But I'm pretty certain it wasn't in the '89-'92 seasons, as I was already a teenager by then, and I would remember the experience better.

Also, I don't think I was going to the Boys Club anymore by the time I was 14, except when they had dances in the big Bingo room upstairs, where I would go to hang out with my friends and throw those snappy-wrapped-in-paper things at the floor near the pretty girls I was too afraid to ask to dance.  I was such a loser. 

Guidry's presence on the team means that it was necessarily 1988 or before, as he retired after that year.  The reason I know Guidry was on the team but didn't pitch was that after the game I told my mom I had met him and shaken his hand when he was in the bullpen, a semi-plausible lie only if:

A) He was on the roster but wasn't pitching that day, and
2) My mom had never seen Yankee Stadium in person, and therefore did not know that I would have needed arms about 10 feet long to shake Guidry's hand from the bleachers.

Fortunately she had never visited the Stadium (this would not change until the late 1990's) and was kind enough not to confront me on my lie when she did.  However, as it happens, my arms are 10 feet long.

It turns out, thanks to the inimitable Baseball-reference.com, that the Blue Jays won exactly 20 games at Yankee Stadium between 1983 and 1988 in which Barfield played, and we can start throwing some of them out right away.

The 1983 game is a Friday night in April.  Even a loser like me could not manage to get a sunburn on a Friday night in April.  We need to look at games during the summer, that started in the afternoon, presumably on a weekend or else a dozen or more school age kids from the Lodi Boys Club would not have been able to go. 

The ten total games in 1985 and 1987 were all during the school year and/or not during sunburn weather (weeknight games in June, and  weekend games in mid September) so it could not have been any of them.  The five games in 1988 were all night games, so they're out.  

That leaves us only four games in 1986.  The October 1st game was a Wednesday night, and Guidry pitched a complete game.  Therefore there could have been no school kids, sunburn, or plausibly fabricated Louisiana Lightnin' handshake story.

That leaves a three-game sweep at the end of June, 1986.  I've always remembered this game as being in July but the end of June is close enough.  Again, the Friday night game is out because Guidry pitched (badly) and it was a night game.  That leaves Saturday and Sunday.

The Sunday game was a close contest, with the teams tied 2-2 from the second inning until the Yanks went ahead by a run in the bottom of the 4th, only to allow the Jays to tie it again in the top of the 5th.  It stayed 3-3 until the top of the 9th, when rookie manager Lou Piniella (damn, that was a long time ago) brought in Brian Fisher to maintain the tie in the 9th.  He promptly allowed Willie Upshaw to up and hit a single and then Fisher couldn't fish a Damaso Garcia sacrifice bunt out of his glove, so everyone was safe. 

At this point, Piniella presumably should have brought in Dave Righetti, who would have his best season as a reliever in 1986, though at the time his ERA was a shade over 4.00 and he had blown 8 of 24 Save Opportunities.  Still, he had been great as a relief ace the previous two seasons, had five Wins and 16 Saves already that year, and was a lefty, like the next batter, Ernie Whitt, who had already homered that day.

Instead Sweet Lou inexplicably brought in Al Holland, who had pitched three innings the day before.  Somehow Holland got pinch hitter Buck Martinez to fly out to left, but he then allowed a single to pinch hitter Cliff Johnson, a double to Tony Fernandez and a sac fly to Garth Iorg, which you're gonna realize put the Yankees in a 6-3 hole.  Holland finally got Lloyd Moseby to fly out to shortstop and end the inning.

The Yankees couldn't do much against Tom Henke in the 9th and that's the way the game ended, 6-3 Blue Jays, the Yankees' fourth consecutive loss.  Holland had about another month of solid relief work in him before ineffectiveness would get him released in early August, and his MLB career would be over the following April. 

But that is not the game I attended.  For one thing, it was far too interesting, or at least it seems interesting now.

No, I'm now pretty sure that the game I went to was the afternoon before, Saturday, 28 June 1986.  Jimmy Key started for the Jays against Joe Niekro, who had turned 41 in April of that year and really was not any good anymore.  He averaged only about five innings per start and walked more batters than he struck out in 1986.  Who says knuckleballers can pitch forever?

No longer knuckling Niekro allowed four runs in the first two innings and the Yankees never had a lead.  Alfonso Pulido relieved Niekro in the second and they were down 6-1 by the fifth, after Pulido allowed Moseby's second homer of the game and then an RBI single by (*chuckle*) Barfield.  Thereafter Pulido was pulled for Holland. 

The forgettable Gary Roenicke, playing his only season for the Yankees, hit a homer in the 6th off of Jimmy Key, which brought the team's Win Probability up to 23%, as high as it got all day after the second inning.  He also singled in a run in the 8th, but the rest of the team went 5 for 29 (.172) against Key and drove in only one run.

Also by the 6th inning, my hero Don Mattingly, who was in the midst of the best season of his career, even better than the MVP campaign the year before, was no longer in the game.  He had been replaced by Dan Pasqua, who used the opportunity to strike out twice, missing his chance to Wally Pipp the immortal Donnie Baseball.

Notable players included future Hall of Famers Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson, who each got on base twice, but only Winfield scored or drove in a run, and no bases were stolen, which might have given me something to remember about the game.  Besides their two actual Hall of Famers, the 1986 Yankees had several people related to, but not nearly as talented as, other Hall of Famers (Phil Niekro's brother, Yogi Berra's son and Ken Griffey Jr.'s dad, who would be unceremoniously traded to the Braves two days after my visit.) 

Someone on the Yankees (either Donnie or Rickey) would eventually lead the 1986 American League in Runs Scored, Hits, Plate Appearances, Doubles, Slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+ or Total Bases, and the team would send four players (Righetti, Mattingly, Winfield and Henderson) to the All-Star game two weeks later, but in this game, all were either absent or ineffective.  Worse yet, the bottom of the order (DH Mike Easler, C Butch Wynegar, 3B Mike Pagliarulo and SS Dale Berra, went 0-for-14 with a sac fly RBI and one walk.

Neikro threw a wild pitch with the bases loaded and then walked in another run before being yanked for Pulido.  Holland and Wynegar each made errors, and it was just a sloppy game in almost every respect.  Al Holland, as I mentioned, pitched three (mostly effective) innings to close out the game, which eventually and mercifully ended when Dale Berra grounded out to third and and the colorfully-named-if-not-wonderfully-talented Rance Mulliniks threw him out at first. 

I'm not even sure we stayed that long.  Given how long a drive we had back in the van, how hot it was, and how whiny and annoying a dozen sweaty, sunburned kids become when their team is losing by several runs on a late June afternoon, I can only assume that we probably left early.  Fortunately we had an hour or more waiting in traffic in the hot van on the way home, not to mention my ten foot arms, to amuse us.

The New Oriole Way: No Need for Good Pitchers in Baltimore

The New York Yankees maintained the slimmest of leads  - just half a game - in their pursuit of another AL East Division Title yesterday by sweeping a double-header with the Toronto Blue Jays, 4-2 and 2-1.

They got a shot in the arm from the returning Andy Pettitte, who provided five scoreless innings to start the game despite being limited to 75 pitches.  Since he hadn't thrown more than 5 innings in any of his rehab stints, I imagine they didn't want to take any chances by stretching him out too much in his first game back.

Half a dozen relievers managed to hold onto a slim lead in the day game and then David Phelps hurled 6.1 innings of one-run ball - only his second Quality Start of his career and his first in a month - to pave the way for another W.  Rafael Soriano saved both ends of the doubleheader to increase his total to 42, which besides being the answer to life, the universe and everything is also evidence that perhaps the $35 million the Yankees gave him before last season weren't wasted after all. 

In any case, the Yankees seem to be doing what they always do: Winning.  None of that is all so terribly exciting, mostly because we who follow the Bronx Bombers have been more or less spoiled since 1994.   
What is exciting is that somehow the Baltimore Orioles, though an astonishing combination of luck, skill, clutch hitting and excellent relief pitching, have managed to be the team that the Yankees find breathing down their collective necks.

There was a time not so long ago when I would have pointed to their terrible run differential as evidence that they wouldn't last.  Or to their lack of any star hitters, or any decent, established starting pitchers.  Or the fact that they hadn't had a winning season since I was a senior in college, or that nobody expected them to win anything coming into the season, or the fact that they had to battle division foes like New York, Boston and Tampa -three franchises clearly much better run than the one in Baltimore.

That time is now past.  The Orioles still have a (slightly) negative run differential, and they still lack an ace pitcher and other than Adam Jones, they don't really have any hitters you'd be comfortable calling a "star".  What they do have is an astonishing record in one-run games (27-8), and an even better record in extra innings (15-2, including 15 straight, the most since 1949).

More important, perhaps, is that they have 85 wins with only 13 games left to play, and so whatever analysis one might do to figure out what will happen from here is nearly moot: the sample size is too small.  Heck, even Houston once won seven out of nine back in April and May, and now they're fighting to avoid 110 losses.

ESPN's David Schoenfeld looked at the Orioles' lack of a true ace yesterday in one of his columns and determined that while it was not so unusual for the best pitcher on a playoff team (in this case Wei-Yin Chen) to be just decent, with only 2.8 WAR, no such team had ever won the World Series either. 

I was somewhat shocked to find that not only is Chen not that good, he's the only pitcher on the team who's actually been decent all year.  Chen is 12-9 with a 3.98 ERA and is the only pitcher on the Baltimores who will qualify for the ERA title this year (162 IP are required).  This got me to wondering how unusual it was for there to literally be nobody else on a playoff team's pitching staff who could say that he had contributed all year.

I used double digit Wins as my benchmark - yes, I know it's an archaic stat, but stick with me here - and looked at every playoff team since they started the 3-division format in 1995.  I used Wins because it's relatively easy to sort and search with them and because while winning 10 games doesn't necessarily make you a great pitcher, it's usually a sign that you at least were sufficiently present on the pitching staff and effective on the mound to be used in such a way as to get credit for 10 or more Wins.  Rarely to lousy, unhealthy pitchers amass 10 Wins.  Got it?

(I did not use Wins amassed for another team, before a late season trade or in the minors, for example, mostly because it would have been a real pain in the butt.) 

That left us 68 playoff teams, and the number of those that had only one 10-game winner?

One.

And none in a full, 162-game season.

The 1995 Colorado Rockies had only one 10 game winner, Kevin Ritz, who went 11-11 with a 4.21 ERA in 173 innings.  Since the league only played 144 games that year, this one is kind of an outlier.  With another 3 weeks in the beginning of the season, Bill Swift would almost certainly have added to his nine Wins, so we can practically dismiss them.

Other than that, no playoff team since 1995 has had fewer than two 10-game winners.  For that matter, only 15 of the 68 have had as few as two, and another of those, the 1995 Cincinnati Reds, also came from a strike-shortened season.  (Unlike the similar-vintage Rockies, the Reds probably would not have added an additional 10-game winner with three more weeks to play, as the next closest pitcher, Xavier Hernandez, was a reliever with just seven Wins, and no starter had more than six.  David Wells had won 10 with the Tigers before coming over in a trade and tacking on half a dozen more for the Reds, so they don't exactly count either.)

In any case, having only two 10-game winners on your playoff team, it seems, does not bode well for your success in the postseason.  None of those teams won the World Series, and only two of them - the 2007 Rockies and the 1997 Indians - even made it that far.

The '97 Indians captured a weak AL Central division with only 86 wins and then squeaked past the Wild Card Yankees and the Orioles before losing to the first Wild Card World Champion, Eric Gregg's 6-foot strike zone Livan Hernandez and the Florida Marlins. 

The '07 Rockies, of course, rode an astonishing winning streak, not just in extra innings or close games like these Orioles, but in nearly all games for about a month.  They won 11 in a row and 14 out of 15 to sneak into the NL Wild Card spot on the very last day of the season, then swept both the Phillies and the Diamondbacks en route to the World Series.  There, despite having gone 22-1 in the previous month, they were swept by the Boston Red Sox.  C'est la vie.

Or, perhaps more precisely, c'est la pitching.  Without at least a few reliable guys to lean on when the team needed to record outs, none of these clubs could withstand the crucible of October baseball.  Almost half of them, seven of the 15 teams, lost in the Division Series, with five of the seven being swept.  Six other teams put up a good fight but ultimately succumbed in the League Championship Series, and the last two we just discussed. 

And these Orioles don't look like they even have a real chance at ending up with multiple 10 game winners.  The next closest pitcher is Jason Hammel with eight Wins, and he's got a knee injury and may not pitch much if at all for the rest of the season.  In any case, he's unlikely to add two wins in the next week and a half.

Chris Tillman is probably their best shot, also with eight Wins, and with potentially three remaining starts, it's conceivable that he could win two more, if he doesn't re-injure his elbow.  (Joe Saunders had six wins with Arizona before getting two with Baltimore, so technically he could win two more games and end up with 10 overall, but he'd have to win both of his remaining starts to do that.)  

As a few other interesting statistical anomalies of the Baltimore pitchers - 

Baltimore has:

• One complete game.  This sounds worse than it is, since today's game doesn't require guys to finish what they start very often.  Oakland has only one as well, and the playoff-hopeful Dodgers and Pirates only have two each, and the Brewers have none at all.  Even Washington has only three, and they've got the best record in baseball.   
• Seven Tough Losses, i.e. losses in games in which they got a Quality Start from their pitcher.  This would be the lowest number in MLB except that the Rockies haven't been even attempting to get Quality Starts since some time in mid June, so they have only four such losses.  Generally the good teams are near the bottom of this list, rarely squandering a good performance by their starter.   
• Thirty relief Wins.  This would be the best in the majors if not for the bizarre experiment in Colorado, where they've amassed 33 such wins.  
• Ten relief Losses.  Fewest in MLB, though Texas and Oakland each only have 11.  
• Allowed 33% of inherited runners to score.  This is the third worst number in the majors (the Angels are at 34% and the Cubs at 38%.) 
• Allowed 74 total inherited runners to score, 4th most in the majors, and seven more than the next closest playoff contender (San Francisco, who has a much better percentage).  
• 58 Holds, third fewest in MLB.  This kind of makes sense, since a Hold requires that a pitcher come into a game in a Save situation and hold onto the lead without actually finishing the game and therefore getting the Save.  Since the Orioles rarely have a lead early enough in a game for this to happen, it's only logical that they wouldn't be able to do this much. Oddly, Texas has even fewer Holds, just 55, but in their case I think it's because they score so many runs that when a relief pitcher comes into a game, it's usually already out of reach, and hence not an opportunity to get a Hold.  
• Allowed only 62 steals, third fewest in MLB, and caught 33% of would be thieves, 5th best in the majors.  This strikes me as one of the "little things" that an old-school manager like Buck Showalter would stress, i.e. not giving away runs with carelessness about he guys already on base.  
• Had relievers enter 73 games with a tie score, most in MLB.
• Had relievers enter the most high-leverage situations (168) in MLB, since their games are always close.    
• Had relievers enter 321 games with the bases empty, most in the AL, but only 9th in MLB.  I imagine this is because NL pitchers often have to be swapped out for pinch hitters, rather than just for situational matchups, so they'll more often come in to start an inning after a pinch hitter has replaced their predecessor on the mound.  The fact that the Orioles have more of these situations than any other AL team I believe is a result of either Showalter's rigid determination to use his relievers to start innings whenever possible, or the fact that Baltimore relievers rarely leave the game with a baserunner on base.  Either way, it's kind of odd.  
• Needed its relievers to get three or more outs 121 times, most in MLB among teams that don't play some weird brand of baseball in Denver.  Only one other potential playoff team has more than 99 such games.  

Naturally, I'll be the first to admit that stuff like run differential and the number of Holds or inherited runners scored in the regular season all go out the window once the playoffs start.  The teams that score more runs than their opponents more often than not in each series will win, just as they always do.  The 2001 Mariners, on paper, were a demonstrably better team than the Yankees that year, but in the end, it was the Seattle tam that ended up watching the Yankees lose the World Series to Arizona, not the team with the 116 regular season victories.

So the Orioles may get into the playoffs, and may even win the AL East, but luck and magic and clutch hitting can go away for no apparent reason at all, just as they showed up for no apparent reason.

Just ask the 2007 Rockies.