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.