SI article about Cordero

[crkone]

When Francisco Cordero makes his ninth-inning trek from the bullpen gate to the pitcher's mound at Miller Park, he is accompanied by theme music on the Brewers' PA system; a dominant closer, after all, is nothing without a trademark song to announce his arrival in loud and sinister fashion.

Mariano Rivera of the Yankees has Metallica's Enter Sandman, and Trevor Hoffman of the Padres has AC/DC's Hell's Bells, both hard-rock classics for future Hall-of-Famers. Cordero, who leads the major leagues in saves with 17 through Thursday, is a far less famous figure and fittingly has a far less canonical tune: Click Click Boom by Saliva, a mildly popular post-grunge band. Cordero also admits to being unaware of the name of the song or its performers: "I told [the Brewers] they can play whatever they want," he says. "The fans get loud and it gets my adrenaline up, but I don't listen to the music. When I come into the game, I come to do a job."

Cordero, who has been in the employ of the Brewers since a July 28, 2006, trade that shipped him, outfielders Kevin Mench and Laynce Nix, and minor leaguer Julian Cordero to Milwaukee in exchange for slugger Carlos Lee and minor league outfielder Nelson Cruz, has been performing that job better than any other closer in the bigs this season. He's 17-for-17 in save opportunities with a 0.47 ERA and a 0.632 WHIP, and has the third-highest Win Probability Added (a FanGraphs.com stat that measures an individual's impact on game outcomes) of any reliever in the majors after Al Reyes of the Devil Rays and Takashi Saito of the Dodgers. The Brewers are 20-0 in games when Cordero makes an appearance. Their problem, of late, has been an inability to create proper situations in which he can pitch. Ever since a stretch from May 4-9 in which Cordero appeared in six straight games, manager Ned Yost has only been able to use him twice in Milwaukee's past 13 contests, of which the team has lost nine.

The stocky, 32-year-old righty, nicknamed "Coco" by Todd Jones during his debut with Detroit in '99, has lived life both as a star and a wreck. In 2004 he saved 49 games for the Rangers with a 2.13 ERA and was named an All-Star. In 2006, before being traded to Milwaukee, Cordero began the season by blowing nearly twice as many saves (9) as he had successfully recorded (5). His career was resurrected with the Brewers, for whom he saved 16 second-half games with a 1.69 ERA last year, convincing them to exercise a $5.4 million club option to keep him for '07. Considering his production in April and May -- and the fact that Milwaukee could, potentially, have received nothing in return for Lee, who cashed in on his extensive Miller Park yardwork by signing a $100 million, free-agent deal with the Astros -- Cordero has been an incredible bargain.
Gameday Ritual

You cannot find Cordero in the bullpen, or even the Brewers' dugout, for the first four innings of any game. His preferred vantage point is from a seat in the clubhouse, scouting hitters via television. ("You see batters better that way -- what type of approach they take, what kind of pitches they lay off, what kind of pitches they swing at," he says.) Then it's off to the 'pen, where he'll spend the next four innings doing little other than waiting and watching. Cordero is blessed with the rare power arm that needs very little time to warm up: He won't commence throwing, in a home game, until the top of the ninth, going essentially from zero to mid-90s in the span of three outs. "Twelve pitches to get loose, that's all I need, and then eight more on the mound," Cordero says.

That routine has remained largely the same throughout his closing career, but the Cordero we are seeing this season is different. He's more aggressive in the strike zone, with a nastier slider and a less-vulnerable fastball. The statistical data -- albeit a relatively small sample size -- backs this up:

• Cordero's career first-pitch strike percentage (including minor-league play), according to Baseball-Reference.com, is 57 percent. It has jumped to 66 percent in '07.

• His career percentage of batters taken to 0-2 counts is 19, and in his All-Star year, '04, it was 22 percent. This season it's an astounding 28 percent. "I'm trying to get ahead of every hitter, every time now," Cordero says. "It's just -- boom! -- strike one, strike two, and then I've got four more pitches to work."
• More hitters are watching Cordero's strikes than ever before; a career-high 31 percent of his strikes are looking, and a career-high 25 percent of his strikeouts are looking.

• His propensity to freeze hitters can mostly be attributed to an increasingly devastating slider (or combo of sliders, according to bullpen coach Bill Castro, who told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this month, "He has the 'show' one and a bigger one. The first one is just to show the hitter you have it. Then, when you see they'll chase it, he throws the big one"). According to ESPN's Inside Edge scouting service, which has logged Cordero's last 2,932 pitches (a total that includes all of '05 and '06), he uses the slider 39 percent of the time overall, and 43 percent of the time with two strikes. Opponents are batting just .178 against it, and while '07-specific data is not available, one suspects that figure has only decreased.

• For the first time in his career, Cordero has become a fly-ball pitcher; his overall major-league ground-to-fly ratio is 1.18, but in '07 it's 0.69. Fifty percent of his outs have come on outfield flies and 18.8 percent have come on infield pop-ups, both career highs that seem to suggest that while his slider has been untouchable, hitters have also been unable to catch up with his fastball up in the zone. Rather than turning the heater into line drives or home runs, it's being sent harmlessly aloft.
The Turnaround

The turbulent life of a closer -- one day's clean-up man, the next day's goat -- often makes superstition seem as equally important as statistics, and Cordero gives as much credit to his slider as he does a couple of timely gifts from his mother, Martina Monta

[Dwade03]

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