No one wants to admit it, but the modern bullpen is a failure and the modern conventional wisdom of training pitchers is a failure. The modern specialized bullpen does no better job protecting leads than the pitching usage that preceded it. And though closers, like pitchers of all types, work less often, they break down more often. What industry would accept these failure rates -- the way baseball does?
• Sixty-six percent of 2011 Opening Day closers (20 of 30) are no longer closing for the same team 12 months later, with seven of them hurt.
• Fifty percent of all starting pitchers will go on the DL every year, as well as 34 percent of all relievers, according to research by Stan Conte, director of medical services for the Los Angeles Dodgers. That bears repeating: half of all starting pitchers will break down this year. ("When I did the research," Conte said, "I was so surprised I figured I must have done the math wrong.")
• Injuries last year cost clubs $487 million -- or about $16 million per team. The bill since 2008 for players who can't play is $1.9 billion.
Yet baseball keeps doing things the same way. It is addicted to the "theater" of having a specialized closer and the "theory" that an arm has only so many pitches in it -- and that everybody's arm will be treated exactly the same way. And when the casualties keep piling up, baseball keeps going about it the same way. The sport is so flush with money even wasting half a billion dollars a year doesn't set off any alarms.
Wilson's injury was not a surprise given his history, usage and pitching style. The Giants rode him hard to a world championship in 2010. He made 80 appearances, including the postseason, and was asked 19 times to get more than three outs. He racked up 54 saves and 85 1/3 innings. The next season he wasn't the same, and the red flag to people like Conte was that he was shut down at the end of the season with elbow pain for purposes of "rest."
Another red flag: Wilson wasn't throwing as hard. The guy who threw 97 in 2009 was down to 94 last year. A loss in peak velocity -- a loss of three or four miles per hour is very significant -- is a dead giveaway that something is wrong.
But was Wilson really worked that hard in 2010? It depends on your perspective. For a modern closer, and for the way Wilson was trained, yes. Wilson never worked more than 68 games before or since. The Giants pushed the usual conveniences of the modern closer because they played so many close games and because they had a chance to win the franchise's first championship since it relocated to San Francisco.
But when you look at how closers were handled 20 or 30 years ago, no, Wilson was not overused. What seems to make no sense is that closers are asked to pitch less but they break down more often. Here's an example: compare four-year runs at ages 26-29 for two famously bearded closers: Wilson and Jeff Reardon of the Montreal Expos:
The role is devolving, not evolving. The past two seasons mark the first time since the save statistic became official in 1969 that nobody saved 25 games with 81 innings in back-to-back full seasons. Bailey, with the 2009 Athletics, is the only closer to do so in the past four years.
Managers are motivated by the save statistic, throwing three-out save chances to their closer like bones to a dog. The game universally has embraced this idea that a closer can't come in to a tie game on the road -- better to lose the game with a lesser pitcher than run your closer out there without a save in hand.
What makes this groupthink so crazy is that the system isn't working. Closers are breaking down or losing effectiveness faster than you can say Joel Zumaya. (Quick, look around baseball: show me the high velocity, high energy closer with the obligatory, goofy closer-hair starter kit who has a long career. The job has a bit of planned obsolescence to it.)
Clubs can find closers; it's keeping them in the job that is the tough part. Over the previous five seasons, 53 closers saved 25 games at least once. Thirty-three of them, or 62 percent, no longer are closing. Only five pitchers saved 25 games three times in the past five years and are still closing: Jose Valverde, Mariano Rivera, Jonathan Papelbon, Heath Bell and Joe Nathan (with the latter two off to shaky starts). Mostly, closers just come and go, or they break down and virtually disappear (Zumaya, B.J. Ryan, David Aardsma, Brandon Lyon, Kerry Wood, Bobby Jenks, etc.).
Is anybody watching the Tampa Bay Rays? They don't have the money to waste nor do they waste a valuable young starter in a closing role. The team with the fourth best record in baseball since 2008 has done just fine with five different pitchers leading the team in saves over those five years: Troy Percival, J.P. Howell, Rafael Soriano, Farnsworth and Fernando Rodney. Total cost: $15.8 million. And all of them, to varying degrees, have broken down.
Imagine if every team in the NFL used the same 3-4 defense. That's essentially what is happening in baseball. Everybody runs their bullpen and their pitch count policies the same way. Everybody. Justin Verlander on Monday night became the first pitcher to throw 120 pitches, hitting 133 and causing manager Jim Leyland to crack on the mound that he was going to get him fired.
And yet the universally accepted system is a failure when it comes to reducing the rate of injuries. What can change it? A maverick organization. (The Rangers and Giants are loosening pitch count restrictions in the minors, but the evidence is not yet very apparent in the majors.) A maverick manager. (Why won't somebody use a closer -- say Sean Marshall or Aroldis Chapman in Cincinnati -- in the manner of a 1980s closer such as Jeff Reardon? And my personal idea: give each starting pitcher a 10-day vacation during the season. Recovery, both mental and physical, is an undervalued asset.) Stem cell treatments. (Baseball better be bracing for a whole new series of ethical questions as science blurs the line between performance enhancing and performance enabling.)
Who knows what the future holds? Not even Tony LaRussa, the father of the modern bullpen, likely could have envisioned a pitcher limited to about 60 innings being worth more than $12 million while representing a breakdown waiting to happen. But this much is certain: the injury rate will not be reduced if teams continue to treat pitchers the same way they do now.
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/w ... z1sKlmug00
