Closer: The Best Job In Sports
Oh to be a closer. You have all the glory, all the money, and all the fame of an everyday player or a starting pitcher and a small percent of the responsibilities. You get to record the last out of a win (and usually of the world series). You get a salary of 7 to 8 figures. Fan love you. Writers love you. Announcers love you. And the best part is: you get to spend almost all your time hanging out in the bullpen.
A good closer will pitch between 60 and 80 innings per year. That is about 1/3 of what a starter will throw, and about 1/20 of the time an everyday player will play the field. Yet they are paid almost the same amount per season.
Lets apply this to a typical American's life. We'll ignore position players and compare apples to apples. Johan is one of the company's top salesmen. He works 40 hours a week, brings in many potential clients, and is paid a nice salary. Joe gets almost all the clients after Johan brings them in. He generally closes the deal, but the client is almost always ready to buy by the time they get to Joe. Joe works 12 hours a week and is paid almost as much as Johan. The boss values them equally. After a few years Johan begins to draw interest from other companies and rather than giving him the raise he has earned, his boss lets him go to a company in a different industry. Joe immediately gets a huge raise making him the companies highest paid employee. Joe continues to do the same job, but without Johan bringing in the clients, Joe is having a hard time closing as many deals.
It's gotten ridiculous. Team now draft and groom pitchers specifically to be closers. But you can't because closers are sort of like running backs in the NFL. There are a select few who are good every year, but there are many more who are good for a year or two and then flame out and disappear.
Guess who led the AL in saves last year? Not Rivera. Not Nathan. Not Papelbon. Not K-Rod, Street, or Jenks. Not even JJ Putz. Nope, Joe Freakin Borowski led the league in saves.
I heard some talking head recently say that they believed Mariano Rivera was the most important player during the Yankee's dynasty from 1996-2001. Um... No. It was not Rivera. It wasn't Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, or even Bernie Williams. It wasn't anyone in particular. It was their starting pitchers: Wells, Cone, Clemens, Pettitte, and El Duque. Those five pitchers carried that team from April-September and especially in October. The hitting helped, and Rivera was nice to have, but what happened when those pitchers got old? The team stopped winning in the playoffs. They tried to replace them with a long line of guys who didn't work out. Kevin Brown, Javier Vazquez, Jeff Weaver, Jose Contreras, Mike Mussina, Jon Lieber, Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Randy Johnson, Chin Ming Wang, and second go-rounds with Pettitte and Clemens. Except for Wang, every one of those pitchers has had success elsewhere, but they were all either past their primes or not able to handle the pressure of winning in New York. The closest they came to winning was in 2003 when they were beaten by the better pitching of Josh Beckett and the Marlins.
A recent article on MLB.com discussed the move of Joba Chamberlain to the starting rotation and how team sometimes keep their best pitchers as relievers. The only reason to ever keep a pitcher in relief who could potentially be a front line starter is if a team already has plenty of starters, a situation which rarely occurs. Such was the case with Rivera in 1997. Coming off a stellar 1996 campaign in which he threw over 100 innings in relief he seemed destined to be a starter, but when John Wetteland left via free agency, the Yanks concluded that they had plenty of starting pitching an needed a reliever. With Wells, Cone, and Pettitte leading the way, I'd tend to agree with them that Rivera would not have been much more than a marginal improvement in their rotation. The rest is history. The same scenario occurred in Boston last year when the Red Sox kept Papelbon in the pen, and so far it's turned out quite well.
Don't get me wrong, relief pitchers are an important part of a team. But is the 9th inning guy that much more important than the guys who pitch the 8th inning, or the occasional 6th and 7th innings? And he certainly can't be considered as important as the guy who pitched 1-7, right?
The 4 best pitchers of the last 20 years are Clemens, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, and Randy Johnson, and its not even close. With the exception of Clemens, they're all first ballot HOF locks and Maddux should set the all time % of the vote record. To consider mentioning any closer, even Rivera, in the same sentence with these four is an absolute insult to them and what they accomplished. They were just as dominant if not more that the best closers, and they did it throwing 3 or 4 times as many innings. Pedro has a career WHIP of 1.04, Rivera's is 1.03 in 1/3 of the innings. Pedro's career best is 0.74, Mo's is 0.87 despite only having to dominate for a much shorter portion of time. Can you imagine what would have happened if Pedro had been a closer for his career? His lifetime ERA would have surely been under 1.50, and he may have had a few years with a 0.00 ERA. The Red Sox however would have struggled mightily without their ace and likely would have missed the playoffs every year from the time he arrived until 2004 when they finally had put together a well rounded pitching staff.
Rivera has had a stellar career, no doubt hall of fame caliber, but I wonder how good a starter he could have become. I can say that almost every ace starter could be a successful closer, but I cannot say the same about closers becoming starters. It's interesting to see guys like Dempster, Smoltz, and Lowe go from starter to closer and back again successfully. Dempster has arguably been the best pitcher on the Cubs this year, and one of the big reasons for their success. He has made an impact that he could not have made if he was still closing.
A good closer will pitch between 60 and 80 innings per year. That is about 1/3 of what a starter will throw, and about 1/20 of the time an everyday player will play the field. Yet they are paid almost the same amount per season.
Lets apply this to a typical American's life. We'll ignore position players and compare apples to apples. Johan is one of the company's top salesmen. He works 40 hours a week, brings in many potential clients, and is paid a nice salary. Joe gets almost all the clients after Johan brings them in. He generally closes the deal, but the client is almost always ready to buy by the time they get to Joe. Joe works 12 hours a week and is paid almost as much as Johan. The boss values them equally. After a few years Johan begins to draw interest from other companies and rather than giving him the raise he has earned, his boss lets him go to a company in a different industry. Joe immediately gets a huge raise making him the companies highest paid employee. Joe continues to do the same job, but without Johan bringing in the clients, Joe is having a hard time closing as many deals.
It's gotten ridiculous. Team now draft and groom pitchers specifically to be closers. But you can't because closers are sort of like running backs in the NFL. There are a select few who are good every year, but there are many more who are good for a year or two and then flame out and disappear.
Guess who led the AL in saves last year? Not Rivera. Not Nathan. Not Papelbon. Not K-Rod, Street, or Jenks. Not even JJ Putz. Nope, Joe Freakin Borowski led the league in saves.
I heard some talking head recently say that they believed Mariano Rivera was the most important player during the Yankee's dynasty from 1996-2001. Um... No. It was not Rivera. It wasn't Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, or even Bernie Williams. It wasn't anyone in particular. It was their starting pitchers: Wells, Cone, Clemens, Pettitte, and El Duque. Those five pitchers carried that team from April-September and especially in October. The hitting helped, and Rivera was nice to have, but what happened when those pitchers got old? The team stopped winning in the playoffs. They tried to replace them with a long line of guys who didn't work out. Kevin Brown, Javier Vazquez, Jeff Weaver, Jose Contreras, Mike Mussina, Jon Lieber, Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Randy Johnson, Chin Ming Wang, and second go-rounds with Pettitte and Clemens. Except for Wang, every one of those pitchers has had success elsewhere, but they were all either past their primes or not able to handle the pressure of winning in New York. The closest they came to winning was in 2003 when they were beaten by the better pitching of Josh Beckett and the Marlins.
A recent article on MLB.com discussed the move of Joba Chamberlain to the starting rotation and how team sometimes keep their best pitchers as relievers. The only reason to ever keep a pitcher in relief who could potentially be a front line starter is if a team already has plenty of starters, a situation which rarely occurs. Such was the case with Rivera in 1997. Coming off a stellar 1996 campaign in which he threw over 100 innings in relief he seemed destined to be a starter, but when John Wetteland left via free agency, the Yanks concluded that they had plenty of starting pitching an needed a reliever. With Wells, Cone, and Pettitte leading the way, I'd tend to agree with them that Rivera would not have been much more than a marginal improvement in their rotation. The rest is history. The same scenario occurred in Boston last year when the Red Sox kept Papelbon in the pen, and so far it's turned out quite well.
Don't get me wrong, relief pitchers are an important part of a team. But is the 9th inning guy that much more important than the guys who pitch the 8th inning, or the occasional 6th and 7th innings? And he certainly can't be considered as important as the guy who pitched 1-7, right?
The 4 best pitchers of the last 20 years are Clemens, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, and Randy Johnson, and its not even close. With the exception of Clemens, they're all first ballot HOF locks and Maddux should set the all time % of the vote record. To consider mentioning any closer, even Rivera, in the same sentence with these four is an absolute insult to them and what they accomplished. They were just as dominant if not more that the best closers, and they did it throwing 3 or 4 times as many innings. Pedro has a career WHIP of 1.04, Rivera's is 1.03 in 1/3 of the innings. Pedro's career best is 0.74, Mo's is 0.87 despite only having to dominate for a much shorter portion of time. Can you imagine what would have happened if Pedro had been a closer for his career? His lifetime ERA would have surely been under 1.50, and he may have had a few years with a 0.00 ERA. The Red Sox however would have struggled mightily without their ace and likely would have missed the playoffs every year from the time he arrived until 2004 when they finally had put together a well rounded pitching staff.
Rivera has had a stellar career, no doubt hall of fame caliber, but I wonder how good a starter he could have become. I can say that almost every ace starter could be a successful closer, but I cannot say the same about closers becoming starters. It's interesting to see guys like Dempster, Smoltz, and Lowe go from starter to closer and back again successfully. Dempster has arguably been the best pitcher on the Cubs this year, and one of the big reasons for their success. He has made an impact that he could not have made if he was still closing.
Labels: Closers, Joe Freakin Borowski, Joe Nathan, Johan Santana, Mariano Rivera
posted by Andrew Manning at
9:20 PM
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