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Outs 24-27: Not as Easy As They Look

Jonathan Papelbon has not been a very good closer this season. Truth be told, he wasn't all that hot last season, either. Since when closers fail, their teams lose, there has been a movement afoot to replace Papelbon with Daniel Bard. Right now, with the Sox desperately attempting to keep their playoff chances deteriorating from "odds against" to purely theoretical.

Bard has what fans always want in a closer. He throws really hard and he's never done it before. So naturally, there is an assumption that Bard will be invincible if promoted from the important task of setup man to the bullpen CEO job of closing.

Perhaps this is true. That's how Mariano Rivera got started, and he's done reasonably well. But the idea of giving a player an entirely new role for the final quarter of the season is inherently risky -- especially when it's a role both as important and unusual as closer.

Closing LOOKS easy. If one goes by the percentages, it IS easy. After all, even in his time of trouble, Papelbon has converted over 80 percent of his save chances. What other individual statistic in baseball comes close to that success/failure ratio?

Percentages are not all of baseball, thank heavens. The thing about closing is, it's the only job in baseball where you work without a net. There are no teammates to pick you up. You screw up, everybody goes home a loser. Every other pitcher's three-ball count is working the corners. Yours is a catastrophe in the making.

That's a lot of stress-stress not every pitcher can handle, no matter how hard they throw. And so, even when they are in the midst of a terrible run, experienced closers seem to be hard to replace.

Let's take a nonrandom example named Brad Lidge. In 2008, Lidge was perfect, saving every game in which he appeared for the Phillies in their world championship season. In 2009, Lidge was wretched. He blew 11 saves, had an ERA around 8 and Phillies manager Charlie Manuel actually did bench Lidge for mental health reasons, right around this point of the season, as a matter of fact.

By the playoffs, Lidge had the closer's job back. He's had only a slightly less terrible 2010 than 2009, but as of this morning, Lidge remains Philadelphia's closer. Given over a full season to attempt to find/create a replacement, the Phils couldn't do it -- even though Lidge didn't get much better during that time.

Papelbon hasn't been as awful as the 2009 Lidge, merely mediocre. Therefore, he's likely to be even harder to replace. And of all the sorts of pitchers possible to replace him with, a flamethrowing young one given a battlefield promotion seems likelier to fail than most.

The future of such an experiment goes something like this: Eight strikeouts in three perfect saves, followed by the game-losing tape measure homer in the one you absolutely have to win to have a chance.

posted by Michael Gee @ 7:40 AM