Previous entries:

The 1870s, '80s, and '90s

The 1900s and '10s

The 1920s, '30s, and '40s

The 1950s

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s and 2000s

20003 Notes: Part I & II

Final Analysis: I, II, III, and IV.

Base Relief I, II, and III

2006 Edition: Part I, II, III, IV, and V

In what I hope is the last post to this series prior to my presenting the results at SABR36 on Thursday, I wanted to take a look at the future of relief pitching. I have been anticipating some change to the way that closers are employed since I started the series a few years ago. Why not? Every dozen or so years throughout baseball history baseball has fundamentally changed its approach to the reliever role.

In the 1870s, Harry Wright, without the ability to make substitutions, invented relieving by rotating himself from center field to the mound. In the 1890s, starting pitchers like Cy Young and Kid Nichols began to be used to also close out games. Around 1903, John McGraw invented the relief role. In the 1920s, Firpo Marberry became the first quality pitcher used mostly in relief. In the Forties, the Yankees brought relievers into the limelight with two stars, Johnny Murphy and Joe Page. In the Fifties, pure relievers started to take hold. In the Sixties, managers pushed the boundaries of what relievers were capable of doing on almost a yearly basis. In 1979, Bruce Sutter is used almost exclusively in save situations establishing a new role for relievers. In 1988, Dennis Eckersley is used almost exclusively in one-inning save situations and the rest of the A's bullpen is used to pick up the slack, establishing the current mold for relief pitching.

So it's been twenty years, but despite all the talk that using your best reliever in save situations exclusively is a waste of talent, baseball is still in love with the Eck paradigm. Closers are saving a higher percentage of their teams games than ever before and are collecting fewer innings per appearance than ever.

I've been anticipating a shift whenever I see the slightest harbinger of change, be it the 2003 Red Sox so-called "bullpen by committee" or the existence of Brooks Kieschnick, I start expecting the sky to fall. Then it occurred to me that I might be looking in the wrong place.

Could it be that the closer role has reached some level of maturity? Maybe Bill James' prediction that closers will someday collect eighty saves a year will never come true. Could it be that there is a major paradigm shift afoot that is going unnoticed?

Well, I took a look at the percentage of team saves that the average closer is collecting. The figures are going up on almost a yearly basis. However, the variation across teams has been jumping especially the last couple of years.

One of the biggest jumps was 2003 when Bill James tried to put into practice his theories of relief pitching that got mislabeled bullpen by committee. That attempt failed, but perhaps the theories did take hold. Maybe teams are using their closers in more appropriate situations rather than just in the color-by-numbers save situations.

I took a look at the men who were second in saves on their teams. Below is the annual average of team saves amassed by the man second saves on his team (for teams with co-leaders in saves, one of the co-leaders was considered the second-place save guy). Note that the numbers are declining steadily throughout the save era:

Note also that the n deviation of the values is at the same time increasing steadily with the most growth in the 2000s. What this tells me is that managers are using their closers more efficiently to collect saves, but they are tinkering with the other situations. Some use their entire bullpen, some use their closer, some use a secondary reliever regularly.

Couple this with the fact that the biggest opportunity for bullpen improvement is after the sixth and seventh innings. The percentage of leads retained after seven and especially six innings are the only figures that have been declining in the post-Eck era.

So what's in the cards for the relieving in the foreseeable future? It looks like the closer will be tweaked but will remain fundamentally unchanged. I expect the next shift to come in the rest of the bullpen.