Jon Papelbon's season did not start as expected. The Red Sox were ready for him to ascend to the rotation, but after a disappointing spring training (5.06 ERA in a team-leading 21 spring innings), they moved him to the bullpen on March 24. He was expected to fill the long relief role and was to be followed by Mike Timlin and closer Keith Foulke.

In the season opener, Papelbon pitched a perfect ninth in a 7-3 win over the Rangers. Two days later, he picked up his first save striking out two of the three men he faced. It was just his second professional save (the other coming last year with the PawSox, and it should be mentioned that he picked up 7 saves in his last year at Mississippi State).

With David Wells going on the DL in mid-April, he would seem the natural choice to take Wells' spot in the rotation. But, Papelbon had already recorded 5 saves and had pitched six scoreless innings (with 5 Ks, no walks and just 2 hits allowed). So the spot fell to Lenny DiNardo, the Red Sox answer to Lou Merloni on their pitching staff.

He now has a major-league leading ten saves. He still has not given up an earned run in 15.1 innings pitched and has just allowed 7 hits and two walks while striking out 16. His opponents are batting .137 against him. He projects to what would be a major-league record of 62 saves.

Meanwhile, incumbent closer Keith Foulke has taken on a pseudo-lefty spot reliever role even though he is a right-handed pitcher (huh?).

Once upon a time, teams felt the need to come into the season with a strong veteran closer in order to compete for a playoff spot. Actually, that was last winter when the Mets nabbed Billy Wagner from the Phils. Now it seems that teams are ready to hand the job over to any decent-throwing stopgap solution.

Has relief pitching, or at least teams' approach to relief pitching, regressed to the point it had been in the olden days when, as John Thorn said in The Relief Pitcher, "[I]ts image [was] as a rest home for aging starters and as audition studio for green kids"? Just replace "aging starter" with "aging middle reliever".

Well, the first test would be to take a look at the average age of a major-league closer. Keep in mind that I define a closer as the man who was the leader (or co-leader) on his team in saves. The stats are through 2005:

The average age dip drop in the first six years of this decade. It was the first drop in closer age since the 1970s when closers first became superstars.

So does this mean that given that teams are seemingly handing out closer jobs to youngsters AND aging journeymen? Perhaps a different approach would be more illuminating.

What if we looked at closer retention? That is, how do teams do on average at retaining their closers from year to year? If a team believes in the closer role, they will devote a pitcher with enough talent to last more than one year in the role (data through 2005):

Again we see the numbers dipping for the current decade. Teams are retaining their closers at a lower rate than they had for the past two decades.

Maybe, you'll point out, that is just a function of higher turnover in general. Billy Wagner, for example, went from Philly to New York but remained a closer throughout. He changed teams via free agency because he was in demand not because the Phils lost faith in him as a closer.

Here are the breakdowns per decade of how well closers retained their role, if not their team, from year to year:

This shows the numbers were affected by higher turnover per team on the closer role. However, it does show that closers in general lose their jobs more often than in the previous decade.

Another trend we are seeing is that a team will rely on a player who had been a closer in the past. Guys like Tom Gordon, Joe Borowski, and Tim Worrell are returning to the closers job after a hiatus. How often, historically, do teams turn to veterans who may not have been a closer in the previous season? Here are the numbers:

Again there's a severe decline this decade.

You may point out that this decade accounts for just six seasons given that the current season is barely underway. Maybe these trends will reverse over the entire decade.

Let's look at the closers per team from 2005-06 (stats through Tuesday's games). First, here are the closers for the past two seasons per team:

Here are the numbers for the categories we looked at above: whether the man was the closer on the same team in the previous year, whether he was a closer for some team in the previous season, and whether he closed previously though not necessarily in the previous year:

All of these trends are reversing in the ongoing season. Whether that's a full reversal or just dumb luck is yet to be seen. However, it seems to belie what we thought we knew about closer use this season, Jon Papelbon notwithstanding.

So what does it mean? Baseball has seemed to be on the cusp of another reinvention of the closer role for a few seasons. Bill James' so-called "bullpen by committee" approach in Boston failed. The super closer in the Gagne mold has lost resonance since Eric Gagne became the new Mark Fidrych.

So it seems that what we are seeing is a lot of flux this decade. Whether it will lead anywhere remains to be seen.