"Welcome to the Hall's of Relief", II

The 1900s

In the first half of the Aughts, relief pitching had basically become a safety net for one's starting pitching. Whichever pitcher was fresh would relieve to keep the game close. The number of pure starters dwindled to about 10% of all pitchers by the end of the decade. The percentage of pure relievers was dwindling in the first half of the decade from almost 16% in 1900 to under 6% in 1906. The starter-reliever had taken hold. Aside from a one-year dip in 1902, each year of the Aughts had between 71 and 80 percent swing men.

In each year, the leader would have 3 or 4 saves. Usually it was an undistinguished member of a staff (Frank Kitson with the 1900 Dodgers 4 saves in 10 relief appearances, Bill Hoffer's 3 saves in 6 opportunities on the 1901 Cleveland Blues, etc.). The players could be old, could be young, or could be trying to comeback from a poor season. They rarely worked in the role for more than a year. Rarely now were they the ace of the staff (though Vic Willis lead the majors with 3 saves in five relief appearances in 1902). Rarely did they relieve more than a dozen games in a season.

Then came Roscoe "Ruberlegs" Miller. Miller wasn't much of a pitcher, but he happened to be on the Giants when John McGraw started to experiment with his pitching staff. In 1902 John McGraw took over a last-place team that hadn't had a winning season in 5 years. McGraw recounts in his autobiography, My Thirty Years in Baseball, how he found a young Christy Mathewson playing first base. He moved Matty to pitcher and brought in Iron Joe McGinnity and Jack Cronin. (Note that Mathewson only played 3 games at first that year. McGraw tended to exaggerate. He also claims to have rehabilitated Mathewson's career, which by his 1901 and 1902 stats was in no need of revival.)

This was the bulwark of the Giant staff. In 1903, Mathewson and McGinnity pitched well but the rest of the staff faltered. So McGraw tried something new, he started experimenting with a relief ace. Well, maybe using a reliever wasn't so new. But everyone on McGraw's staff was used as a reliever-that was new, at least for a winning team (the 1901 Milwaukee Brewers did it with a bad pitching staff on a last-place team)-and he also had fifth starter Roscoe Miller act as the closer. He saved three games in seven appearances. The two aces also picked up two saves each (Mathewson in 7 relief appearances and McGinnity in three). It was like a modern bullpen built into a starting rotation. The Giants finished in second.

The only problem with the scheme was that Miller wasn't very good. The staff was improved in 1904 and this time they saved 15 games in total led by Iron Joe's 5 (plus 35 wins and over 400 innings). The next highest staff in the majors had 6 saves. There were only 12 saves in total in the entire American League. The Giants won the pennant (though McGraw refused to play the Series).

The 1905 Giants again had 15 saves led by Claude Elliott's 6 in 8 relief appearances. The next highest again was 6 saves. The Giants won the Series in 5 from the A's. Other teams had started to take note of the strategy, though they couldn't yet duplicate it. The NY Highlanders' Clark Griffith adopted the strategy inserting himself as a reliever 18 times, the highest total in the majors. Griffith would finish his career as a reliever. In total there were nine men in the majors with 10 or more appearances as a reliever (including Chief Bender and Rude Waddell), though Griffith was the only man to do it regularly (18 appearances in 25 games).

In 1906, George Ferguson became the Giant closer (7 saves in 22 games, all but one in relief). The staff saved 18 in total, but the Cubs and Dodgers (sorry, Superbas) had gotten double digits in saves and the Cubbies wrested the NL flag away from the Giants. The Cubs and Dodgers also adopted the strategy of using the entire staff as both starters and relievers. In this season, there were 10 men with at least 10 relief appearances.

As the decade wore on the strategy was adopted by more teams. In 1907, 19 men had 10 or more relief appearances. In 1908, forty men had 10 or more relief appearances. Among them was the Giants' Bill Malarkey, who was used exclusively as a reliever, saving two games in 15 appearances. The save "record" fell three times between 1905 and 1909.

Then in 1909, McGraw came up with perhaps the game's first true reliever in Doc Crandall. Crandall had pitched reasonably well as a rookie in 1908, but he was now reinvented as the team's reliever. He pitched 30 games and started only 7, and he had 6 saves. 1909 was a banner year for relievers overall. There were 114 saves in the majors up from only 36 in 1901. 36 men appeared in games as reliever in 10 or more games. And a good number of them were predominantly relievers, like Crandall, Steve Melter, Forrest More, Irv Higginbotham, Rube Vickers, and Sam Leever. Unfortunately, few of these men pitched all that well-they had basically expanded the role of the last man on the staff-and were out of the game within a year. All but Crandall, who would relieve the rest of his 10-year career, never starting more than 21 games and saving 25 in total. However, the era of the full-time reliever was short-lived and soon the stratagem would take on a different guise.

Her are the leaders for relief appearances and saves for the decade:

FirstName	LastName	RA	Saves	GP
JOE	MCGINNITY	77	22	417
TOM	HUGHES	61	11	329
JIMMY	DYGERT	60	2	156
ED	WALSH	59	14	234
JACK	CHESBRO	58	5	373
HOOKS	WILTSE	58	20	208
RUBE	WADDELL	57	3	385
SAM	LEEVER	57	8	306
HARRY	HOWELL	54	5	309
DEACON	PHILLIPPE	54	7	296
GEORGE	FERGUSON	54	8	110
LEW	RICHIE	53	4	116
CLARK	GRIFFITH	52	4	181
MORDECAI	BROWN	51	19	246
CHIEF	BENDER	48	8	221
FRANK	KITSON	47	8	246
BILL	DUGGLEBY	45	6	231
CHRISTY	MATHEWSON	44	15	388
HOWIE	CAMNITZ	44	6	122
RUBE	VICKERS	43	2	88
JACK	POWELL	43	14	377
NICK	ALTROCK	42	6	193
WALTER	CLARKSON	41	1	78
  
FirstName	LastName	RA	Saves	GP 
JOE	MCGINNITY	77	22	417
HOOKS	WILTSE	58	20	208
MORDECAI	BROWN	51	19	246
CHRISTY	MATHEWSON	44	15	388
ED	WALSH	59	14	234
JACK	POWELL	43	14	377
TOM	HUGHES	61	11	329
ORVAL	OVERALL	32	11	184
CY	YOUNG	37	9	403
GEORGE	FERGUSON	54	8	110
FRANK	KITSON	47	8	246
SAM	LEEVER	57	8	306
TULLY	SPARKS	33	8	281
CHIEF	BENDER	48	8	221
FRANK	ARELLANES	20	8	56

Now, here are the major-league totals by year for the decade. Note the increase in swingmen and pure relievers throughout the decade. Also note that the pure reliever's stats didn't improve much, but the swingmam's did, so much so that the best pitchers by far were in this category by the end of the decade:

Year   GP   GS  SV   CG    CG%   RA   P/G  #P SP    SP% RP    RP% SP/RP Swing%
1900 1356 1136  12  935 82.31%  220 1.194  70  8 11.43% 11 15.71%   51  72.86%
1901 2545 2218  36 1913 86.25%  327 1.147 139 25 17.99% 14 10.07%  100  71.94%
1902 2517 2226  34 1950 87.60%  291 1.131 160 45 28.13% 16 10.00%   99  61.88%
1903 2565 2228  50 1909 85.68%  337 1.151 141 23 16.31% 11  7.80%  107  75.89%
1904 2817 2496  42 2186 87.58%  321 1.129 129 23 17.83% 10  7.75%   96  74.42%
1905 3019 2474  44 1976 79.87%  545 1.220 144 23 15.97% 12  8.33%  109  75.69%
1906 3072 2454  85 1910 77.83%  618 1.252 155 21 13.55%  9  5.81%  125  80.65%
1907 3217 2466  90 1828 74.13%  751 1.305 161 15  9.32% 18 11.18%  128  79.50%
1908 3476 2488 108 1677 67.40%  988 1.397 172 17  9.88% 23 13.37%  132  76.74%
1909 3544 2481 114 1622 65.38% 1063 1.428 203 22 10.84% 24 11.82%  157  77.34%

 Year