Joe---Thanks for this article. You've said what a lot of people have thought for a long time. Let's hope that those on the "inside" are listening.

All its going to take Joe, is someone winning the WS without a closer.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I feel like I've read this same article four or five times this season. I love Joe, I love BP, I agree with your point, but it's almost becoming some kind of crusade here. I agree with irablum above--this will change when someone goes without a closer and has significant success doing so.

Until that happens, can we, I don't know, set up some kind of counter or running Unfiltered or something that just keeps track of the many, many examples of what a big mistake the closer mentality is over the course of a season? That might be fun, and free up column time for some different topics.

Joe,

You forget the real reason closers exist: to have the saves category in fantasy baseball. How would we survive if we didn't have to deal with THAT stupidity!

Joe is really confounding two issues here

1-Whether you best reliever should be used to close the game or used earlier in a high-levereged situation

2-Whether Fuentes or Lidge should remain in the closer role after numerous confirmations they &%$&.

The Red Sox game last night was a perfect example of why you would keep your closer till the 9th because there were many other tough situations prior in the game that you might have thought were high leverage only to be supereded by the 9th.

On the other hand, Fuentes putting 5 runners on base in a row after getting the first two outs only confirmed what should have been apparent many games, if not months, before.

Don't let the perfomance of a 'poor closer' enter anywhere into the discussion of whether a 'good closer' should be pitching in the 7th or 9th.

I agree that if you are a team competing for a playoff spot it's best to use your bullpen in a way that maximizes your wins. However, if you're a team like the Orioles, you can use baseball's stupidity to your advantage. You can (hypothetically speaking of course) take a LOOGY a few years removed from the independent leagues, make him your "closer," and then after building perceived value based on a silly statistic, move him for a young and cheap power hitting 3Bman and a young and cheap potential 4/5 starter.

Yes, the Orioles might have won a few more games with nontraditional bullpen management, but what's the difference between 66 and 68 wins? Baseball thought's unwillingness to evolve presents one of the few opportunities for small market teams to compete with the big boys in an unfair playing field.

Go O's!

Teams seem to understand that closers aren't all that valuable. What did Sherrill return to the Os in trade?

Until we establish how quickly relievers can regularly warm up, rushing them in whenever a 'key' situation develops is a theory eminently shatterable upon collision with actual reality.

If closers: a), pitched 8th + 9th innings; b), weren't wasted on 3-run leads; c) of COURSE! came into tie games, and possibly even top-of-the-9th down-a-run situations, I would consider that to be self-evident and considerable improvement, and possibly darn close to optimal. And isn't that roughly how Sparky Andersen used Mike Henneman? Goldman, get on that!

When you have 2-3 roughly equal relievers, insisting on anointing one of them 'CLOSER!' is certainly darn silly.

Why can't managers just define their roles differently? Instead of grunting "You get 7th inning; he get 9th inning", can't they instead say "Since you are very adept at retiring hitters that approach the plate from the third base side, we will ask you to perform this invaluable skill when tight spots arise and many of these types of hitters are due to bat"? If the relievers aren't smart enough to read the lineup card, isn't that why you have a bullpen coach?

I believe this is the first time Joe has laid out the reasons for eliminating the closer-centric bullpen model in one fully formed essay. This has been a pet issue, and I'm glad to see it laid out here.
I think his point is very difficult to dispute.
Another thing he could have said is to question why teams will bring their closer into the 9th inning with a 1, 2, or 3 run lead but not with a 4-run lead. That only became the norm after the save statistic became popular. There is no doubt that bullpen usage patterns are direct effect of modern statistical conventions, and not statistical evidence, which is a poor basis for how to employ your best pitcher(s).

A potential above-average big league 3B with many years of service time still to be exploited. And that's George Sherrill.

You don't think Jonathan Broxton is in that top tier of closers? I think the only reason I'd like Torre to use him more flexibly is that the Dodger bullpen is so deep with great arms that should be better deployed situationally.

Well, I don't know. I think specialization is going to head were everyone wants the pens to go anywhere. Most teams now have a LH setup man and a RH setup man. Most have a LOOGY, most have a groundball pitcher. All a closer is is the pen ace. In the near future I'd be amazed if teams didn't start taking advantage of that guy the way they're learning to take advantage of those other guys and putting him in situations that best help the team.

The 1970's being my coming-of-age as a baseball fan, I remember how the great relievers of that time were referred to as "firemen", there even being a yearly "Fireman of the Year" award. The idea being that your best reliever was the guy brought in to "put out the fire"at a crucial point in the game, often NOT the 9th inning. As a rabid A's fan, I can remember all the games when Rollie Fingers would come in in the 7th or 8th with runners on base in a close game (heaven forbid, even DOWN a run!), and pitch the rest of the way.

The most important point, in my view, is the idea that you should maximize the number of innings thrown by your best pitchers. The relentless specialization of the modern game forces far too many innings pitched by bad pitchers. I'll always regard the Earl Weaver philosophy as best - 4-man rotation, 3 or 4 short-relievers, and a couple long-relievers, often young starters being broken in. But then maybe I'm just old.

"Guys like Jose Valverde, Heath Bell, and Bobby Jenks are good pitchers, but they're not immovable objects."

I don't know, Bell and Jenks are pretty big guys...

I think one thing has been overlooked in the column and the discussion so far. While the "closer controversy" is a headache for the manager, the alternative pattern of usage involves explaining his reasoning for choosing one reliever over another perhaps several times a week. A lot of managers might prefer the occasional "closer controversy," in which the focus is more on a player than the manager, than having reporters question his choices all the time.

I think a lot of clubs are scared by what happened to Boston when they tried closer by committee in 2003. They blew some leads, a few to woeful TB--an abject humiliation at the time -- and got ripped by the local media for defying conventional wisdom.

Joe: The hardest significant group of people to convince is not the managers, GMs or pitchers. It's the mainstream media and fans.

It has been interesting following the Orioles' media coverage since the Sherrill trade. Everyone at BP wrote, "Great deal!" Mainstream Baltimore media generally said, "But who's going to close games in September?" And now every time Jim Johnson pitches poorly fans bitch and moan over missing out on a chance at 68 wins instead of 66.

The team that could break this paradigm, as often, is Oakland -- Billy Beane wouldn't care what people think, he'd order the manager to do his bidding, and the severely downsized local media still gives him the benefit of the doubt. But the A's would have to win a World Series, because everything less by them is seen throughout the rest of the country as "the failure of Moneyball," which really means the failure of logic.

There's one other benefit -- beyond the tactical and strategic reasons Joe laid out here -- to teams that move away from the "closer-centric" usage pattern: it saves money! Closers are generally overpaid, and there are probably more dollars wasted on saves than any other statistic (including, I would think, RBI).

Buried in all this "save" nonsense is a very important lesson for the SABR-oriented community. Of course, everybody wants to find a statistic that serves as a good proxy for measuring talent. Originally, that is what the save was meant to measure. The problem is, that as soon as a statistic becomes "important" (widely used in the baseball community to measure skill), then there is incentive for players "game the system" so to speak... to change their behavior in order to benefit the statistic (because, after all that is what they are being judged on) at the possible cost of losing effectiveness.

Developing statistics to explain performance is great, but some care must be given in how the popularity of that statistic will change behavior.

Very interesting, and I use the leverage chart from BP's book to guide my decision making in Strat-O-Matic, where I might have Nathan, Balfour, Howell, Devine, and Romo to select from.

There are two things that I haven't seen mentioned yet that I think drove this. "Genius" LaRussa's (see George Will's Men at Work for a glorifying example) exclusive use of Dennis Eckersley in this role, and agents (especially in arbitration cases) having a stat to point to that doesn't exist for set-up men and other non-closers.

Until negotiations start happening around WHIP, K/BB ratio, HR rate, GB/FB ratio, VORP or whatever else, I don't see this trend changing easily. Agents (and the Union) do have a lot of power in today's game.

One of the best summaries of the "folly of the closer" ever written. Interestingly, the mainstream media and Baseball Lifers are constantly complaining about how starters these days are coddled with pitch counts and 5-man rotations, yet all have bought in deeply to the coddling of potential relief aces. Why don't we ever hear them grumbling about the good ol' days when relievers pitched (gasp!) a couple of innings at a time?

Go beyond the closer issues, what about the set-up guy? We've all been there, our team down by a run in the eighth or ninth, the heart of the opponent's lineup coming up and instead of bringing in the best or second-best reliever, in comes the fourth- or fifth-best guy because it's not a save or hold situation. Next thing you know the one-run lead is now a four-run lead. The only hope left is that the other team will now bring in one of its shmoes to face the heart of our lineup because it's no longer a save situation and we can get a couple quick runs before the other manager can react.

Weren't the Braves basically doing this? I don't remember them ever saying that either Soriano or Gonzalez was the closer.