Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1052: The State of the Save

Episode Date: May 2, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Boog Powell’s debut, Ryan Webb’s and Matt Albers’ ongoing pursuit of history, and the ethics of baseball injuries, then discuss some early-season evidence that the save stat’s grasp on manager’s minds is starting to slip. Audio intro: Sharon Van Etten, "Save Yourself" Audio outro: Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds, "Save […]

Don't you think I know you're only trying to save yourself? Don't you think I know you're only trying to save yourself? Just like everyone else couple of meaningless things to talk about. I don't know whether you do. It's not every single podcast. Yeah. I mean, more meaningless than usual. Hopefully the rest of the episode will be slightly less meaningless, if not meaningful, but a couple just running themes of Effectively Wild that I wanted to mention. Last year, Sam and I talked about something that he dubbed the no plate appearance pinch hitter. He wrote an article about this last May, and I talked about something that he dubbed the no plate appearance pinch hitter. He wrote an article about this last May and I think maybe did a stat segment on it on the podcast. And

he was chronicling how this was an endangered species in baseball. This is the pinch hitter who gets announced and then the opposing manager goes to the bullpen again to counter that pinch hitter, and then that pinch hitter is in turn pinch hit four. And Sam was noting that this doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to because benches are tiny and bullpens are huge, and it's rare that managers have enough bench bats to play with that they will sacrifice two in essentially one move. So this was dying out, but I think we may have talked about hitters who made their major league debuts as a no plate appearance pinch hitter. And there was one over the weekend as Michael Clare chronicled at MLB.com's Cut Foresight, Boog Powell, the new Boog Powell, the latest Boog Powell, made his Big Lake debut as a pinch hitter. And then Terry Francona called for Andrew Miller. And that was the end of Boog Powell's Big Lake debut. Hopefully it will not be the end of his career, but Andrew Miller came in and that was that. So I just wanted to mention it still happens even in Big league debuts, even if not nearly as often anymore. And Boog Powell did make his actual debut. He started, I believe, the next game.

And honestly, as much as this is, you know, not how anyone wants to start their career, I'm pretty sure no one else wants to start their career pinch hitting against Andrew Miller. So Boog Powell was probably quite pleased with the turn of events. Yeah, Sam called this the only job in the sport you could do. So it's not a bad way to sort of ease your way into baseball. And the other meaningless thing, update on the Matt Albers, Ryan Webb pursuit of the all-time games finished without a save record. If you are new to Effectively Wild, this has been a running theme for years now. These two guys have the most games finished ever by a pitcher who does not have a save, which is sort of funny and sad and tragic all in one. And I've talked about it many times. I talked to them about it and interviewed them for

a Grantland piece and played clips of it on the podcast. Anyway, I've been tracking this and Matt Albers, I don't know how he has managed to extend the streak this year because he's with the Nationals whose bullpen has been a mess. They started the season with, who was their initial closer? Blake Trinan was their first closer, right? And then they had a Sean Kelly-Kota Glover duo and now Glover's hurt, so I guess it's just Kelly. This seems like the perfect opportunity for Albers to snap his streak. And he pitched 10 scoreless games in spring training. He's now up to seven scoreless games in the majors for the Nationals this year, so he's not allowed to run on the year.

He's just sitting there. there. I'm not saying he's closer material, but the reason that it's so strange that these two guys have extended these streaks so far is that all kinds of random pitchers get saves all the time. You don't have to be a designated closer to get a save. It just happens. If you're around long enough, you get one of those weird three inning appearances, or you just get a vulture save or something happens and you pick up a save and these guys have not done it. And this seems like the perfect opportunity for him to do it if he's ever going to do it. But he has only extended the streak this year.

He has finished three games without a save. So he is now at 102 lifetime games finished without a save. Ryan Webb is at 105. Albers is in hot pursuit, although Webb has been in AAA thus far this year and has four games finished without a save down there. So he can't even get a save in AAA. Anyway, this is one of my favorite ongoing storylines in baseball. I am still not sure whether I'm rooting for them to get a save or rooting for them never

to get a save. It's sort of fun either way. And last year there was a very close call. I think it was Albers came on in a save situation, or maybe he came in in the eighth, I think it was, and he stayed on to get the save, but he couldn't close it out. And I was getting dozens of tweets about this happening. And I managed to tune in just in time to see him blow it. So my favorite quixotic quest in baseball is continuing. Let's see. I wonder if that would have been May 10th.

I'm just doing a quick little search. It's not seared in my mind with that degree of recall. It's not all those tweets. Albers would have come in at the bottom of the eighth of a, oh dear, 11 to six game. No, by that point it would have been 11 to seven. He comes in, in fly ball triple walk home run blows a save and uh and the Rangers boy have the White Sox 13 11 however uh I don't know there there are a few blown saves that Albers has on his 2016 record and it's uh yeah it's fun to

scroll through I know I wasn't part of this originally but uh now I get to adopt it as something that I am I guess I'm interested in because yeah who couldn't be at this point I get tweets even when he comes in in like the sixth inning or something because like technically it's a safe situation if he finishes the whole game which would never ever happen but I still get tweets saying Albers is in with a two-run lead and he just has to pitch three innings to do it or something that's not gonna, but might never happen anyway. Anyway, it's a fun thing to track. And this bit of banter was as meaningless as advertised, I think. Do you have anything you want to talk about?

No. All the things that I'm thinking about right now are depressing in terms of baseball. It's, you know, the Mets and Syndergaard, the Giants and Bumgarner, the Nationals. Yeah. And Eaton, the Diamondbacks even. Yeah, I know. And Miller, of course. I have my Mariners bias with Hanager and Felix from earlier last week. I know that for every bad thing that happens to a baseball team, that's a good thing that happens to somebody else.

But everything seems just kind of depressing. Yeah. I know it's hectic because the National League playoff picture is completely opened up. But just so much of a bummer. April was a real bummer for baseball. Yeah, this was a debate going on in the Facebook group, and I think Sam and I talked about it at one point in the past. Where do you stand on being happy about non-serious injuries that happen to a team that you are

rooting against, a division rival or something? Non-serious. Yeah, so not career-threatening, not life- not life threatening, just a DL stint, maybe a significant DL stint, but the guy's going to come back. He is set for life already. His livelihood is not jeopardized. Do you approve of taking some pleasure in that? Or do you take the strict stance that no we cannot take any pleasure in a

player's misfortune even if it benefits my team no that's nonsense because what's the difference if you are a nationals fan let's say and even forgetting that eaton that i mean is out for the season because he tours acl even if you are not just talking about in the perspective that well players of my favorite team will get hurt and players on other teams will get hurt and and so be it i guess i don't see where the difference is. If you're talking about, like, Syndergaard, he could miss, I don't know, two, three months. We don't know what's going to happen with him.

But you're not out there, like, watching Syndergaard pitch, and you shouldn't be actively rooting for him to get injured, I guess, with every single pitch. That's just no way to... For one thing, you're going to be disappointed a lot, because he will pitch. But where's the difference? If it's about rooting, not rooting for misfortune?

Well, would you not then be allowed to cheer for the Mets committing a devastating error or something? Or just having a late season collapse? That's going to deal them just as much psychological damage as a partially torn lat will deal Syndergaard physical damage. Yeah, it's a strange line it's like the what's different about lasik compared to pds or something it's like you know what there's no answer it's not right yeah i mean you can kind of come up with gradations of difference there but it's sort of tough but then if you're saying that you can take some form of pleasure in an opposing player having been injured, is it ethically and morally different to root for him

to be injured? I guess it is, right? I mean, it's not like you're causing the injury by wishing that it were so, so you have no impact on this. So if you're a Mets fan and you want the Mets to win and now Adam Eaton's out for the year, I guess you don't wish a season-ending injury upon him. And in ACL, that can be serious. Maybe that is above the threshold that we're talking about here. If we're just talking about a muscle strain or something since I've been a fan in the traditional sense. So I'm trying to think back to how I felt. And I mean, I was a kid when I was a fan. So maybe my sense of morals was not fully developed. But I feel like if there was a non-serious injury to my division rival, I wouldn't have been upset about it. Well, so this is convenient. I am a fan when it comes

to hockey, less so with baseball. And my favorite team is still alive in the playoffs by some miracle. And in the first round, they eliminated the Boston Bruins, who are probably a better hockey team, if we're going to be honest. So I don't know how much you know about hockey, but a team will in each game play generally six defensemen, three pairs of two defensemen each. And when the Ottawa Senators played the Boston Bruins most of the injured Ottawa Senators players came back healthy ready for the first round and the Bruins had at least three of their top four defensemen injured and out pretty much all series long some more defensemen got hurt over the course of things such that they wound up with a player

they drafted in the first round who two weeks previous to the first round of the playoff series, was playing in college, wound up making not only his NHL debut, but making his debut in the playoffs and then leading his team in minutes on the ice. So that speaks to a little bit of desperation. Yeah. So, yeah, sure. The Bruins wound up eliminated in six games by the Autos Senators because, in part, they were very depleted. But I can tell you that at no point did I feel the least bit guilty

about my favorite team taking advantage of mistakes that those defensemen made. And when another defenseman on that team got hurt, I didn't feel bad. You know, it was a rough collision. Anyway, I think that the easiest way you can justify it if you are a fan is that, well, you're hoping that your team proves itself to be superior to another team which is always what this is about you always want your team to be just the best full stop true although i guess in baseball we accept the fact that winning is not necessarily the same thing as being the best at least in the playoffs you and i do however if you talk to

not i mean it's easy with cubs fans because hey they were the best team last season by a fair margin but you know you talk to royals fans about the year before and i don't want to speak for all of them but you always want to believe that your team was the best whether it's just the best in the playoffs the best design you talk about how maybe the roles were built for playoff success and maybe that makes them better than their regular season numbers etc you always want to believe your team is the best and i think it's easy to convince yourself that they are if they go all the way but an element of building a strong team is is having depth to survive the injuries that are inevitable every single team does get hurt aside from last year's cubs pitching staff i guess

and so if you are a fan and an important player on another team does get hurt then you can say well you know they should have been prepared for that and ultimately i mean realistically the vets should be prepared for noah cinder guard and all of their pitchers getting hurt. They kind of have experienced this before. So it's no fun for your entire rooting experience to be pro injury. But I don't think it's a bad thing to find some amount of pleasure in a player on a team you don't like getting hurt. It's just that's part of it.

Yeah, I remember once being in the dugout, the visitors dugout at Yankee Stadium. It's just, it's part of it. On that trip, did he feel happy that he didn't have to face Jeter or something? And Madden said, no, you never want the other team to be shorthanded. You always want to face them at their best because then you know that you're the better team or you beat them and all that sort of thing, which, of course, is what he would say. It sounds good. It would play well in both clubhouses. play well in both clubhouses. So it's a smart thing to say. Wonder whether he actually believed any of that or whether he would have been happy to have the entire Yankees starting lineup on the disabled list if it would have benefited the Rays at the time, because no one remembers that sort of thing. Like maybe at the time, a Yankees fan would say, yeah, but we didn't have X, Y, and Z. And every team's fans say that every year, because I think every team's fans believe that their team had the worst injury luck of any team every year. But I think ultimately no one really remembers, oh, we were missing so-and-so that year. And if we'd had so-and-so, we might have been two games better and we would have won. Everyone just remembers who won. And I doubt that if you won and you're celebrating at the end of the season, it really mars the experience for you that you got to take advantage of another team being shorthanded.

So probably just a nice line that he didn't fully believe. Yeah. No coaches say that stuff all the time. Well, I don't need to go into further depth. I just remembered, by the way, when we were talking aboutbers and uh and web i just remembered that there had been a player recently who got a garbage save and i didn't remember who it was so i ran a quick search it was tommy malone who the brewers have just dfa'd i believe today on april 25th tommy malone came into a game in the seventh inning inheriting a nine to zero brewers lead over the reds

and he threw three innings allowed a run Brewers lead over the Reds and he threw three innings allowed a run three strikeouts allowed a home run and he got a save it was probably his first career save I'm not going to look it up there's no point so three inning save garbage time Tommy Malone two weeks before that whoever Justin Haley is he seems to be a twin he also got a garbage save against the Tigers going 3.1 innings in a game. The twins won 11 to 5. Yeah, this happens all the time. I think when I wrote about it, I mentioned someone who had gotten a save in his big league debut and he wasn't even a closer or a prospect or anything.

He just happened to walk into one without any weight at all. Whereas some guys go years or actually almost no one goes years. It's just Webb and Albers who go years because I remember searching at the time to see like who was next closest. Almost no one is close, but almost no one has had to wait nearly as long. Just by chance alone, you'd think they would have gotten one by now. Anyway, yeah, I mean, this weekend was all about injury news and I talked about that stuff on my other podcast, which is now back on iTunes if you want to listen to that, so I don't want to repeat everything I said. But we just talked about the Mets late last week, right?

So I don't know if we have anything new to say about their handling of injuries. injuries. It kind of confirmed everyone's worst fears and beliefs about the Mets, that Syndergaard didn't want the MRI, that they couldn't make him get the MRI, that they didn't sit him anyway because he didn't get the MRI. It's a mess. So I think we've all sort of been waiting for Syndergaard to break one way or another for the last year plus, just because he's so good and he throws so hard. And it just seems like no one that good can last that long based on what we've seen of other very hard throwing pitchers. So hopefully this will not be the thing that does him in and he will be back at some point this season because Cinder guard is fun to watch. But if you're a nationals fan and you don't feel that

way, I don't blame you. Somebody give James Paxton a hug. All right. So we can move on to my topic today, which is the save. And I wrote something about this for the ringer that will be up by the time all of you are hearing this. And I tried to look into whether there's any sign of changing bullpen usage so far this season, just because it's been such a prominent storyline in baseball going back to the playoffs last year. All we were talking about was bullpens and Andrew Miller and Terry Francona and wondering how much of that would carry over not only to future post seasons, but also to regular seasons. And I wrote something before this season looking at guys who could potentially fit into that Andrew Miller mold. And we've all written and talked about Chris Davinsky.

And we have these anecdotal examples of guys who are either following in those footsteps or doing something similar. Michael Lorenzen, et cetera. So I wanted to see if I could go beyond the anecdotal and find any evidence of a league-wide change in reliever usage or save distribution or anything like that. And of course, it's early. It's just the end of the first month of baseball. So I compared everything I did. I compared this season to previous pre-May portions of seasons. in the way that teams have in the postseason, because it's a long season and you don't have them any off days and guys will get burned out and it's hard to predict when you're going to have to use them and predict exactly what the optimal time will be to bring them in. So I don't think it was really realistic to expect anything dramatic to happen. So I was just looking for

some signs. So I approached it in a few different ways. First thing I looked at was just the length of outings because the length of outings has decreased a lot over the last four decades or so. innings pitched per relief appearance or the percentage of relief appearances that last two innings or more has gone way down over the last several decades and hasn't really shown much sign of bouncing back. So that was the first thing I looked at, just innings pitched per game and the percentage of outings that lasted four outs or more or six outs or more and essentially nothing to see there at all like slight increases over last season but compared to the five previous seasons nothing remarkable at all so does that surprise you at all or is that what you would have expected that's about what i would have expected Yeah, me too, there's only

So much you can do, there's only so much You can change in one winter, even if you Want to copy the Indians and Have your own Andrew Miller, it's tough to Just develop that guy When we talked to Davinsky, he said He's able to do this because The Astros prepped him to do

This, essentially, and he was drafted As a reliever, and then he had starting experience And then he was part of the piggyback Rotations in the Astros prepped him to do this, essentially, and he was drafted as a reliever, and then he had starting experience, and then he was part of the piggyback rotations in the Astros minor league systems where he'd start and throw five innings, and then he'd relieve and throw four innings. And so that whole thing kind of got him into the mental and physical mindset to be able to do this sort of thing. So I don't think you can just conjure those pitchers out of nowhere. So came up empty there. Then I looked to see whether, okay, if individual relief outings are not getting longer, are relief outings getting more frequent? Are teams using certain pitchers more often, fewer days between outings, that sort of thing? So I just looked at the leaders in relief appearances and compared them to the number of games their team has played. And again, I'm comparing to the pre-May portions of five previous seasons and essentially nothing to see here either. It was

exactly the same as last year, just looking at the percentage of team games that the relief appearance leaders have pitched in. So again, nothing to see there. And then I looked at usage. I tried to look for a correlation between the leverage index when pitchers entered the game and their preseason projected ERA, according to Pakoda, which I used because it's easy to go back several seasons and essentially nothing to see there either. So no indication that managers are using guys who are presumably better or at least have better projections in high leverage roles, which could be ninth inning roles. You don't necessarily always want your best pitcher in a high leverage role, but nothing to see there too. So I was about

ready to throw up my hands and say that this article was either a waste or a confirmation that nothing is happening at all until I got to the last thing I wanted to check, which was the distribution of saves. So I was curious to see whether saves have been handed out any more democratically this season than they have in the past. And so the way I did this was I looked up the save leader on each team. So basically the maximum number of saves that one person had on every team. I added up all those saves. I divided them by the total saves in the majors. So basically a percentage of saves that is going to the leading save getter on each team and combining all of those guys. So I'll just say this, the results sort of surprised me, or at least

encouraged me, or at least it was something worth writing about, which is that this year is the lowest percentage of saves going to those saves leaders in that five-year sample I checked. And then I went back five more years to see if that was just a fluke. And again, it's still the lowest. So it's been more than a decade, at the very least, since the leading save getters were getting such a low percentage of saves. So it's not a dramatic drop, except that this does tend to be pretty consistent. It's been at about 85% over the last decade, and it'll fluctuate a little bit, but it's never been below about 82 percent in any year. And this was, again, just looking at the pre-May portion, just because things can change as you get later in the season. And this year it's at 79.2 percent. So it's about

two and a half percentage points lower than it was in any year in the sample, significantly lower than the average to start a season. And I did go kind of team by team and look for whether there was an element of intentionality to this or whether it was coincidence, but just your gut reaction, do you buy that there has been any erosion in the save rule this year? And I will just say that Sam and I talked about this last year too. I think early in the season we did a podcast about how it seemed like people were experimenting a little bit. I think the A's were using kind of a platoon closer system. And the Braves had talked about maybe using their best pitcher in the eighth

and then going with someone else in the ninth. And then Sam wrote about it in June, and just about everything we had talked about didn't stick, and everyone was kind of back to traditional closer usage. But if you compare to this point in last season, last season was actually the most rigid season in the sample. season last season was actually the most rigid season in the sample it was 90.1 percent of the saves at this point in the season had gone to the leading save getters so through the same point last season there was no sign league-wide at least that anything was changing and now there is but it

could be a fluke it could be mirage so what do you think well so let's see this year there have been 192 total saves so in terms of rate basis 79 versus an average of 82 to 85 you're looking at a difference of i don't know i'd call it roughly 5 to 10 saves so far that have gone to not the top guys and of course i all think of like well where has this been happening and then my mind goes immediately to the rangers who have not had their safe situations go as they intended but i would think that if i had to hypothesize i guess it it feels like at least anecdotally that the trend has been about assembling very deep backs of bullpens tops of bullpens i don't know that to me is the back of the bullpen the good or the bad i don't know i think this is like the rotation is bad back of the bullpen is good okay but also saying top of the bullpen or top of the rotation is that just confusing i don't know. Back of the rotation is bad. Back of the bullpen is good. Okay, but also saying top of the bullpen or top of the rotation,

is that just confusing the two words? I don't think anyone says top of the bullpen. Back of the bullpen, good. Back of the rotation, bad. Okay, back of the bullpen. I think that there's been a lot of teams focusing on assembling depth in the back of the bullpen. Of course, just about every team has a best reliever,

but I think that teams have focused more on having a second or third or even fourth, if you can manage it, almost elite level reliever. And of course, when teams assemble that many elite relievers, then the definition of elite has to change. But it seems like every team, many teams, not every team, has a handful of pitchers who are more than capable of being sort of shut down relievers. I don't know where they're all coming from if it's just because relievers in general are so absurd but it definitely felt like one of the trends of maybe this past offices maybe even beyond that i think about the the red sox are a bad example but the first ones that come to mind where you think not only do they have kimbrough but they try to get carson kelly well they did successfully get carson

kelly and then he unsuccessfully stayed healthy. And Tyler Thornburg, who they also picked up. Yeah, they had Buehara before. Buehara, right. And even Joe Kelly held toward the down the stretch last year. We don't need to say good things about Joe Kelly because people have made that mistake before. But you look at a team like the Astros, who have probably six guys I could see reasonably closing a baseball game. And I haven't studied it in depth because it's annoying to do that

and I don't want to. But, you know, people like Ben Lindbergh have. It seems like it is a definite trend where at least contending teams want to assemble at least two to three very good relievers in the bullpen. Sometimes they come out of nowhere, like, say, Tommy Canley or the White Sox, who is fun. But that would be my hypothesis

aside from the default hypothesis of it's noise, wait for me. Yeah, totally possible that it is noise. And you can go team by team and come up with, well, if this guy had been healthy or whatever, then this would wash out. Like Zach Britton got 87% of the Orioles

full season saves last year. He's gotten 50% of the Orioles saves this year because he's been hurt. And you could go team by team. Jairus Familia was suspended to start the season. Roberto Asuna was hurt to start the season and then has been bad. And of course, you can do that in just about every season. I mean, there's always someone who's hurt. There's always someone who loses his job right after opening day. And then fantasy players are asking me who's going to be the closer. And I say, I don't know. I haven't played fantasy in a decade. But that, I think, is a constant that there's a lot of turnover at that position. So I don't know whether this season has been any worse in that respect than usual. And there are a few cases where it seems like doing a platoon of Sean Doolittle and Santiago Casilla. And that's something that Bob Melvin said and announced officially. And they've done that in the past. So that's an example of a team that's definitely doing this. about the Reds and Brian Price, and he is clearly trying to blow up the bullpen hierarchy to a certain extent. And that doesn't solely manifest itself in saves. He also has Michael Lorenzen

coming in in the third inning or whatever, but Lorenzen's gotten a save. Iglesias has gotten some saves. Someone else got a save, I think. So that seems to be something that they are doing on purpose. The Phillies had Gmar Gomez as their closer going into the season. God, why? Yeah. And then almost immediately removed him from that role and I believe have resisted the urge to name another closer. And of course, you never totally know whether it's because there just isn't anyone that the manager wants to be the closer or whether he doesn't like the idea of closers. I'm guessing that in the Phillies case, it's more the former than the latter. But people have been asking him who's the closer and he has not anointed one. And I kind of got the idea to do this article and started it off with the Mariners who have used Edwin Diaz in a pretty

conventional way. But there was a quote from Scott Service who said about a week ago that he wants to use Diaz in a different way. His quote was, he might go five outs, he might go six outs in a road game. Don't be shocked if he comes in there in the eighth inning of a tie game. I know it's not the traditional closer role, but that's kind of how I see using him. He has not actually used him that way thus far, and he might not, but he is at least talking about it. Although he did seem to stress that this has nothing to do with sabermetrics and that he just wants to use Diaz more, which when you think about it is basically all the sabermetrics says on this topic is just, hey, use your good pitchers more. And also at important times, that's about it.

You don't really need any numbers to make that case. So I don't know if he just didn't want this to be branded as like some weird sabermetrics experiment for the portion of the fan base that reacts negatively to that kind of thing. But he at least is open to entertaining the idea of using Diaz in that way. And even like going to the Angels, two of the teams that have done this so far are led by old school managers, or at least old managers, Dusty Baker's Nationals. I don't think Dusty is intentionally doing this. They just kind of didn't give him a closer, which is another element of this. I'm just talking about managers and their decisions, but obviously it's partially the front office's decision to go get a closer or not or to just get a bunch of generic relievers that the manager can mix and match.

So if you're a team that didn't decide to go out and sign someone, and maybe the Nationals tried and just came up empty, but if you didn't get someone like that, it could be because you don't think you need someone like that. So the Angels are another example of that, and Socha has sort of avoided the committee word. Everyone hates bullpen by committee. It sounds like some sort of inefficient bureaucracy, I guess, and no one likes the term. But he went into the season saying that he wanted to prize versatility and he didn't want to lock anyone into any specific roles. And maybe that has something to do with the fact that Houston Street was hurt, but Houston Street was lousy and hurt last year and was going to have to be competing for that job anyway. So I don't know how much it has to do with that.

So there are a number of teams that you can go one by one, and maybe you could do this sort of thing every year and find teams that kind of fit the definition of a club that's trying not to be married to one closer in a very rigid role. But there's enough evidence that I think there could be something to this, and that doesn't mean there will continue to be over the rest of the season. But just the fact that this tends to be fairly stable, and I went back 10 years, and this is the lowest, and it's coming at a time when you kind of would have expected something like this to happen just based on the trends and how people talk about bullpens. just based on the trends and how people talk about bullpens. All of that combined makes me think maybe there's something here.

And it's not dramatic. It's not total upheaval. But if you did expect the bullpen order to be overthrown, this is probably how it would happen, just slowly and incrementally and not all that dramatically for as many headlines as Andrew Miller got. It's kind of a thing that has to go team by team and player by player. I don't know. I don't know if Mike Socha can take anything away from this,

but as a wonderful example of how easy it can be to rack up saves sometimes, the Angels, Houston Street, Hurt, Cam Bedrosian, very good. Hurt, Andrew Bailey,

Hurt, even Mike Morin, who I don't know if he's ever had a save. I'm not going to look it up. Hurt. And so here are the current closers this season who have five saves. Are Aldis Chapman, Zach Britton, Mark Melanson,

David Robertson, Alex Colomay, Bud Norris. Bud Norris. I believe he was... Okay, I haven't looked this up, but I guarantee you Bud Norris was a minor league contract with the spring training non-ruster invite this year. He's thrown 14 innings, has 19 strikeouts, has allowed four runs.

He's been super good in the angels bullpen who's the other one in there who's got a crazy high strikeout rate the answer to that question of course is blake parker who i uh had to look up 13 appearances 20 strikeouts angels bullpen completely obliterated good nobody knows why the angels bullpen was the reason that i looked at them before the year and i thought okay i've probably oversold them they don't look like a contender at all then all of their relievers who looked any good got injured and so now they are led by bud norris and blake parker and they've been fine and it doesn't make any sense to me jc ramirez hardest throwing start on the team don't know what's going on angels baseball they're the contender and the american league west this is i

think maybe i guess the upside. I know this is less about saves. I'm sorry to step away from that. But touching on how depressing April kind of felt with so many seemingly good teams being terrible and banged up. Yeah. That there's a benefit to chaos. It's fun. The White Sox are 13 and 10.

The White Sox were supposed to be the worst team in baseball. Of course, they also had the worst team in baseball of course they also had the best record in the al last april i think yeah and that was with good players and now they're 13 and 10 and who knows why but it's fun you look at the overall standings but even distorting i just looked at the base runs standings based on like where teams records should be based on how they've done whatever i don't need to explain base runs the yankees best team in baseball in April. Oh, sure, Gary Sanchez missed the entire month,

and Greg Bird has been terrible, and it doesn't matter. The Yankees have been amazing. So it's fun. There's the benefit of chaos, and Bud Norris would be sort of an indicator of that, where, okay, it doesn't make any sense, but here he is leading the Angels and Sabes, being their closer, getting the job done.

And so the Angels are the team in the division who are to the astros who are granted one of the only teams so far actually fulfilling expectations so save totals can be a sort of proxy indicator i guess of league-wide chaos which i think people like more than we we always want our expectations and projections to be accurate except you never want them to be too accurate, I think, is the key that some people kind of miss. I think I'm happy with where our expectations are. But anyway, saves. This is about saves. I'm just talking about chaos at this point.

Yeah, well, last thought on saves. Maybe the fact that almost every reliever throws hard now would make it easier for this to happen. Because, I mean, Bud Norris throws like 95, he tops out at like 98. I mean, I wouldn't have thought of Bud Norris as a guy who's touching 98 necessarily, but I guess he always kind of did, but he does that. And there are guys in every bullpen who do that. And I think the storyline coming into the season about the Angels bullpen was like, we're the guys who don't throw hard, right think i i'm pretty sure i remember reading a story where like everyone was talking about it in that bullpen like we get the job done without velocity etc etc well their closer now is throwing 98 so

every team has this guy and i wonder if that helps just conquering the mental block when it comes to certain pitchers and installing them as closers. Because there have been guys who have been very effective who never got to close or had to wait a long time to close because whatever, they were side armors or soft tossers or, I mean, there can be platoon considerations there, obviously, but there are guys who have been very effective, but they don't look like the fire-breathing, flame-throwing closer that people think of as the guy you want charging in in the ninth with the rock music playing. So maybe the fact that almost everyone fits that mold, or at least what that mold looked like 10, 20 years ago, helps a little bit because there are so many guys in every bullpen who look like the prototypical closer that if someone has success in that role, you're not looking for reasons to say,

this guy doesn't look like a closer. He does. They all look like closers. Every reliever looks like a closer. Except for, I guess, Brandon Kintzler, who I'm just going to guess that he doesn't throw hard. Yeah, I can buy that. If you have sort of an, I guess, outdated or overly simplistic idea of what a closer is supposed to be, then that's probably going to evolve very slowly with the times as opposed to how bullpens have actually evolved to the point where, you know, the thing that people throw around, someone like Billy Wagner would have been a freak, was a freak 15 years ago, but now every team has like seven Billy Wagners and nobody knows how or why, but here we are. Bullpen velocity over the

last 10 years has increased from just over 91 to just over 93 which is insane yeah so I didn't even realize that Bud Norris was sometimes touching 98 I still think of Bud Norris as being you know Bud Norrisy yeah I kind of confuse him in my mind with Joe Blanton but oh by the way Joe Blanton is also a good reliever now and I know one of the league leaders currently in missing bats, which, okay, it's just, I don't know what you do with it, but if you have, maybe it also has to do with the related idea of how relievers just in general, the average reliever is so good that it means that the average reliever is less likely now than ever to give up a run or give up two or three runs in a safe situation and so if if the bar is is so high or if the baseline is so high for just

completing an effective inning then yeah you would trust nearly everyone in your bullpen which would be a another contributor so yes i think you're onto something all right well this is totally a topic that we could revisit in august and say all of this went back to normal and the save is as established as it ever was. But it could be the beginning of something. Who knows? Maybe if Scott Service actually does something interesting with Edwin Diaz, then this will only intensify as the season goes on. Anyway, it's interesting to me. as the season goes on.

Anyway, it's interesting to me. We keep waiting for the save to lose its stranglehold on managers and bullpens. And perhaps maybe that grasp is slightly, slightly starting to slip. Although it's too soon to say for sure. They're all going to hang on to the goose egg. All right.

So that'll do it. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Tim Roschko, Jacob Mooney, David Myers, John Sagal, and Chris Clarkin. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Speaking of iTunes, my other baseball podcast, The Ringer MLB Show, is back on iTunes and SoundCloud.

The April exclusivity to tune in is over, so you can go listen to the new episode, which features me and Michael talking about injuries, as mentioned, as well as interviews with Gifton Gopay and Dovidas Neviraskis, the two Pirates players Jeff and I bantered about last week, first African-born player and Lithuanian-born player, respectively, in big league history. You can also now download all of the April episodes we did. They're on iTunes too. Lots of fun interviews that hold up well. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing

assistance. Keep your questions coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you very soon. a stranger if you please or am I too far gone