Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 81: The Angels, the Reds, and Two Conflicting Closer Philosophies

Episode Date: November 13, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the Reds’ and Angels’ approaches to bullpen-building, how Cincinnati’s philosophy affects Aroldis Chapman’s future, and which way the wind is blowing where the closer role is concerned.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Good evening and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. It is Monday, November 12th. This is episode 81. I feel like I'm safe saying good evening because it is 912 where you are, correct? Yes, that's right. And so this is an evening episode. Your topic is today. So what is your topic? I wanted to talk about the different approaches that a couple teams are taking and saying they're taking with their closers. You wanted to talk about a couple

of approaches that teams are taking and saying that they're taking with regards to their closers. That's right. Okay. This is unfortunate because that is not the kind of topic that I can furiously Google. a podcast topic. And a couple recent ones stood out to me because they were direct opposites, really. Two teams that are looking for a closer or at least looking for someone to be designated as the person who gets saves most of the time kind of have different philosophies about what they're going to do about that this winter. So you have on one hand the Reds, and I'll just read an excerpt here from an MLB.com story. On the Reds, it says, The specific makeup of the Reds' 2013 rotation and back end of the bullpen

will have one rather large question mark next to it, at least for the time being. Much of the uncertainty will exist until the Reds figure out what to do with Aroldis Chapman. We haven't made a decision on Chapman as a starter or as a reliever, Reds general manager Walt Jockety said. We're talking about it. Part of what determines if Chapman starts involves how well the Reds navigate their way around the free agent market for closers. It depends on if we re-sign Jonathan Broxton and Ryan Madsen, Jackety said, or if we get another closer. So the Reds, of course, have been talking about moving Chapman or what role to have him in for a couple seasons now. But for now, it sounds like they definitely want him as the starter, but they are willing to use him as a closer or to continue using him as

a closer if they don't find one on the free agent market. And from all the rumors, all the closer candidates they've been tied to have been established closers, guys who have closed before and have led their team in saves before. So they're kind of letting this be a deciding factor for them this offseason. What happens at the closer position will determine what happens in their starting rotation and what other moves they make. And then on the other hand, you have the Angels and Jerry DiPoto, who, according to Ken Rosenthal, Ken Rosenthal wrote, the way DiPoto sees it, he'll acquire the best bullpen arms he can find and the Angels will figure out the rest.

So they have Freire, who kind of came out of nowhere to be their closer this year, and they have Scott Downs and Kevin Jepsen and Jordan Walden, and Rosenthal writes that DiPoto is not concerned with finding a pure closer. So you have these totally different philosophies for two pretty successful teams. And if you look at the saves leaderboard from last year, the guys who had at least 20 saves, there were 25 relievers with at least 20 saves.

12 of them had had 20 saves before. So basically half of them, a little more than half of them, were first-time closers or at least first-time full-time closers. And that's pretty typical of what you see almost every season. For one reason or another, there is just a ton of turnover and the saves leaderboard from one season looks nothing like the saves leaderboard from one season looks nothing like the saves leaderboard from the next. I was also reading another rumor about the Tigers who are in need of a closer.

And Danny Nalber tweeted that the Tigers are not interested in Rafael Soriano. They plan to stay in-house for closer with hard-throwing 21-year-old Bruce Rondon getting a chance at the job. And that's someone who hasn't pitched in the majors at all, let alone in a save situation. So I kind of wonder how these competing philosophies can coexist at the same time for successful teams in the same leagues. Even if you look at just the playoff teams from last season, the most successful teams and the teams with the highest leverage spots, over half of them finish their seasons

with new closers, first-time closers, or guys who hadn't really done the job before. So that kind of takes away the argument that a team can't be successful or can't succeed in the playoffs without a closer. Both World Series teams were using closers that they hadn't started the season with as closers and hadn't been closers before the season. So I wonder whether you think that the Reds' philosophy is kind of an endangered species. Yeah, I think it's mostly an endangered species. Uh, but it's also, there is a, there's a bit of pressure on the GM, uh, who takes the depoto path still. And that pressure is that, uh, you do have to find the guy. I mean, the, there, uh, there is certainly,

I think a, uh, an acceptance of the fact that there are many more guys capable of getting saves than simply the guys who have already gotten saves. So you're not limited to the 30 guys who are already in those jobs. And that's a nice thing. I mean, if you want a shortstop, you're essentially limited to the 30 shortstops in Major League Baseball or a couple of others. But if you want a closer, there's a lot more than 30. And so, I mean, if you just look at a simple supply and demand math, it's pretty obvious that DePoto's way will get you a better deal. From the perspective of, I think, what his players expect

and his fan base expects, and quite possibly what his manager expects though you still do need to come up with a guy and uh depoto came up with a guy last year uh which was uh ernie frieri and as long as you can keep doing that which is you know i mean what what billy bean was doing in in the the mid uh the middle part of last decade when when he was sort of uh i i think probably the most prominent gm exposing the lie of the closer um when he was sort of, I think, probably the most prominent GM exposing the lie of the closer, he kept coming up with them. And partly he kept coming up with them because, like I said, it's a lot easier than coming up with the shortstop. But it's not guaranteed. And if you don't come up with that guy, it is probably the most, I would say the most disheartening way to lose for a fan base is to

have a terrible bullpen. And so, I mean, there's a certain amount of hustle that you need to do to make this work. But I guess, yeah, I think that it's clearly less, well, I think, I mean, I don't know. I was going to say it's clearly less of a factor now than it was 10 years ago. But on the other hand, if you look at the money that Papelbon got last winter and that Madsen nearly got last winter and that Heath Bell got last winter. I mean, Heath Bell, goodness gracious, right? Nobody thought Heath Bell was one of the 30 best relievers alive, I don't think. And we haven't really gotten to see what a closer will sign for yet this winter. I mean we saw the Brandon League deal and then we saw today the Jeremy Affelt deal for three years and $18 billion.

But we haven't really seen a traditional closer sign yet. So I guess we're not sure where that market is right now. I guess we're not sure where that market is right now. The other thing, I don't know if the numbers would back this up, but given how fast relievers burn out, the career path of a dominant reliever is usually a year and four months, and then they stop being dominant. It seems to me that probably if you really took the best reliever on each staff of the 30 teams, I mean, my guess is that probably something like 20 plus would have a pre-arb best reliever. And so the idea that you're going out and spending you're going on spending i mean that the the best short stop on each team if you did that same exercise you might have like seven or eight

that were pre-arb at most and quite possibly two or three or four um so i think that there's something interesting about each of these teams that you've brought up that if i can sort of steer the question slightly different uh direction but frieriire, this is the part of the closer myth that I think is hysterical and that I love, which is that there's no defined number of saves for a guy to be a proven closer. And I've never been able to pin down what that number is or where that line is. Friere closed for basically the entire year for a big market team in a pennant race. And he did extremely, I mean, I guess I would say, well, maybe not extremely well, given what extremely well means for relievers these days, but he did very well.

And I don't think that depoto would say that he's looking for a closer at all but the the sort of rumor reporters and also i think the angels fan base and the angels reporters uh are kind of imposing this search on him that like oh they keep asking all right oh are you looking at Soriano? Are you looking at, you know, Valverde? Like, he has a closer. And I don't know why Freire, who had, you know, 23 saves. I guess 23 is not the number. It seems to me that 23 would be enough if you're going with this idea. But it probably also varies from reliever to reliever.

And if you're a particular type of man, I think if you are a – my guess is that the number is much lower if you're a heavyset white guy with facial hair. Whereas Freire and like Romo as another example are not that. And Romo, again, Romo is another he saved he saved his way to the world series and uh i'm not sure maybe he's a proven closer now i don't know he won't be i don't think he's likely to close for the giants next year unless wilson gets hurt but i'm not sure if romo is a proven closer or not um But anyway, that's... And there was doubt about, I think, even Madsen last winter, who was signed to be a closer.

There were still concerns about whether he kind of had the closer mentality, which was strange, I thought, because he was coming off his season where he saved 32 games and generally been very good for a Phillies team that made the playoffs. And I feel like, you know, if you have, I mean, maybe the concerns were legitimate when he was just a really good setup guy with a few saves sprinkled in here and there. But when you've had a full season, I mean, I would think that if the mentality thing is going to come back to bite you

it would happen at some point in that first season yeah and I think we would both acknowledge that what we're talking about is basically silliness and is not really the distinction that we're drawing is much more about how they're viewed

than about what they actually are than about whether you know what they actually are so um the other thing is that uh chapman is interesting because um well when i was a kid uh i was a i was i really wanted to be an infielder so i would take ground ball it was basically the only thing i could do on a baseball field was was field ground balls because i didn't have much strength i was a little guy but i could field ground balls because that's all I did is have my dad hit me ground balls. So I was very good at ground balls. But when I would be in the young year of the league, it's like 11, 12.

So when I was 11, I was the young guy. They would always put me in the outfield and I didn't want to be in the outfield. I wanted to be in the infield because it was the only way I could contribute to the team. So I had this idea one year to, uh, totally botch everything in right field. And then the, the, the manager would re would realize that I was no outfielder. I was, uh, I was, I must be an infielder. He should move me to shortstop. And my, uh, my dad convinced me that, that actually making a ton of errors in right field is not how you get to play shortstop. And so Chapman, I was thinking about this.

The better he does as a reliever, the more obvious it is that he should – I guess that he should – would have value, that he would be a very good starter. would have value, that he would be a very good starter. And yet the more dominant he is as a reliever, the harder it is, even for me emotionally, and I have no emotional attachment to this at all, for me to see him. I really have a hard time, even though I know rationally, obviously 71 innings is not nearly enough for this guy. But the better he does in that role, the harder it is for me to move him out of there. And I almost feel like if he had gone the other way, if he had had a bad year as a reliever,

would that have made me want to move him to starting even more? Yeah, I think it would, even though that's irrational. That's totally irrational. So, yeah, so though that's irrational. That's totally irrational. So, um, yeah, so I don't know the Chapman that's going to be, it's, I think it's probably going to be really annoying to talk about it for the, uh, during spring training. So I'm glad that we're getting ahead of the game. Yeah. Well, everyone who's been listening to us for a while knows that we hate talking about the reds. Um, so this is just a one-time exception, but we have, I think mentioned, uh, how good

their bullpen was before. It was really, really good this season. Um, and we've also mentioned how, I don't know if it's easy, but at least how, how large the supply of relievers who are kind of dominant is now. Um, I wrote the other day that were, there were 60 something relievers who struck out over a batter per inning and they weren't distributed, of course, but that's still an average of a couple of those guys per team, and most teams you probably can find a couple of those guys. the drop-off from Chapman to some mortal closer would be for them, even if it's not someone who's done the job before. If they are really convinced that he's going to be a success as a starter, it seems like there would be more to gain there. Yeah, you know, I actually was, I'm glad you

brought that up, because I know that it's going to be brought up repeatedly when they start talking about moving him to the rotation, about how the Reds' bullpen was such a huge part of their success and how it was the Nasty Boys. And that was really the number one narrative about the Reds, I think, and their success, was that they had maybe the greatest bullpen of all time. And so people are going to say, hey, how are you going to break that up now? It showed just how important it is. But I think it's really important to note that the Reds' success was just as reliant on, perhaps more so, on their tremendous turnaround in the rotation. And they had, I'm going to, because it's here in front of me, they got their starting rotation, their five guys this year produced 17 war on baseball references model of it.

The year before, their starting rotation produced about two war. You just – you have that in front of you at all times. Well, I've looked it up because that's – I was on that page. page. And so, yeah, so anyway, that's a, I just want to note before that, that meme gets started, that it is a false argument and we should not stand for it. Well, I mean, does it make sense to argue that, that it doesn't to me, it doesn't make sense to break up something that was a great strength or is that an even more compelling argument to kind of rob that weakness to or rob that strength to to pave over a weakness not that it necessarily was a weakness in this case but the idea that you can't break up a great bullpen because it worked so well um maybe because it was

so good you could take something away from it and be a better team. Yeah, okay. So now I see where the hole in my argument is. Well, it was more the hole in other people's, in the Strowman's argument. Yeah, I think that there's probably, well, I don't know. It's hard to, I don't probably think that there's much interconnectedness to the effectiveness of one reliever on another. I mean, there's there's the innings that Chapman pitches, I think, are primarily limited to the innings that Chapman pitches. I don't think they have a great deal of effect on J.J. Hoover. So I would say that breaking up is probably a loaded way of describing what you would be doing,

probably a loaded way of describing what you would be doing, which is taking one strong part of it and moving it and making it hopefully a strong part of another more important part of the team. And my point in pointing out the Reds' rotation success this year is not to say that their rotation doesn't need Chapman. It's to say that the rotation needs to be successful for the Reds to be good. I mean, they probably won't be a 17-win rotation next year. There probably will be regression and injuries and Bronson Arroyo perhaps being the guy that I still think he is

or Mike Leak being removed or something. So I think he's more important in the rotation. Anyway, I don't want to go down that way. Okay. Well, we will be following the Chapman situation and probably never talking about it again, but we'll be following it. And we've learned about your Henry Scrimshander-like upbringing as an obsessive infielder from The Art of Fielding. Did you read The Art of Fielding? I did. You're actually the second person on a podcast in the last week to name drop him off the top of his head.

I mean I recognize the name because I read the book, but I would never in a million years have come up with it from memory. Yeah, obsessive ground ball taking reminded me of him. Yeah, yeah. But Grant Brisby made a similar reference on Ian's podcast recently. Okay. Well, we're done with episode 81. If you want to email us, because Wednesday is traditionally

a week-long tradition, is our listener email show. So if you want to send us a question in the hopes that we will answer it, or have someone smarter on to answer it, please send it to us at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com.