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By Mark Starr
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Baseball is unrivaled by any sport, except possibly boxing, in the quality and literacy of the many artistic offerings--novels, journalism, theater, cinema--on the subject. Which may account for the conceit that baseball is the most intellectual, the most cerebral, of all sports.In truth, that's a rather self-serving notion generated by baseball fanatics like myself. Baseball is a slow, leisurely paced game that lends itself to constant dialogue--"what shoulds," "what ifs" and, of course, the endless amusement of Williams vs. Dimaggio, Mantle vs. Mays, Nomar vs. Derek, Pedro vs. the Big Unit, etc. If these aren't, in fact, muscular musings, then some of us are wasting our lives in mindless babble.
It is my hometown team, Boston, that is at the center of what is currently the most intriguing experiment and, thus inevitably, liveliest debate of the new season. The 2003 Red Sox have chosen to eschew the traditional baseball closer, the relief pitcher with the singular charge of sealing away victories in the ninth inning. They have replaced him with what is being termed "closer by committee," a relief corps in which any of five different pitchers might be called upon to close out the game.
In America's most hidebound sport, that passes for innovation. Never mind that it may be dictated more by financial constraints than by any abiding faith in the concept. Or that what is viewed as radical may, in fact, be rather reactionary. Baseball spent almost a century without anyone being designated a closer. In fact, the save stat, the ultimate measure of closers (essentially preserving a lead of three runs or less), wasn't even invented until 1969. Only then was it retrofitted to the game's history so that we now know that in baseball's inaugural season, 1876, the eight teams combined for 13 saves--even if they were unaware of it. The "closer" task was such an afterthought that the Boston Red Cap's Jack Manning, on most days an outfielder, led the league with five.
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By the post-World War II era, there were some stellar relief pitchers--Joe Page for the Yankees in the '40s, Elroy Face for the Pirates in the '50s--but the term "closer" still wasn't in vogue. In my very parochial view of baseball history, the first true closer was the Red Sox's Dick Radatz, dubbed "The Monster." In three seasons in the early '60s, Radatz not only saved 78 games, but won another 40. His role bore only modest resemblance to today's pampered closer. In those three years, Radatz threw 414 innings and struck out 464 batters. That's more innings than the Yankee's Mariano Rivera has worked in the last six years as the game's premier save-meister.
Overuse, not to mention a training regimen more suited to St. Patrick's Day celebrations than athletic performance, cut short Radatz's career. But the Monster begat Mike Marshall, Bruce Sutter, Goose Gossage, Dan Quisenberry and all the other modern closers. That role was further refined by Tony LaRussa, the manager who is viewed as baseball's foremost intellectual, if only because he is a vegetarian who can use a computer. During his tenure with the Oakland A's in the late '80s, LaRussa made his closer, Dennis Eckersely, even more of a specialist, seldom calling upon him to pitch more than just the ninth inning. In five seasons during which he averaged 44 saves, Eck pitched 310 times, but totaled just 358 innings.
That has pretty much been the working model, or at least the one all teams aspire to, ever since. And a certain conventional wisdom has developed alongside that approach to justify it. The closer role is seen as a requiring a special breed with a certain combination of mindset and cojones. Thus Boston is defying both baseball biology and psychology with its approach. The Red Sox have replaced the one stud with five solid, if not exactly all-star-caliber, veterans. Each may be best suited for different situations. Alan Embree is tough on left-handers. Chad Fox has the best strikeout pitch. Ramiro Mendoza is the most likely to induce a double-play ball. Furthermore, this new philosophy adheres to the notion that a game is not necessarily "saved" in the ninth inning, that the critical save--if not the save stat--may come at any time during the game. So the Red Sox intend to call upon any and all of the fivesome to get out of a bases-loaded jam in the sixth inning as well as to close out the ninth.
The architect of this revolution, or at least the executive who will have to defend it, is Theo Epstein, the rookie general manager who, at age 29, is younger than every one of those five relievers. The GM's job in Boston is even more of a pressure-cooker than the closer's. He's faced with fans who claim to be the country's most knowledgeable and, at the very least, the most obsessive. So just a few days into the season, the talk-radio debate is raging. And fans are already decrying the grand experiment as a disaster. They grew convinced of this after the Red Sox committee blew large leads in its first two games against the worst team in baseball, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
It was even more disastrous than it sounds, if that's possible. Last year the Red Sox had swept all 10 games in Tampa. But in the season-opener, Red Sox relievers surrendered five runs in the ninth, including a walkoff, three-run homer. And in the second game, the relief corps gave up a tying two-run homer to Rey Ordonez, a hapless hitter who in seven years in the bigs had struck just eight round-trippers. Of Boston's five committee members, four contributed to blowing these leads. Only Ramiro Mendoza, whose pedigree is Yankee pinstripes, escaped without any damage.
But baseball is a game of delicious ironies. The second game dragged on into extra innings, until Boston had exhausted all of its committee options. So the Red Sox were forced to call upon the only two no-names in the bullpen, Steve Woodard and Brandon Lyon. This past winter Epstein had acquired both youngsters despite their flops with other teams. Neither was expected to make the varsity. But here they were with the big club in Tampa, cast as the last line of defense against what had every appearance of becoming an apocalyptic start to both the season and Epstein's executive career. They rose to the occasion, combining for six innings of shutout baseball until the Red Sox pushed across the winning run in the 16th inning.
Perhaps inspired by that effort, the Sox committee closed out Tampa Bay the next evening with three shutout innings. And that very same night, 750 miles west in Houston, Colorado's ace closer Jose Jiminez, who saved 41 games last season, got just one man out while surrendering five runs to the Astros in the bottom of the ninth inning. There are no perfect closers, no perfect solutions to the ninth-inning ordeal. But rest assured that every team--and every one who claims to be a cerebral fan of the game--will be viewing Boston's grand experiment with keen interest.
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