If You’re Going To Put Him In, Let Him Pitch

If there is one area of baseball that will probably always prove impervious to objective analysis, it’s judging managers. From the worst to the best, each has his own strengths and weaknesses, must adjust to the talent in the dugout, and has a different job description and amount of power.All of this, along with the varying expectations that go along with each job in the majors, makes judging managers against each other virtually all art and no science. It’s clear that Atlanta’s Bobby Cox is a pretty good manager, and that Kansas City’s Buddy Bell has no idea at all what he’s doing, but other than at the extremes, it’s almost impossible to separate a manager’s talent and skill from his situation.This being so, I mainly judge managers by how much they make others suffer. An example will make my point clear. In the top of the eighth inning in a recent Cubs game, with two outs and his team down by six runs, Cubs manager Dusty Baker brought in a lefty specialist, Scott Eyre, to face left-handed hitter Alexis Gomez, a 27-year-old defensive substitute whose career batting line is .246 AVG/.289 OBA/.289 SLG. In the top of the ninth, with the Cubs down by six, Eyre retired leadoff hitter Curtis Granderson, a lefty, and was promptly pulled from the game in favor of righthander David Aardsma. Somewhat happily, Aardsma gave up two runs before getting out of the inning.While Baker is an especially clueless manager, there is no explanation other than wanton sadism for making two separate mid-inning pitching changes involving a situational lefty while down by six runs. No one likes suffering through endless pitching changes, and everyone hates doing so. Therefore, I consider it perfectly fair to judge managers by the average length of the appearances their relievers make. A manager only has so much control over the quality of his players, their effort, and their health, but he can avoid playing match-up baseball to obtain advantages over 25th men who hit like pitchers.Thus, I present you with a junk statistic I’ll call the Suffering Index: It is simply a team’s number of relief innings, divided by the number of relief appearances. Bad teams are at no particular disadvantage here, as bad pitchers getting yanked during ugly appearances should be balanced out by bad pitchers being left in to soak up beatings in one-sided games.The main factors here are managerial preferences and quality of the bullpen – something over which virtually all managers have a great deal of influence. As an example, here is the Suffering Index for the National League going into last night’s action. Ties are decided in favor of the team with the fewest total relief appearances, as making fewer pitching changes is in virtually all cases the right thing to do.While there is a certain amount of correlation here between Suffering Index and overall bullpen quality, it’s nowhere near so high as one might suspect. The Rockies, for instance, are fifth in the NL with a 3.89 bullpen ERA – incredibly impressive considering their home field – and yet they have the second-shortest average appearance length of any team in the league. The Brewers’ 5.08 bullpen ERA is second-worst in the league, and yet they rank right with the excellent and notably durable Mets’ pen in terms of showing mercy toward spectators who don’t want to see an endless array of scrub pitchers run in and out of games for no reason.What conclusions are to be drawn from this? For me, the main one is that Dodgers manager Grady Little deserves a parade through the streets of Los Angeles. Not only do his Dodgers have the lengthiest average appearances in the league, but not a single pitcher on the staff has averaged less than an inning per appearance. This hated phenomenon, commonly associated with what baseball writer John Sickels so appositely termed LOOGYs (Lefty One-Out Guys), is always the earmark of a pitcher no one wants to see and a manager determined to inflict him on a weary baseball-watching populace.Colorado aside (baseball played five miles above sea level has its own rules), Houston manager Phil Garner and Cincinnati manager Jerry Narron deserve special condemnation in this regard. Each only has two relievers with at least 10 innings and more innings than games pitched – truly shameful marks on their records.Many solutions to the scourge of the one-out guy have been proposed, from changing the rules so that a pitcher can’t be lifted from a game until he’s recorded an out or allowed a run, to nationwide boycotts of baseball games. I am in favor of all of them, but I think the real solution is public shame. The more people boo the arrival of a veteran lefty meant to take out some slap hitter with a .137 batting average, the more writers call out managers for these silly tactics, and the more praise that’s heaped on those like Little and Willie Randolph for having the common sense to let their pitchers pitch rather than warm them up by the dozen, the better off the game – and all of us – will be.tmarchman@nysun.com

If You’re Going To Put Him In, Let Him Pitch

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