The big story in baseball through the first two weeks of the season has been the seeming implosion of every bullpen in the game, as New York fans can attest. Everyone from Mariano Rivera on down has been blowing saves this season, enough that only 55% of save chances were converted through Friday.

This is probably just one of those odd flukes that make baseball so enjoyable, but such widespread failure also points up the silliness inherent in the way relievers are used these days – after all, if the bums can’t even get three outs with a three-run lead, what good are they? It also inspires nostalgia for the old days, when real relievers like Goose Gossage and Rollie Fingers pitched twice as many innings per year as someone like Rivera or Eric Gagne.

Like most nostalgic impulses, there’s a bit less behind this one than it would seem. While relievers did throw a lot more in the 1970s – about a third of teams in that decade sported a reliever who racked up 100 innings without making a start, as compared to about a tenth these days – pitchers like Gossage and Fingers were fairly unusual even in their day for their ability to hold up year after year under heavy workloads. It’s important to realize as well, if we want to see what relevance that role has for the modern game, that the most important difference between the fireman and the modern closer is qualitative, not quantitative.

To illustrate the difference, I went over Gossage’s game logs for the three seasons in which he was used most heavily and grouped his appearances together by how many batters he faced. As a point of comparison, I also examined the logs for the three seasons in which the Red Sox used Derek Lowe, an unusually durable pitcher, as a closer.

This adequately reflects our idea of the difference between a 1970s-style fireman and even the most durable of today’s relievers – Gossage pitched plenty of games in every type of situation, from one-out appearances to 5+ inning jobs of the kind you never see from an ace reliever today.

The main difference, though, is that 99 of the 409 innings he pitched in the three years under consideration came in 19 appearances in which he pitched four or more innings at a time. Take those out of the equation, and his usage pattern looks a lot more like Lowe’s.

Gossage wasn’t an exceptionally durable version of someone like Eric Gagne – he was, in a sense, really a starter pitching out of the bullpen. Those 4+ inning appearances were starts in all but name, games after which Gossage was typically rested four or five days.

This is pretty obvious if you look at his use in the context of his teams. The 1975 White Sox had three reliable starters, two of whom pitched around 300 innings and one of whom pitched 200. The rest of the staff was a mess, so Gossage pitched the fourth-most innings on the team. Given the fairly regular intervals at which he pitched long outings, and the fact that he was used as a starter in 1976, it’s clear that it’s unfair to compare him to Gagne.

Pitching for the 1977 Pirates, a team that had four starters who pitched about 200 innings apiece, Gossage only made three exceptionally long appearances all year. Remove those from his line and he pitched 116 innings – not many more than Lowe’s 109 in 1999.

(It’s worth noting here that Lowe, the most heavily used closer of the last 15 years, was on a team with one durable starter – Pedro Martinez – and a variety of mix-and-match scrubs and fragile veterans; also that, like Gossage, he was put in the rotation when needed there.)

With the Yankees in 1978, Gossage’s season was something of a cross between ’75 and ’77. The Yanks had two 35-start pitchers and three more who made between 20 and 25. Gossage made seven appearances of at least four innings, which wasn’t a problem because Sparky Lyle was available when he had to rest. Take them out of his line and he pitched 99 innings of pure relief.

Basically, then, Gossage had seasons like those exceptionally durable modern relievers like Lowe and Brad Lidge have had with some frequency – in which he also made five or so starts. Those five starts would more likely be made, these days, by a Triple-A call-up.

In a perfect world, any manager would of course prefer to have five starts made by Brad Lidge to five made by whatever rookies happen to be available. But along with the benefits of the old-time fireman role comes a serious cost – your relief ace will have to rest like a starter as well. The talk-show callers who get on Rivera for blowing saves would surely love it if he were just unavailable for entire series at a time.

It’s always tempting, whenever something annoys us about the modern game, to think back to the halcyon past; it’s easy to ignore the costs of the fireman role, and focus on the benefits. Still, more teams should note that the relievers of the past were used the way they were because they were on specific teams with specific needs, and that as the use of Lowe suggests, there’s nothing in particular about the modern game that prevents relievers from being used that way today. Given that he’s never missed a start in the majors, I seriously doubt that sprinkling a start a month into his schedule in 1999 would have ruined Lowe’s arm.

Looking around the majors, there aren’t really many teams that fit the pattern of the ’75 White Sox or the ’78 Yankees – a strong front of the rotation pitching huge numbers of innings, a weak back end, a durable relief ace on hand, and a second good reliever. Only the Dodgers come close, but Eric Gagne is too good at what he does for tinkering with his role to be a wise idea. As the Red Sox’ 2003 bullpen experiment showed, it’s a bad idea to try to fit theories to your team when you don’t have the personnel to do it.

Still, though, some team next year or the year after that will find itself in the same spot those 1970s teams did, and it would be nice to see one of them use their best reliever in the full-on Gossage role. Examined carefully, that role has little to do with the common stereotype of a pitcher run out at the manager’s whim for three and four innings at a time, and much to do with a carefully considered plan to cover up the weaknesses on a staff while not trying to wring too much out of an ace’s arm. It’s just about making the best use of the talent you have on hand, and there’s not a team around that couldn’t stand to do more of that.