R-O-L-A-I-D-S Spells Prejudice Against Middle-Relievers

Rolaids purports to be the “home of everything you need to know about the best relievers in baseball.” Hey, Rolaids: relief-pitching fans across the country now agree that the Loogy Lounge is the home of everything they need to know about the best relievers in baseball. And your Relief Man of the Year Award undermines everything we strive for as a blog dedicated to relief pitchers.

Why does a silly award like this make my stomach turn? (Get it? Stomach turn… Rolaids. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.) I did some research, and it appears the award is actually considered to be prestigious and is sometimes used as a barometer to measure relief pitchers. The Relief Man Award is given to the relief pitcher in each league who accumulates the most points based upon the following system:

• Three points for each save
• One additional point for each “tough” save (i.e. reliever comes in with the tying run on base and saves the game)
• Two points for each win
• Two points deducted for each loss or “blown save”

At least its objective. Unfortunately, it’s also really stupid. First, it absolutely is impossible for a non-closer to win the Rolaids Relief Man Award. The list of past award recipients confirms this point. Maybe my issue here merely is based upon semantics, but I think it’s disingenuous to call this a Relief Man Award. It’s an award exclusively for closers. Second, putting the middle-relief prejudice aside, this is a really bad way to measure closer effectiveness. Case in point: Joe Borowski was ranked ahead of Jonathan Papelbon in 2007.

OK, I’m done ranting about trivial nonsense. Going forward, I’m just going to use Pepto for my indigestion. Maybe they can come up with a better way to recognize relief pitchers.

Closers in Non-Save Situations

1 AM… post-Thanksgiving feast… stomach preventing sleep. Naturally, I begin to think about closers in non-save situations. Last week, after I commented that Eric Gagne doesn’t deserve “closer dollars” following his abysmal few months with the Red Sox, Gnopple and loyal reader MJ indicated that Gagne was better as a closer than a reliever pitching “outside of his comfort zone” in non-save situations. After I called bullshit on this theory, Gnopple attacked:

ugh. John Stevens, you’re taking the game and the people who play it out of baseball and replacing it with FJM statistical blindness. You forget that people play the game, not vacuumed numbers.

Harsh.

At this late hour, I decided to do some preliminary Google research on the topic. Check out this result… and this result. [Note that each result only looks at one season of data.]

If you’re too lazy, here’s a quick synopsis: closers, not vacuumed numbers, perform around their general ability level in save and non-save situations. While there are exceptions, those exceptions can be found in each direction — some closers are better in save situations; others in non-save situations.