Welcome to the Party, Joe!

Joe Morgan has been known for some time now among the sabermatricians as one of the leading anti-Moneyball commentators. Although he has been known to attack it directly, I think that most of his comments tend to spring from a general cluelessness about sabermetrics than anything intentional or personal.

Today's column on espn.com, I think, is an example of this. Joe comes out and says that closers are misused by managers! What a concept! Nothing that the William F. Beane crowd hasn't been saying for years now, of course, but Joe acts like he was the first to think of it:

I blame the managers, because they've allowed such a mind-set to develop by how they've handled end-of-the-game bullpen situations.
Closers are almost always used in the ninth inning, with the lead. But the most critical situation in a game might be in the eighth, when the opponent's best hitters are up. At that point, you want your best reliever on the mound – and that's your closer. Or what about a tie game in the ninth with runners in scoring position?
If you give up a run, the game is over. That's exactly what happened Saturday night to the Dodgers, who lost a game that was tied entering the ninth on a bases-loaded walk with closer Eric Gagne sitting in the pen.

Can't argue with that logic. Joe also suddenly realizes that the save stat is, well, pretty dumb, now you mention it:

This brings me to the save rule itself: Simply put, it's too easy to get a save. A closer records a save when he starts the ninth inning with a three-run lead and finishes the game.... To me, you're not really saving a game when you have a three-run lead and you need to get only three outs. Getting three outs with nobody on base and a three-run lead isn't nearly as difficult as getting out of a bases-loaded jam in the seventh or eighth.

Beane, of course, has deprecated the save stat for, oh, I'd say about a billion years now, and Moneyball goes into some depth as to his reasoning. But anybody with any common sense can see it. Mariano Rivera comes on in Game 5 of the ALCS last year with a runner on third and no outs, allows a sacrifice fly, and is saddled with a blown save. Makes no sense.

To the surprise of no one, however, Joe takes this one argument and extrapolates it to an assertion that, really, makes no sense:

Stats have become far too important. The mind-set of today's closers is that they don't want to enter the game unless they can record a save. Sadly, that's become the culture of the game.

So people pay too much attention to one stupid stat, and now suddenly "stats" in general have become too important. That's gotta be music to Derek Jeter's ears, but it seems to me that a better approach would be to just stop paying attention to the meaningless numbers. If teams started keeping track of how many times a player spits and scratches per inning, and pay him extra based on the performance, you'd sure see a lot more spitting and scratching going on (mind-boggling as that may seem).

In a more subtle way, I'd say that Morgan's column also argues for teams to shift more to the closer-by-committee approach (favored, by the way, by the Moneyball types). What Joe is really arguing for here is simply an abolition of the role of "closer" in favor of using your best pitcher in the most critical situations. That may or may not be in the ninth inning, of course. And true, when in doubt, you'd probably incline more to saving your best reliever for later, because once he's used, he's used. But in general, you'd simply rank your relievers based on their effectiveness, try as best you can to both judge and forecast the game's most critical situations, and use your best pitcher(s) at the most important time(s). This would seem, to me, anyway, to argue for building up your staff as a--well, let's just use the term "committee," for lack of a better one--committee of specialists, rather than blowing a huge wad on one dominant closer and then trying to fill out your "middle relievers" with people who are marginally more effective than the Keystone Cops.

Joe would not agree with me, I know, because he's so convinced of the need for "pressure" relievers, also known as Mariano Rivera Infatuation:

I recognize that closers play an important role – a role that's so important it should extend back to the seventh and eighth. And I've always felt that closers are the most essential in the playoffs. That's why, to me, Mariano Rivera is the best pressure closer I've ever seen.
In the playoffs and the World Series you can't make any mistakes. In the regular season, if a closer blows a save, there are 161 other games to make up for it. But in a five- or seven-game series, it's tough to make up for a blown save.
That's the measure of a closer – someone who gets the job done under postseason pressure.

Hmm, can anybody think of an example of Rivera not performing under pressure? Well, by golly, Game 7 of the 2001 World Series comes to mind. And in game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, I believe he walked that lead-off batter, didn't he? Not that that really had any long-term consequences, of course.

Look, neither of these failures diminishes Rivera as a pitcher at all. They could have happened to anyone. My only point is, Rivera, as it turns out, is a good pitcher under pressure (usually) because he's a good pitcher, period, not because of some magical personality trait. And on the other side of things, Keith Foulke had a heckuva postseason last year, but the Red Sox need him to pitch a whole lot better than he has so far in 2005 if they're going to make the playoffs.