Also, I don't think it's mental so much as it needs to be your best reliever. And here's my criteria:

WHIP: ideally under 1.00
HR/9: as low as possible, definitely under 1
K/9: definitely at least 9, ideally 10 or higher
BB/9: again low, under 3

This is why I don't like Chad Cordero, Danys Baez, etc as closers.

It sure is amazing, then, how often guys seem to acquire or lose their "sack" at the same time they acquire or lose their good stuff.

I can buy the notion that there might be isolated instances of a pitcher who pyschs himself out and isn't mentally capable of being a good closer. Key word being isolated. 99% of the time, though, I think it's hogwash. Superstitious, unprovable mumbo-jumbo which announcers, sportswriters, and managers like to talk about in order to make themselves feel smart.

Then, of course, the A's in the 70's had Fingers but also pitchers like Knowles and Linblad.

Face it, every bullpen is a committee. The term "bullpen by committee" was first done to describe how Whitey Herzog ran the Cards pen.

If you can't hold a 3-run lead in the 9th, you belong in AAA or selling insurance. Same with a 2-run lead.

Your best relievers should get the toughest outs to keep your team in the game. The notion of 'saves' and 'finishing games' is pure media and LaRussization hype.

My (unresearched) feeling is that one big reason Cleveland did so well last year was that they had a couple ferocious middle relief firemen and were able to stash a lesser arm, Boroski, in the role of the guy who saunters onto the scene with the fire reduced to cooling embers.

The way the bullpen is used is very different than 2 decades ago. Things have changed a lot since the 18 years ago when the Nasty Boys won a championship, I can see how that could work, though. If you can get 3 young relievers who are in their pre-arbitration stage with great stuff and makeup like the Nasty Boys, it could work for a couple of years. Pretty low chance of all those factors happening though.

The math seems great by bringing in your best relievers at high leverage times, but I don't think you can expect a pitcher to sit in the bullpen and try to be focused on coming in at any time of the game, day after day. It's too mentally taxing. I think Relievers need some structure to their jobs.

I have seen many times a good closer struggle when they are brought in with a big lead or down by a few runs, just because they need to get their work in. Just like shooting free throws at the end of the game, some guys get better and some get worse. I'm not sure about clutch hitting, but I do believe in clutch pitching.

I have long believed that the best pitchers should be pitching in close games. That means pitching while ahead, tied or behind. It's why the '94 Expos remain one of my favorite teams of all time. They had the best record in baseball before the season was stopped and part of their remarkable success was a bullpen that had, IIRC, 3 closers and two other damn good pitchers; Rojas, Wetteland (sp?), Shaw, Heredia and one other guy I can't remember. They were all right-handed and they all were used often in the 7th and 8th innings to close out games. Felipe Alou was getting his "closer" in the game earlier than most and it was working. They were 74-40 before the strike.

You know what's funny? All season long, I kept hearing experts saying what a shame it was that Alou didn't have a left-hander in the bullpen.

That's it in a nutshell.

So you could warm him up in case there's trouble, and not use him if there isn't, but then you've warmed him up for nothing. If you do that all year long, you're going to have a burned-out bullpen by August, and you've wasted all that pitcher energy without getting any payoff in actual games.

So you go to the ninth with a three run lead, and you don't put your best pitcher in because it's not technically "high leverage", and then the first two runners get on. Now the tying run is at the plate. Do you bring your closer in now? Only if you had him warming up to start the inning to begin with. And if he was warming up to begin with, why not just bring your closer in to start the inning, and only use the energy of one pitcher instead of two?

Mentally and physically a bullpen needs to have certain roles to be at their sharpest. If you put situations into a computer program, it might seem like putting your best reliever in at the highest leverage times is the answer, but that doesn't measure the mental and physical toll it brings. It also doesn't solve the issue of do you then have someopne who can close out the game. The Latroy Hawkins/kyle Farnsworth types who look great in the 7th and 8th, but can't succeed in the 9th are no more rare than guys who are dominant closers.

In the off-season, I saw many sabermatricians knock the white sox for overpaying for linebrink and dotel. The 2007 sox bullpen was atrocious outside of Jenks, so I thought the money spent for these 2 was worth it. The money they spent for these 2 was half of what they would have spent for tori hunter or aaron rowand and I think will help them win more games. If you can develop bullpen help from your farm system that is better, but the white sox have no track record of doing it.

Relievers have been the last players in baseball to see their salaries escalate, so it is hard for many to see a cordero or gagne get so much money. Some of them will be bad signings or busts, but I suspect less so than starting pitchers have been in free agency.

Their manager was too much of a dolt to understand the concept on any level. All he did was run different guys out there with no rhyme or reason or any logic to the situation.

It was a disaster. But not because the ideas were bad.

Well, no. You let the other pitcher work out of it. Which he usually will do. And the one or two times a year somebody manages to blow a three-run lead in the ninth inning, you live with it. You'll make it up through more efficient use of the bullpen elsewhere.

"I don't think you can expect a pitcher to sit in the bullpen and try to be focused on coming in at any time of the game, day after day. It's too mentally taxing. ... I think Relievers need some structure to their jobs. Mentally and physically a bullpen needs to have certain roles to be at their sharpest."

See, it's all well and good to believe that, but there is no objective reason whatsoever to believe it's true. No disrespect, but it's an opinion manufactured out of thin air with not a shred of evidence, either statistical or anecdotal, to support it. While you've got a right to that opinion, certainly, it's a little much to ask others to believe it in light of the overwhelming lack of evidence.

I do believe that pitchers like structure, that they prefer structured roles, that a defined role makes them more comfortable, and that they think it helps them perform better. But what a pitcher likes, and what he thinks, are irrelevant to the discussion. Athletes, with their lack of perspective, are notoriously bad at being able to judge their own performance. So while pitchers may feel that structure helps their pitching, the real question is whether, statistically, it actually helps their pitching. And if there is any evidence at all that it does, I'm not aware of it.

Baseball history has shown that it's possible for relievers to thrive even without structure. The not-so-structured fireman role existed for many more years than the structured closer's role has. Now, you've tried to dismiss all but the last 10 years of baseball history -- 120 years -- as wholly irrevelant to this discussion, but I'm not going to let you do that. It's not irrelevant. And there's no valid reason to dismiss it. What it shows us is that, yes, human beings do possess the ability to still excel when used in fairly unpredictable relief roles. I'm not saying that you can drop J.J. Putz into that role cold and have him succeed, but certainly it's still possible to create an atmosphere in which a pitcher could succeed in such a role today. Heck, as recently as five years ago, Huston Street was pitching in an unpredictable, high-leverage fireman-type role, complete with multiple-inning appearances -- and won a College World Series MVP award doing it. You're telling me he's now mentally incapable of doing that? Phooey.

Even if it WERE true that structure helps a reliever's performance, there are ways one can structure bullpen roles to better maximize efficiency. Instead of telling your best reliever "I'm going to bring you in whenever we're up by one, two, or three runs in the ninth," tell him "I'm going to bring you in whenever it's a tie or one-run game in the eighth or ninth." I think pitchers could handle that. Even if one accepts that there's a need for some type of defined roles, the WAY those roles are currently structured is due 100% to the way the save rule is written.

Why I don't think anything before the 1990's is particularly relevant is that the financial structure ofthe game is very different. The financial benefits of being the closer versus will cause conflict, unless you've got a young crew like dibble, myers, charlton. I don't see that on any current roster.

Players like to make so much noise about being a team player, the good of the team is all that matters, blah, blah, blah. All it would take is one team ballsy enough to challenge them to put their money where their mouth is. Either they comply with the team-first concept, or they come off publicly looking like selfish phonies.

I second the thought that the 2003 Red Sox did not use CBC. CBC, really, is just another way of saying "high leverage"-use the best pitcher at the key point in the game, without any particular thought as to who gets the saves. Saves are a peripherally meaningful stat, but they are the only stat a lot of people can handle when applied to relievers.

I don't think CBC will ever work, but only because of external pressures, not because the fragile pitchers can't handle the strain.
Every blown save, if it's Rivera being taken into the bullpen by Ortiz, has a certain amount of stress to it. But it would be a hundred times worse if it's Hawkins being taken into the bullpen-"Why didn't you save Rivera for later?" "Do you think LaTroy can't handle the pressure of the ninth?" The outcry that would erupt when a non certified closer blew a save would torpedo an honest attempt to try CBC.

Any team willing to do this would have to have some stones, because there would definitely be an outcry, at least at first, from people either incapable of understanding the strategy or unwilling to understand it. But fortunately, Dan Shaughnessy isn't the manager of the Red Sox and Bill Plaschke is not the manager of the Dodgers.

I think it's a good idea for an entire bullpen to follow the Joba Rules. If that kind of rest helps premium arms it should help the less talented back end of the bullpen even more. Who needs that extra mph on his fastball more, the stud closer or the journeyman long relief guy?

I can see a bullpen-by-committee working if the team sets out something like Joba Rules for the entire bullpen. That way the lack of save opportunities happen in a context of protecting the player not in use, not skipping the player not in use.